Nibbles – Page 484 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

July 16, 2007July 16, 2007

Date tissue culture

Man has in vitro plan for Iraqi dates.

July 15, 2007July 15, 2007

Hemp grower persecuted

A farmer who wanted to diversify into hemp is persecuted by authority.

July 13, 2007July 13, 2007

More on bovine belching

BBC News and Der Spiegel both add details to the low-gas bovines story. Still no word from Al.

Equine obesity

Improved forages make horses obese. That and too much TV.

July 12, 2007July 12, 2007

Thai food

BBC photo essay on Thai insect-based street food.

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