- Maya nut blogs.
- And then there are the ARTCs. What do you mean, you don’t need another acronym?
- Pedal powered grain cleaning – with a link to a video of the thing in action. Could it be adapted for poorer places?
- A new research project on cacao in the Dominican Republic, and how it could support more biodiversity.
- Because we all know that crops compete with conservation, right?
- Cash, food or vouchers? In one study, vouchers result in greater dietary diversity.
- Speaking of which, maybe you can use varietal diversification to manage climate risk in East Africa.
- Or perhaps you can leave it all to ecosystem services.
- Speaking of which, someone actually asked Kenyan farmers how they perceive and respond to climate change.
- Speaking of which, the University of Nairobi has embraced open access.
- Speaking of which, in March there’ll be International Training Course Plant Conservation Biology: Science and Practice, which you can find here, with a little effort.
- The executive summary of a Union of Concerned Scientists report on drought-resistant crops.
- At a loose end? Listen to an hour of economics podcast on organic farming from that link.
Nibbles: Genome assembly, Congo livelihoods, Tilman, Peak farmland, Lima bean project, Cotton award, Translocation, Sudanese seed, Pachyrhizus, Conference, Agro-ecology, SEAVEG, Indigenous foodways,
- The latest genomic whiz-bangery.
- CIFOR’s Congo slideshow makes The Guardian. About as far from genomic whiz-bangery as you can get.
- Speaking of which… Very long talk by David Tilman. Almost certainly worth watching in its entirety. Eventually. It all depends on trade-offs. See what I did there?
- Agriculture stops expanding. Is it all that genomic whiz-bangery?
- U. of Delaware gets big Lima bean grant. Yes, Delaware. They got whiz-bangery in Delaware too.
- Meanwhile, Texan cotton breeder gets award. For a certain amount of whiz-bangery.
- Translocation and restoration: cool, but a last resort, whiz-bangery says.
- Support for the seed sector in S. Sudan. Any landraces? No whiz-bangery in sight.
- And likewise for the yam bean in Africa.
- Wonder whether that’ll be on the agenda at the First Food Security Futures Conference in April. Probably not.
- Nor, probably, will anyone be thinking too hard about agro-ecology; but you could be, with this handy-dandy introduction to holistic management.
- SEAVEG; no, not nori etc, but veg in SE Asia.
- Different animals need different kinds of fodder, ILRI shows how.
- Wishing success to the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative launched at the University of Arkansas today.
Brainfood: Barley phylogeny, Strawberry smell, C4, European tree sap, Conservation anthropology, Seed systems, Profitability of diversity, Wheat breeding, Rice breeding, Forest conservation, Neolithic transition, Forest ecosystem services, Diversity and area
- Phylogenetic analysis in some Hordeum species (Triticeae; Poaceae) based on two single-copy nuclear genes encoding acetyl-CoA carboxylase. Divides up the Africa/Asia and American clades, but not perfectly.
- Journeys through aroma space: a novel approach towards the selection of aroma-enriched strawberry cultivars in breeding programmes. Breed a better smelling strawberry in this way, and the world will beat a path to your door.
- Strategies for engineering C4 photosynthesis. More than one way to skin a cat. But is it worth doing if you don’t eat cats?
- Uses of tree saps in northern and eastern parts of Europe. Not what it used to be.
- Resequencing rice genomes: an emerging new era of rice genomics. Maybe. But it would have been better if they had sequenced something other than Nipponbare originally.
- Toward conservational anthropology: addressing anthropocentric bias in anthropology. “Traditional practices” not always all that great.
- Seed exchange networks for agrobiodiversity conservation. A review. Farmers have to be “well connected” for conservation to work. But nobody really knows what that means.
- Landscape diversity and the resilience of agricultural returns: a portfolio analysis of land-use patterns and economic returns from lowland agriculture. Higher gross margin related positively to greater variance, negatively to diversity, in lowland UK, up to 12000 ha.
- Marker-assisted development and characterization of a set of Triticum aestivum lines carrying different introgressions from the T. timopheevii genome. Getting resistance out of wild relatives and into crops.
- Physical localization of a novel blue-grained gene derived from Thinopyrum bessarabicum. Getting blue pigments out of a wild relative and into wheat.
- Improvement of two traditional Basmati rice varieties for bacterial blight resistance and plant stature through morphological and marker-assisted selection. Getting blight resistance out of an improved variety to improve traditional ones.
- Maintaining or Abandoning African Rice: Lessons for Understanding Processes of Seed Innovation. Farmers play an important role in adopting and developing new varieties shock.
- Dynamic Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources in 33 European Countries. It happens.
- The impact of the Neolithic agricultural transition in Britain: a comparison of pollen-based land-cover and archaeological 14C date-inferred population change. Pollen and archaeology agree on dates, the rest is history.
- Higher levels of multiple ecosystem services are found in forests with more tree species. Swedish production forests, anyway. And more. And more.
If it isn’t gluten, maybe its dairy?
A propos of Luigi’s earlier decision to plumb Kim Kardashian’s depths, my own sources led me this morning to a “comedy” video.
It dates from 2009, at least, even longer ago than La Kardashian’s ringing endorsement.
Gluten free is the way to be. Or not to be.
Gluten free is the way to be….OH Hiiiiiiiiiiii http://t.co/y4LOtk1Z
— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) May 4, 2012
No doubt fearing the repercussions of this and other celebrity endorsements of a wheat-free diet, 1 the National Wheat Improvement Committee has come out with a myth-busting denunciation of Dr William Davis’ monumental Wheat Belly. I wonder if Kim has seen it. Wait, let me tweet it to her…