- Wow! Just wow. Big Picture Agriculture has launched an incredibly useful website.
- Chromosomes, crops and superdomestication, a slideshare presentation by Pat Heslop-Harrison.
- Cats, domesticated? Not as far as I’m concerned. Still, Ancient Chinese cats ate rats, leading to their domestication.
- Independent plant breeders, a conference just for you.
- Great ammunition for the lazy gardener.
- IBPES told to “tap the wisdom of indigenous peoples”.
- Kenyan policymakers told to consider the potato.
- Basque vineyards of a millennium ago.
- A new strain of UG99 wheat rust? But this time, the world is ready.
- Variable diets linked to variable emissions shock.
- scidev.net reports that ants protect cacao trees from fungal diseases. (Yes, I’m taking short cuts here.)
- Palaeolithic people preferred nutrition-rich places.
- And quinoa remains as confusing as ever.
- Tokyo’s local honey.
- Although agriculture barely features in a paean to urban biodiversity. It should.
- The holly and the coffee: The Botanist in the Kitchen does Yerba Maté
- Ready for the inevitable ennui of next Christmas, a taxonomy of conifers.
Nibbles: Cranberry, Apple, Quail
Obviously it is going to take a while to get back up to cruisin’ speed, so we’ll start slow before we accelerate back to the future and attempt to catch up.
- Ready to amuse at the next Thanksgiving, a history of the cranberry.
- Ready for the next apple you eat (or, in my case, run from), a history of Granny Smith.
- Ready for bankruptcy? A recent history of quail farming in Kenya.
Nibbles: Wild veg, Cleome, Barberries, Alley-cropped wheat, Bison, Seed potatoes, Veg database, IPR of PGRFA
- Wild veg are very much in the news today. Teresa Borelli and Danny Hunter are unlocking their potential.
- Meanwhile, Eileen Omosa actually has unlocked their potential. Here’s her take on Cleome gynandra (smoked out by Luigi’s photo of same).
- And then there are barberries, scourge of rust-susceptible wheat.
- Some trees, though, properly deployed, can be good for wheat. My head’s spinning with all that complexity.
- Saddest story you’ll read all day? Or most hopeful? A timeline of the status of the bison in North America.
- Seed degeneration to be studied. And about time too. Course, they don’t mean true seed. That never degenerates, not even in the
- World Vegetable Center’s spiffy genebank, whose database contains 438 species. As odd a way to advertise the database as any.
- And here’s a thought to strike terror into the hearts of genebank curators everywhere: plant genetic resources may not all be public goods after all, says noted expert Michael Halewood.
Nibbles: Ecosystem services, EU hearing, Competition, Stagnant yields, Abandoned croplands, Ferments
We’re almost out of here, until 6 January 2014. Till then …
- Possibly the best current explanation of why ecosystem services are worth paying for. Stay with it.
- Would you like to see Roberto Papa tell the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee what he thinks of the proposals on plant reproductive material? Thought so.
- Young agricultural blogger? CTA wants to hear from you for the YoBloCo awards.
- Nature’s on a roll lately: Crop yields are growing arithmetically, and you can stuff that in your anti-Malthusian stocking.
- What, then, to do with Eastern Europe’s abandoned croplands?
- Maybe we could ferment them.
Nibbles: Banana bionformatics, Banana problems, Dietary diversity indicator, SoD meet, MSSRF & millets, Intercropping tree crops, Ecosystem management, UNEP atlas, Pacific ABS, Seed theft
- Data geeks tuck into bananas.
- Will it help the Filipino smallholder, though?
- Dietary diversity suggested as an indicator of welfare at national level. Wow.
- Seeds of Discovery discovers it has made progress.
- Celebrating a potato breeder. We should do more of that.
- Beer-fueled conservation. Not what you’re thinking.
- Milling minor millets means more money.
- CIRAD breaks down intercropping rubber. And nutmeg?
- Better forest governance by the numbers. How about savannas
- Arab region gets an environmental atlas. Also in Google Earth.
- The Pacific learns about the ITPGRFA. Not for the first time…
- I guess these guys didn’t know about MTAs.