- Palestinian rooftop gardens. Including crucifers, no doubt.
- Brits support work with rice and wheat wild relatives. Among other things. They’ll probably use some of these genomics things.
- Aussies support sweet potatoes. HarvestPlus rejoices.
- That new Australian genebank. Will it have any sweet potatoes?
- The agricultural legacy of Thomas Jefferson. It doesn’t say here, but I bet he was into sweet potato.
- Hawaiian menus. What, no sweet potato?
- Forget biotech, the road to sexy agriculture is via the supermarket. Where you can buy sweet potato. Maybe even of the organic persuasion.
- Or maybe better tree seeds. Even in the Nordic countries. Or the US. Is cacao a tree?
- Plans for special edition of Sustainability on neglected crops. Like amaranth?
- Geographic targeting reaches roots/tubers. Using this newfangled atlas? Or no?
- Treaty and Consortium love-in filmed. Thanks for sharing. It’s all part of this CGIAR perestroika thing, no doubt.
- What that Kew coffee extinction paper really said.
- Protected areas need work. Especially for coffee (see above).
- Yeah but protected areas is not the only way to go, and Europe now has a bunch of biodiversity indicators for farmland. I guess it’s all part of some big plan.
- Policy brief on sustainable use of PGR. Or, as we used to call it, on farm conservation.
- Which you can kind of see happening here.
Nibbles: Biodiversity economics, ICARDA social network, Beyond food miles, Heirlooms on BBC, Cannabis, Research funding, Cacao diversity, Agriculture from the air, Sustainable intensification example, Research whine, Japanese botanic garden visit, European PGR network, Tribal Glycene, Youth in agriculture
- Oxford Review of Economic Policy has special volume on biodiversity economics. Not much ag, though, settle down.
- ICARDA announces on Twitter the existence of a new Facebook page which looks a bit like the old one.
- It’s the fertilizer miles, stupid.
- Great British Food Revival does heirloom carrots. Oh and beer.
- Good news for a particular agricultural biodiversity subsector from Amsterdam and Colorado. The Dude unavailable for comment. For obvious reasons.
- If you’re from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda and are doing research on Neglected and Underutilized Species you’ll be interested in this call or research proposals from ISF.
- Bioversity deconstructs that paper on the spatial analysis of Theobroma diversity. I still don’t quite get why they didn’t do the gap analysis.
- Farming from the air. And more along the same lines. Or polygons, I suppose I should say. Can you estimate diversity from the air? I bet you can.
- Sustainable intensification in (sort of) action.
- Damn rice farmers not playing ball.
- Oxford botany geeks visit Japan, identify wood of bench in noodle bar.
- 13th meeting ECPGR Steering Committee. All the documents you’ll need. And then some.
- Soybean as a vegetable. Possibly an acquired taste.
- How to keep young people on the farm? “Perhaps the first point to recognise is that the evidence base on which to build policy and programmes is frighteningly thin.”
Nibbles: Potato blight, Ag statistics, Biofortification, Biofortified potatoes, Insect food, Genuine mozzarella, Agricultural history
- Breeder of blight-resistant potatoes stands up for gardeners who grow blight-susceptible potatoes.
- Hungry for better ag statistics? FAO hears you.
- “Biofortification is an obstacle to food justice”. Just an opinion, obviously.
- And not necessarily one shared by the USDA: Breeding better fruits and veggies, including vitamin-A enriched potatoes.
- Women, gardens, community health … we’ve heard this all before. So why is it still news?
- Diana Buja shares tips on how to catch flying ants, and other goodies, the better to savour their deliciousness.
- A beginner’s guide to everything called pepper.
- A new test for cow’s milk in mozzarella di bufala, can also separate the sheep from the goats. Can I get a pocket version?
- The transition to agriculture in North America.
Nibbles: Agroforestry history, CBD COP, Social GCARD, Dog symbiosis, Indian databases, Beans means iron, Swedish climate change, Italian agrobiodiversity documentation
- Reminiscing at ICRAF about the history of (some of) the intellectual underpinnings of land sharing.
- The latest agrobiodiversity musings from Hyderabad.
- More reminiscing, this time from a GCARD2 social reporter.
- Dogs, the first domesticates?
- India links up its biodiversity databases. Including NBPGR’s?
- Iron-rich beans hit Rwanda. Rwanda reels from the impact. How long before someone thinks of dumping them into the ocean?
- “There will be no nice wine from Sweden this year.” Oh, dear.
- Documenting agricultural biodiversity. In Italian. Maybe Italy will now follow India (see above)?
Nibbles: Wasabi, Plant name checker, Finding birds, GFAR videos, Sweet potato pap, Taro genebank
- Up to their knees in wasabi. And, loving it.
- iPlant Collaborative’s Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS) ver. 3.0 expands its coverage.
- Marine bird e-Atlas goes live. Meah.
- GFAR tweets about old videos. Must be a reason for it.
- Podcast on using sweet potatoes in baby food. Might well come in useful more generally.
- My friend Valerie and former employer SPC get a namecheck in story about world’s largest taro genebank.