Nibbles

Nibbles: Sorghum and rice and climate change, Pacific agrobiodiversity today and yesterday, Japanese microbiota, Wolf domestication, Organic and fungi, Crop wild relatives, Bees, Hunger, Silk

Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?

There are some African success stories, and a few even have to do with agriculture.
TILLING tef.
Some farmers’ groups in Asia don’t like hybrid rice. But some do, presumably. How come we never hear from those?
Livestock trends deconstructed.
The mother of all grapevine varieties found. Well, some varieties anyway.
One of the foremost supporters of the System of Rice Intensification interviewed.
Scientia Pro Publica, latest edition. There’s some nutrition stuff.

Latest news on the bee front ain’t good. Except on Isle of Man.
IFPRI accused of being industry shills. But where’s the evidence?
Commentary on Hilary Clinton’s undernutrition speech.
Monsanto did not donate GMO seed to Haiti. But it was hybrids, so basically a one-off. Better than nothing? Adding insult to injury? I dunno, you decide.
So apparently we have the unstable margins of chromosomes to thank for beer. I’ll drink to that.

Breeders called on to save key Afghani crop. No, not really.
GMOs not incompatible with organic, round 2.
The Columbian Exchange. People though, not crops.
USDA chief botanist was into Cannabis shock.
Novel way of growing rice unveiled.
Two livestock pdfs: What 2010 means for farm animal genetic resources conservation. And a book on European local breeds.