Nibbles

Nibbles: Chocolate industry, Perennial grains, Digestibility gene, Potato in Africa, Maps

Big chocolate to get bigger. What will it do to diversity?
Gates Foundation funds perennial grains for Africa.
Including sorghum, the perennial version of which may or may not include the latest magic bullet gene.
Not including potato, though, which is also, however, being pushed in Africa.
Great old maps of agricultural origins.
And on the same subject, I can never resist etymology maps, especially of agrobiodiversity words.

“Always rotating, regardless of prices, is close to optimal.” Not what you think. Or maybe it is. Robust economic reasons for not planting the same annual crop two years running.
Got any data about nutrition and biodiversity? FAO wants them.
Fuller and McCouch on the origins of rice. Audio goodness only.
The first of many video updates on #COP19. Gonna be a long couple of weeks.
And no, I don’t think a UN Nutrition and Sustainability Seminar will help much in that respect, but you can follow that too at #sustfoodsystems. Or is it #sustdiets?

Search the UK’s living plant collections for errant edibles and their wild relatives.
Independent origins for aromatic rice varieties?
I’ll see your rice varieties, and raise you independent cattle domestication in China.
The scent of a truffle, love it or leave it.
Improving the yam, with flow cytometry and satellite markers to discover how many chromosome sets they have.
Going back to nature for the best in cultivated shiitake. With video goodness.
The @gricultural Revolution, from CTA. Too cute, too loud, too long. With even more video goodness.
“Local Farmer Grows Beans from the Basque Region.” I guess he’s not local to the Basque region, then, or it wouldn’t be remarkable. Yet more video goodness. Aside: I’ve grown alubias de Tolosa and they are wonderful, but I never was elected a member of the confraternity.
You want even more video goodness? Here’s some on resilience in coffee farming.

Secretary of Agriculture tours Ft Collins genebank. With video goodness.
Which genebank I’m sure follows the Genebank Standards for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. With video goodness.
Prince of Wales sows organic rice. In white suit. With video goodness.
The story of indigo. No video, but lots of photos.
Sardinian blood soup. No video, but one photo. Which is more than enough.
Wanna watch Seeds of Time? Here’s where. Includes much on Svalbard, of course. And a bit on USDA wild potato collecting. I plead the fifth.
So there’s a second banana genome? Thankfully no video.
“We are only using the tip of the iceberg.” Rice genetic resources, that is. Could easily have had a video.
Face palm oil.
Photo essay on the bazaars of Central Asia.

They got an awful lot of fungi in Norwegian wood.
Waiter, there’s a mushroom in my beer.
Kew seed scientist discovers the taste of the Amazon.
That “tearless onion” is good for the heart story? The article is behind a paywall, so I don’t know how the boffins suppressed lachrymatory factor synthase. And frankly, I don’t really care.
A new guide to Melaleuca species. Be still my beating heart.
The world’s oldest tomatillo clocks in at 52.2 million years.
French seed company Vilmorin buys 25% of Zimbabwe’s Seed Co. Ltd. What could possibly go wrong?
“Katy Perry’s latest album, Prism, is Number One in Australia, but that hasn’t stopped the country from declaring it a potential biohazard.” Can anyone explain the significance of this story? Or who Katy Perry is?
On the whole, I’d rather be at the frites museum in Bruges.
“Clearly, when it comes to agriculture, productivity matters.” Here comes the science.