Nibbles

Nibbles: Tea nomenclature, Medicinal plants, Robert Fortune, Gender gap, Japanese women farmers, AnGR conservation, Herbarium databases, India & Africa

Tea diversity 101.
Tea is medicinal, isn’t it? Certainly some other plants introduced to the West by the same person are.
I could tell you all about the gender gap in tea cultivation in Kenya.
And I bet there’s one in Japan too.
Not to mention in livestock-keeping. But I don’t suppose that will affect (ILRI’s) plans for a ~~Kenyan~~ livestock genebank.
Crowdsourcing herbarium data. Maybe there’s some specimens of wild tea species in there…
India reaches out to Africa. ICRISAT involved. Debal Deb, probably not so much. Chai, anyone?

Setting up a network of high potato diversity sites for in situ conservation. It has a Facebook page, so “Like” it.
Some of that diversity will no doubt find its way to Lima’s markets.
If not, Leaping and Learning will tell you how. And why.
There’s a lot of diversity in genebanks too, of course. And thank goodness for that!
Potatoes are important in Africa too.
And Japan. But do they go with eels?
What are potatoes like for micronutrients? Probably better than you think. But could be better?
If not, you can always pickle them. Can’t you?

The Lancet goes open source. Well, kinda.
Alt-World Food Prize winners. None of whom are at the Conference on Agroecology for Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: A Transformative Agenda, though.
I guess there’s no chance of Jeffrey Sachs landing the actual World Food Prize. Well, you never know.
If you’re in Britain and you get the urge to measure a tree, now you can share your results.
Maybe the Tunisians should do something similar, at least for their pears, before it’s too late.
“The plan notes biofuels have an important role to play in increasing our energy security, fostering rural economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.” Riiiight.
“We started doing this before heirlooms were fashionable. We knew in our hearts it was the right thing to do.”
Quite a bit of agrobiodiversity in the latest Plant Cuttings.
India goes in for high throughput phenotyping for drought tolerance.

Rethinking rice-based agriculture in Assam.
And China, maybe?
By breeding your way out of the problem, maybe?
And then patenting the result? Well, maybe not.
Here comes fair-trade quinoa.
Nordic cheeses to go with those insects from a few days back. Lack of Norwegian representation pointed out, as well as a remedy.
I wonder how many Italian cheeses are made from the milk of endangered breeds. Well, now the relevant association has a Facebook page, so I can ask them.

Brazil’s flora moves online. And its agriculture into its favelas.
Taxonomy 101.
Wish the people who wrote this press release on “canary seed” had taken a taxonomy course. It’s Phalaris canariensis, it turns out.
African breeders to be trained at UCDavis. Ok, but what about WACCI? What’s going on? Cornell-Davis smackdown?
Further proof, if any were needed, of the importance of wild bees.
Tajikistan gets its first World Heritage Site. Includes most of the Pamirs, so surely a whole lot of agricultural biodiversity, both wild and cultivated, plant and animal. Not that that was the prime mover for protection, probably.
Incidentally, there’s a list of World Heritage Sites in danger, and it includes Rennell Island in the Solomons. The reason I bring it up is that it is famous for a local coconut variety. Hope that’s not endangered!
Nordic Food Lab gets money to experiment with cooking insects.
Belize TV looks to agrobiodiversity to cope with climate change.