- Could teff or millets topple wheat, maize and rice? Anyone for unintended consequences?
- Not if superior models lead to bigger wheat harvests. ’Cos that’s all it takes.
- That and a good book: Yield Gains in Major U.S. Field Crops.
- Did somebody mention models? Vorarlberger Bergkäse is a model cheese, and “The rind is the boundary layer between a cheese and its environment”. Welcome to the cheese microbiome.
- What’s the difference between a wine grape and a table grape? Simple: Pectic-{beta}(1,4)-galactan, extensin and arabinogalactan-protein epitopes.
- Bee biodiversity results in mo’ bigger blueberries. Now to make use of that.
- Seed policy wonks – you know who you are – will thrill to IFPRI’s new report: The seed industry in Pakistan.
- So how does that square with the Financial Express of Bangladesh’s discovery that “Agro biodiversity can improve nutrition and health”?
- How to make baobab juice. Time to edit those factsheets.
Nibbles: Cowpea blogging, Rice vs wheat psychology, IRRI rice breeding, Wheat disease, African ag success, AGRA seed, Seed certification
- Omnibus edition of recent GCP blog posts on cowpea.
- Chinese rice farmers more sharing and caring than wheat farmers.
- Wonder if that will change with all these fancy new rice varieties coming through.
- Wonder if fusarium ear blight of wheat will change that.
- No such problems in Africa, no sirree.
- Not with all these AGRA-supported seed companies taking off.
- But there’s an international component to that which is being neglected.
Nibbles: Nepal goat project, Kenyan camels, Sustainable diet metrics, Agri-informatics centre, Cassava dishes, CC & nutrients, Yield is all, African CC hotspots, AGRA seed enterprises, PlantVillage blog, Medieval weeds, French reserve, Black garlic, Australian tree tool
- Sometimes all it takes is a goat.
- Or a camel.
- I wonder how either would figure into a metric for a sustainable diet. Wonder if these people will be interested in those metrics.
- Cassava figures in lots of different ways.
- No word on whether carbon dioxide will affect its nutrient content the way it does with other crops.
- Who cares, it’s yield we’re after. Well, that’s in trouble too in some parts of Africa.
- That’s the only way those African seed start-ups are going to survive.
- Yeah, but disease resistance is important, Shirley. PlantVillage gets a blog.
- And weeds? Don’t forget the weeds. Although of course some of them you can eat. Put that in your metrics.
- Meanwhile, France starts to re-wild. Would love to see some wild relatives in the Bois du Boulogne. Livestock wild relatives, not your crazy cousin on his gap year.
- And now we can figure out what climate change might do to them. I guess this thing might work for European animals. Says here it works for Australian trees.
- Speaking of France, garlic is quintessentially French, isn’t it? Well, maybe, but it’s also very Korean, in its black, cured form.
Nibbles: Coffee rust, Wheat blast, Livestock yield gap, Livestock adaptation, Extension, Med diet, Organic < conventional, Douglas fir breeding, Best moustache in cryo, Fortifying rice
- Coffee rust is doing a number on livelihoods in Central America.
- Wheat blast could do the same in South America.
- ILRI DG on smallholder livestock producers: one-third don’t have the conditions in which to be viable, one-third can go either way and one–third can be successful. I suppose all of them are going to need adaptation options.
- Not to mention extension services.
- Meanwhile, bureaucrats busy protecting the Mediterranean diet.
- The inevitable productivity penalty of organic.”
- Douglas fir ready for its genomic closeup.
- Cryopreservation update, with video goodness.
- Lots of ways to skin the malnutrition cat: zinc and rice.
Nibbles: Food future, Bean breeding 101, Yield gaps, Mitigation strategies, Sparing vs sharing, Diverse diets, Open seeds, Fake seeds, Florida citrus threat, Hot chicks, Nutrition nuggets
- Food? We don’t need no stinking food.
- Bean breeder begs to differ.
- Where we could do with more food.
- Nobody’s talking about mitigation any more. Oh yes they are.
- Land shparing is the answer.
- ICRAF decides to gather evidence for the benefits of agroforestry for nutrition.
- More on those open source seeds. Which I hope nobody will counterfeit.
- Florida needs new grapefruits, whether open source or not.
- Naked neck chickens look weird, but they may be really heat resistant, so get over it. Ghana has.
- Canadian grad students summarize nutrition research in a pithy sentence. Sound familiar?