Nibbles

Nibbles: Global plant cover, Veggies in Africa, Ancient middens, Raspberry fruit colour, Citrus greening, Jordan biodiversity, US nutrition, Subsidies, Seed and voucher fair, Bean diversity, Grape mildew fight

GIS geeks sort out land cover at last.
Role of vegetables in combating malnutrition in Africa. Author offers pdf of paper.
Ancient native American middens just keep on giving.
Raspberry colour good predictor of various fruit post-harvest characteristics. Good short-cut for breeders.
Getting to the root of citrus greening. Scary disease.
Freaky stuff about using frog eggs to figure out the genetics of grapevine’s susceptibility to another scary disease.
Video of our friend Dr Nigel Maxted on Jordan’s socioeconomically important plants.
Physician, heal thyself. Indian tells USAID to take care of its own food insecurity.
How to create subsidies that promote biodiversity, in a model, which is probably highly unrealistic.
Very realistic notes from a seed and voucher fair in Malawi.
And anecdotes on the benefits of bean diversity in Uganda.

Farming cobia off Panama. Look it up.
Gene editing is the future. But is it GM?
More on the CIMMYT genebank from the Australian press. Get a room already.
Fancy machine can tell fancy Yemeni coffee from lesser stuff. No, not DNA. Producers of lesser stuff unavailable for comment.
Some of them may end up being photographed by National Geographic though.
Before being forced off their land.
Different sort of land grab in the Gran Chaco. Pity those poor wild Arachis. And here’s a meta-analysis of the drivers of the problem.
Feeling left out, herders get fancy photos too.
“The data indicates a broad distribution of this clone from Spain to Russia and Scotland to Cypress.” Good grief. Potato blight, if you’re still interested.
From household survey data to food security assessment: The software.
The bubbleberry is increasingly a thing.

Nature has new Plants journal. With blog.
More from the randomized trials backlash frontlines.
World Bank sets up internal task force on climate smart agriculture. Oh good.
No word on whether spiritual values on agenda.
Hacking the school lunch.
Indian flour mills winding down. Implications for crop diversity unknown.
Big Australian writeup of CIMMYT genebank.
Big CIP writeup of CIP genebank. And other collections, to be fair.
It’s the regeneration, stupid.
Gardens save plants.
Sustainable diets defined to within an inch of their lives. Common factor is less animal products. But, as Susan McMillan of ILRI points out, for whom, and where?
Traditional Maori use of weird fungus.

“Fifteen to twenty percent of the world’s food is produced through urban farming, involving an estimated 800 million people.”
We shaped yeasts as much as they shaped us. Now to sort out their nomenclature, along with the rest of the benighted fungal kingdom.
Cheese is just one way yeasts shaped us. What kind of cheese can you make from Ankole milk, I wonder.
Sean Myles tells us how his lab “makes food better.”
Tan Sonstegard of USDA tells us how ADAPTMap can make goats better. Skip to 2 mins in, if you want to avoid adorable footage of cute (human) kids. I love a nice bit of goat cheese.
Can the private sector help combat hunger and malnutrition? Gee, I dunno, do tell me.
Vietnamese chocolate comes of age. Someone mention the private sector?
Gene jockeys take over world. World surrenders.
What did the Elizabethans ever do for us? Well, they grew funky vegetables for one thing.
Both Colas sign up to FAO guidelines that “protect the rights of poor and vulnerable people to land, livelihoods and food security.” But is it all marketing?
The Lugar Center has a bunch of bibliographic resources for researchers.
Biofuels? Bah, humbug.
Jorge Dubcovsky, a professor of plant sciences at the University of California–Davis, snags another award.
“Are you all converts to the cause of backyard potato breeding?” Do tell. And so we come full circle.

Natural areas just as important for rural incomes as crops.
Because of things like medicinal plants, among others.
Not if the crop was saffron, though. Or multi-purpose biofuels?
Trout gets the genome treatment. I prefer it grilled with a little butter and parsley.
High maize prices good for one thing. Wanna guess?
Guerrilla bee-keepers in the Rust Belt.
Maybe they’ll be discussed in tomorrow’s tweetathon: Urban Food Security +SocialGood.
Brussels sprouts too, maybe: it’s urban agriculture, Jim, but not as we know it.
Another view on NatGeo’s five steps to food security. (Here’s Luigi’s.)
The key thing NatGeo left out: jackfruit.
Well, that, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Of course.