Nibbles – Page 448 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

November 6, 2007

Capsicum on show

â€œA Pepper for Every Potâ€ is on at the U.S. Botanic Gardens in Washington, D.C.

November 6, 2007

Iron in rice

Lots of variation in Fe in Thai rice. Popeye unavailable for comment.

November 6, 2007

Fish as biofuel feedstock

Fish waste as biofuel: Izaak Walton unavailable for comment.

November 5, 2007

Oldest sausage recipe found

Bratwurst: adding value to agrobiodiversity for 600 years.

November 3, 2007

Food data online at NAL

Historic USDA food composition tables digitized.

1. Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
2. Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
3. When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
4. The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
5. Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
6. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
7. New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Published on October 6, 2026