Nibbles

Nibbles: Cover crops, Barley tempeh, Irish biodiversity, Veg research, Landwirtschaft in einer anderen Dimension, Farmers Markets

Higher maize yields? Plant cover crops between the rows.
Barley tempeh! My kind of food exploration.
Danny Hunter impresses Irish Times with need to conserve biodiversity.
UK devotes millions to research for “bigger yields of better quality fruits and vegetables”.
Germans embrace high-tech urban agriculture — cautiously.
Put farmers’ markets near medical centres for added benefits. What happens when everyone’s so healthy they don’t need the doctor?

Yale University magazine drinks the fast-track breeding KoolAid panacea.
Compare and contrast. Repeat. Endlessly.
Grafting tomatoes is hot for lots of reasons; but how does it protect against leaf-borne diseases? And not just tomatoes, actually.
Getting the lowdown on that “food sovereignty” farrago.
And today’s DNA sequencing will solve world hunger and cure bunions story.
Genomics also good for “health, agriculture, livestock, fisheries and biodiversity” in Philippines. Have we forgotten anything?
Well yeah, you forgot your handy molecular toolkit.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the choice is between forests and yaks.
More hard choices: evotourism destinations. But check it out, there be agricultural biodiversity too!
And another one: to go to the International Sandalwood Symposium, or not to go?

The annual Wageningen agrobiodiversity conservation course is in India this year. Hannes says it’s really good.
AVRDC’s veggie seed kits are a hit in Orissa.
CIMMYT swimming in data. Waving, not drowning.
IRRI not doing badly either. But “quantitative train loci” is a new one on me.
Australia thinking about introducing elephants. Yeah because that sort of thing has been such a success in the past.
Well, actually, with sheep, I suppose it has, in a way. And the genetics says breeders have a lot of diversity to play with still.
Your mama is a llama.
The Island of Dogs has crop wild relatives. No, not the one in London.
Cuba goes for new urban crops. And not for the first time, Shirley. But what about the old ones?
Quick, duck! This piece has been rather a hit for me over on Facebook.
VII International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon and Their Wild Relatives: The (Very Expensive) Book.
Food sovereignty “started in New England”. Huh? And proponents “want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators”. Huh?

Banana boffins at each others’ throats over alleged new species. Great spectator sport.
What does a Musa voucher specimen look like, I wonder.
Fancy shmanzy Bangkok restaurant links up with heirloom seedbank.
Aroid network working really hard.
Marker-assisted selection: a biotechnology we can all get behind. Can’t we?
Conservation in Sierra Leone. No agrobiodiversity, natch.

Mike Jackson gets himself a pulpit. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike!
More on the Filipino ex-genebank.
What they grew in an ancient Israelite garden. Can they really tell Citrus species apart from their pollen?
More American maps to mashup with obesity and food insecurity: land use, renewable energy sources…. I do hope someone is keeping track. Even of the more esoteric stuff, of course, like the names of softdrinks.
Yet more on horse domestication.
Another organic farming externality for your consideration. Thanks, Robert.
ILRI gets innovative on this whole training thing.
“The future of chocolate” revealed.
Boffins look at fossil bison epigenetics to investigate adaptation to climate change. What will they think of next. Well, applying it to chickens, for a start.
Other boffins move potato anti-nematode genes into bananas. No word on the epigenetics of it all.
Indian report on how to strengthen role of agriculture in nutrition.
Kew has money for fieldwork.
Cleaning messy taxonomic data. Useful in Genebank Database Hell?