Nibbles

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.