- Kenneth John Frey, oat breeder and more besides, has died.
- A food forager discovers the importance of the proper names for plants.
Nibbles: DIY entomophagy, Svalbard movie, Perennial crops, IPM
- Grow your own delicious bugs for snacks. I feel duty bound to point out that the snacks in question are flies, not bugs. And where’s my donut?
- This short film about the Svalbard seed vault is not nearly as scary as it’s poster image.
- FAO hosts an expert workshop on perennial crops, for three days in August.
- The ENDURE network – “diversifying crop protection” – says Danish farmers love Integrated Pest Management. And the Endure network.
Nibbles: Baobab, Courses, Social Media, “Exotic” edibles, Cereals on display, Ithyphallic lettuce, Ancient manure, Entomophagy, SRI, Weed evolution
Quick catch-up after 10 days away edition. If I missed anything spectacularly important, it’s bound to resurface.
- A baobab (not the baobab) in danger of extinction.
- Could it be saved by attending a course on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use?
- And if it’s courses you’re interested in, we have:
- Agriculture nutrition linkages, also from Wageningen.
- Agroecology – the Future of Farming?, from the College of Enlightened Agriculture at Schumacher College. Why the weaselly question-mark?
- And a conference on domestication.
- The value and use of social media as communication tool in the plant sciences deconstructed by AOBBlog.
- AOBBlog also gives the “cunning culinarists” at Kew some stick on their 100 exotic edibles.
- Personally, I’d quite like to try Dead Man’s Fingers.
- And take a look at Kew’s new display of summer cereals.
- I don’t see any mention, however, of lettuce as a sacred sex symbol, with added vocabulary-enhancing properties.
- And speaking of manure, its use is almost as old as agriculture.
- If I had a donut for every why-don’t-we-all-eat-insects article I’ve read, I’d be spectacularly overweight by now.
- Big Picture Agriculture offers An Interview with Cornell’s Dr Erika Styger about the System of Crop Intensification (SRI-Rice).
- Is watergrass (Echinochloa) a problem for SRI-Rice? I don’t know, but it supports Ford Denison’s argument about the speed of evolution in weeds …
- … prompted by Carl Zimmer’s article on weeds in the New York Times.
Nibbles: Brazil nut, PVP, Dog evolution, Plant Treaty in India, Kerala veggies, Rust tracking latest, Adapt or die, Quinoa latest, NZ seed exchange, African soybeans, Ancient aquaculture
- The Brazil nut needs its pollinators.
- How USDA protects plant varieties.
- American dogs are Asian, not European.
IndiaNepal working out how to implement the ITPGRFA.- Kerala’s vegetable terrace gardeners.
- Haven’t heard much about Ug99 lately, have we? Doesn’t mean people aren’t keeping a careful eye on it.
- Climate change 10,000 times faster than vertebrate evolution.
- Why quinoa is not “taking over the world.”
- Not even New Zealand. Though not for want of trying.
- In the meantime, soybeans taking over Africa?
- Aquaculture that’s sustainable and ancient. Includes taro fish ponds, which for some reason seem to me cool beyond measure.
Nibbles: Bahamian pigs, Llamas far from home, Ugandan aquaponics, Better broccoli, African atlas, Chinese sesame imports, Root & tuber maps, NZ genebank access
- The next big livestock thing is swimming pigs.
- Or maybe llamas. Not swimming ones, mind, settle down.
- Nope, it’s farmed fish. Which do swim, though not very far.
- Meanwhile, Cornell re-engineers broccoli.
- And HarvestChoice puts out an African atlas. Online resources coming in due course.
- Which does not show you sesame cultivation in Ethiopia, alas, at least not yet, let’s wait for the online version.
- Speaking of atlases, RTBMaps is in Beta. I’ll have to play with it and get back to you.
- New Zealand changes genebank rules to speed up forage breeding. To do with quarantine rather than ABS, though.