Nibbles

Nibbles: Aphrodisiacs, Food Security, Access & Benefit Sharing, Berry Go Round, Weeds, Restoration Ecology, Opuntia, Sustainable cacao, Innovation

The rich diversity of aphrodisiac foods. Is it February again?
Why bother doing it myself when someone else had already stuck the knife in The New Statesman.
Making the Nagoya Protocol work at the community level. I know, let’s have a meeting. But will the ISF be invited?
June’s Berry-go-Round botany blog carnival is up, with a few relevancies:

Rave from the grave… If the endless summer don’t get you, the nuclear winter still will.
To him that hath… Spaniards bag Euro cup and their first DNA sequence: melon.
Build a better banana… And you still need to persuade farmers to beat a path to your door.
Well, maybe a Facebook page will help: roots, tubers and bananas go social.
Oxfam advice on protecting your supply chains from endless summers and nuclear winters.
Which might be useful for this training course. But are value chains the same as supply chains?
Or it might not.

C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.

How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
It may well involve patient capital though.
This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
CIMMYT in China.
The banana as a weapon.
Touring UK plant science sites.
Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
“Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
“We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.

My friend Zac bags a well-deserved award.
Agricultural diversity in the Middle Ages: squirrels and cotton. And there’s probably more where those came from…
Keeping score on agricultural research spending.
Fermentables interview.
What does this climate-smart agriculture look like anyway?
And do they ever need it in the American midwest.
And what in blazes is candlenut?
A tool for documenting endangered languages. Maybe endangered landraces or crops one day too…
Documented: One Sri Lankan farmer’s thoughts on sustainable agriculture.
Not to mention the plusses and minuses of livestock — straight from the horse’s mouth.
And the myth that will not die: King Tut’s peas alive and thriving. Kudos to Jackson Holtz, a properly skeptical reporter.