- Saving Dhofar’s frankincense tree. Evocative things they are too.
- The rich may have trouble getting into heaven, but they manage more agrobiodiversity. At least of rice. At least in Nepal.
- Gotta be careful with niche modeling in mountain areas. Well, duh.
- New Pacific food leaflets from SPC.
- Ok, how weird is it that I have a personal connection of sorts to all of the above? Probably not much.
- Ex situ not enough for wild rice. Say it ain’t so!
- The evolution of coffee.
- “If the rains do not fall we may face problems with certain crops.” Right.
- Network on natural fibres proposed by Industree Craft Foundation and the Commonwealth Secretariat. Sounds like fun.
- Screening lactic acid strains for sorghum beer making. Well, kinda. Somebody please fund this vital research!
Nibbles: Goldman Environmental Prize, UK networking, European landraces publication, Seed Warriors, India agrobiodiversity sites, Beer books, Teosinte, Drought foods, Sugarcane genebank, Regional genebank in South Asia, Rhubarb, Annals, Food articles, Cryo
- Goldman Prizewinner Jesús León Santos: “It is time we recognize that traditional agricultural methods can make strong contributions to biodiversity conservation. We should encourage it and value it as a way to produce healthy foods that conserve and care for the environment.” Time indeed.
- British twofer: The Food Climate Research Network aims “to better understand how the food system contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and to research and promote ways of reducing them.” Then there’s the Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming Futures. Will they talk to each other, I wonder.
- From Bioversity, “European landraces: on-farm conservation, management and use.” I wonder if the Foresight Project will download a copy.
- The “Seed Warriors” trailer. Oscar buzz, I hear.
- Agricultural biodiversity heritage sites in India. Ethnobotanist brings together information on food plants used during drought. Mashup, anyone?
- A book about beer. My two favourite things. Oooh, here’s another couple! And it’s not over: Spiegel weighs in on the old chestnut about beer being the reason for agriculture. My tankard runneth over.
- CIMMYT team monitors teosinte. Teosinte planning to fight back.
- Regional sugarcane genebank is actually being used! Heartwarming. Oh, and, coincidentally, here’s a history of Indian sugarcane breeding.
- “A SAARC Plant Genetic Resource Bank for rice, wheat and maize may be created to facilitate free exchange of germplasm between the member countries. To begin with, the Indian Gene Bank facilities may be utilized, with suitable modalities.” Not so heartwarming.
- The Russian roots of Alaskan rhubarb. Take that, Palin! Note the bit about St Isaac’s Cathedral, which of course sits opposite VIR. How apposite is that?
- Nigel Chaffey rounds up the usual suspects in presenting a potpourri of “plant-based items from the world’s media” for Annals of Botany. May well be one to watch. And not just because genebanks make an appearance.
- Amazing food roundup.
- Cryopreserving Chip, the Tennessee fainting goat.
Nibbles: Cacao, Soil mapping, Rice terraces, Maize, Cereus
- “USDA’s Bourlaug International Science Fellows Program has partnered with non-profit and for-profit organizations to identify new agricultural techniques for cocoa cultivation and to control cocoa diseases.” And do some conservation and breeding, surely.
- Big shots call for a decent global digital soil map. Seconded.
- Cool photos of rice agricultural landscapes.
- Roasting maize, Mexico style. Oh yeah, there’s also a nifty new maize mapping population out.
- Peruvian apple cactus doing just fine in Israel.
BBC’s Farm Swap is online
That BBC radio documentary about farmers trying to learn from each other is out at last.
In Farm Swap, Mike Gallagher meets two farmers who are working outside their own countries.
They are both prepared to experience a new environment but for very different reasons.
You can listen online or download a podcast.
In part one Pedro, an idealistic young Ecuadorian farmer, visits Hawaii…
During his 4 month visit to Hawaii, Pedro visits a coffee plantation and learns how to encourage sustainable agriculture.
But as well as discovering new farming techniques and sharing experiences to take back to Ecuador, what can Pedro teach Hawaiian farmers in return?
As I said before, I think farmer-to-farmer exchanges are potentially a great way to learn. I’ll be tuning in.
Evaluation networks redux?
More interesting thinking about the sites of variety yield trials from Glenn Hyman over at AGCommons. You’ll remember he posted a map a few weeks back of the distribution of such sites around Africa, categorized according to which crop evaluation network used them. This is part of a Gates Foundation-funded project to develop an online catalog of these places, including their environmental characterization, and eventually with links to the actual evaluation data they were used to obtain over the years. Glenn then posted about how knowledge of conditions at trial sites could be used to identify the best places for participatory/evolutionary breeding work. And now he’s linked to our recent analysis of interdependence among African countries for plant genetic resources under climate change and suggested that it would be interesting to figure out which sites represent future analogs for current climates: “[w]hat are the key sites for evaluating germplasm in view of climate change throughout Africa?” Is this the MacGuffin we need to get genebanks and breeders to talk to each other more?