- Tofu, anyone?
- Plumcot, anyone?
- Guerrilla gardening, everyone!
- Green Revolution breadbasket drying up. ICRISAT has the answer. Well, sort of.
- BBC has a different answer. Trees can keep people alive in times of drought.
- More semi-naked chicks, this time in South Africa.
- Naked or otherwise, eat them to save them, with the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.
Silphium rediscovered?
Luigi dug up this great article — Devil’s Dung: The World’s Smelliest Spice — which reveals more about asafoetida than you could possibly ever have wanted to know. Lord but it is strange stuff to cook with, and yet I do like what it does for a dish. But I digress. Buried in a sidebar near the bottom of the page is a claim, complete with coy question mark, that silphium, most prized spice of ancient Rome, might be alive and well. The article recounts the history of silphium, and how it was believed to have gone extinct by the 1st century CE, so I won’t repeat that here. It also mentions the possibility that Cachrys ferulacea and ancient silphium are one and the same. ((GBIF doesn’t yet know about the record from Cyrenia.)) Personally, I have no idea, and I’m not even sure I know how one would know, but I’m intrigued. Thanks Luigi.
Nibbles: Drought resistant rice, Bees, Bison, Coffee in Kenya, Cassava in Africa, Pigeon pea, Chickens in Uganda, Green ranching in the Amazon, Climate change, Dates, Museums and DNA, Organic, Ecology meet
- “Sahbhagi dhan is drought-tolerant and can survive even if there are no rains for 12 days.”
- Keeping bees in cities. Not as crazy as it sounds.
- More on the problems of the European bison. What is it with the BBC today?
- Coffee berry borer coming to Kenya. Not boring at all.
- Cassava helping Cameroonians and Ugandans.
- ICRISAT pigeon pea a hit in Kenya.
- Ugandan fishermen crying fowl. What is is with allAfrica today?
- No trees were harmed in the making of this beef.
- “How many of the changes we see happening around us are really attributable to climate change.” Pretty good question. In two parts, be sure to catch both, agrobiodiversity comes into the second.
- How to get a date.
- “By using museum specimens to look back in time, we can potentially assess … [human] impact in detail.” And genebanks, don’t forget genebanks, Olivia.
- Organic better after all. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
- Fisheries not as bad as was thought after all. But still pretty bad.
- For best results, use perennials in diverse landscapes and no tilling.
Bulgaria’s Rose Valley in trouble
Almost half the expensive rose oil used in perfumes and cosmetics comes from a single valley in Bulgaria.
Let the BBC tell you all about it.
Nibbles: Dogs squared, Afghanistan’s poppies, Rice at IRRI, Book on sapodilla chicle in Mexico, Opuntia, Trees
- DNA survey of African village dogs reveals as much diversity as in East Asian village dogs, undermines current ideas about where domestication took place.
- Fossil doubles age of dog domestication.
- “When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father’s fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf.”
- “The rice, a traditional variety called kintoman, came from my grandfather’s farm. It had an inviting aroma, tasty, puffy and sweet. Unfortunately, it is rarely planted today.”
- “An era of synthetic gums ushered in the near death of their profession, and there are only a handful of men that still make a living by passing their days in the jungle collecting chicle latex…The generational changes in this boom-and-bust lifestyle reflect a pattern that has occurred with numerous extractive economies…”
- Morocco markets prickly pear cactus products.
- TreeAid says that sustainable agriculture depends on, well, trees.