- Mozzarella madness.
- Homegrown Evolutionist spreads his seed.
- There’s an International Seed Swap Day of Action? And we missed it?
- The new AJFAND is out.
- Brits belatedly bring back boars, but bumble bee buggered.
- Improving local livestock breeds in Zambia: VOA tells us how and why.
- Not armyworm after all.
- Cloning the ibex: close, but no cigar.
Online platform comes up short on agrobiodiversity
Via LEISA’s Farm comes news of INFONET-BioVision,
…an online information platform tailored to the rural population in East Africa. It offers information on sustainable agriculture and ecological control of plant-, human- and animal- targeting pests and disease vectors.
Leave aside for a moment the unlikelihood of many rural people in East Africa being able to access such a platform. 1 It does have a great deal of useful information on the agronomy of a large number of crops, including neglected ones, focusing on pest and disease control strategies. But there’s not as much as one might have hoped on the value of diversity. Although, for example, there’s a list of a few local and improved cultivars in the cassava section, I didn’t get the sense of genetic diversity management as a legitimate strategy for sustainability. On a par with “conservation tillage,” say. Pity.
Nibbles: Cotton, Citrus, Fig, Permaculture, Turtles, Wine, Cacao, Fish
- Wild cotton use lands prize for boffin trio.
- Unesco to protect wild Citrus in India. And read the discussion.
- IV International Symposium on Fig.
- Permaculture: The Podcast.
- The NY Times thinks Americans should eat fewer turtles. And drink more South African wine.
- Meanwile, the WSJ gets into single-source chocolate.
- Nice map of freshwater fish diversity. But will it last? WWF has a plan.
Appropedia
I don’t think much of the name — a portmanteau of appropriate and cyclopedia (which these days connotes wikification) — but the concept of a web site devoted to “Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives” is appealing for sure. I have not yet had much time to explore, but there is a whole area on Food/Agriculture with some interesting pages. The one on Seed Fairs, for example, is full of useful advice.
Like all such sites, the value of Appropedia will grow with the number of contributors and will depend on those contributors’ diligence. I feel sure that some agrobiodiversity readers would find it useful, and that it would find your contributions welcome.
Via.
Searching for seeds?
Mother Earth News has an online seed finder. It lets you search the “online catalogs of more than 500 mail order seed companies,” mainly in the US, presumably. Test it out and let them know if you could or couldn’t find what you were looking for. We might need to send them our seed list…