- “How One Man Nearly Lost his Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.” Thanks, Danny.
- Bitter food=betrayal.
- DNA bank for Irish dairy and beef cattle being established.
- “… a document from 1631 … mentioned threats to the cacao crop.”
- USAID supports cassava farmers in Africa.
- The simpukng forest gardens of the Dayak deconstructed.
- Shit!
- 1170% of your daily cholesterol per serving. Sounds good to me.
Nibbles: Trees, Fibres, Journal, Local sourcing, d’Yquem, Capybaras
- Sacred groves explained.
- Filipinos encouraged to grow fibres.
- New AJFAND is out.
- “Inclusive business models†good for livelihoods, maybe agrobiodiversity too.
- Because it’s there. Disease and fermentation.
- There’s a booming market for chiguiro meat in Venezuela, which is bad for the chiguiro in Colombia.
The lactose reflux problem
Stephen J. Gould said that “there’s been no biological change in humans for 40,000 or 50,000 years.” Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending beg to differ and, in “The 10,000 Year Explosion,” point to evidence for a recent acceleration in human evolution (e.g. lactose intolerance) 1 and blame it on agriculture. Not everyone agrees. I can’t help finding the idea of the end of genetic change somewhat preposterous, a priori. 2 But one must find data. Check out the interview with Cochran at 2blowhards. 3 What all this means to us here, of course, is that when we assess variation in the nutritional value of agrobiodiversity, we need to remember that that value may differ among human individuals and populations.
Nibbles: Bees, Honey, Fertilizers, Desertification, Nutrition, Decor, Mobile phones
- Bees under lots of “sub-lethal stresses.” I know how they feel.
- Hadzabe, who have been doing it for thousands of years, to be trained in honey production.
- Chinese farmers to be taught law of diminishing returns.
- “Workers at the Egyptian Desert Gene Bank in Cairo harvest and grow threatened desert species in its laboratory before replanting them to their native soils, hoping to revitalize threatened desert species.”
- Lao National Nutrition Policy puts nutrition at the centre of development.
- Economic botany and architectural fripperies.
- Got milk?
Nibbles: Hell, Honours, Pollution, Darwin, Genomes, Small companies, Tigernuts, Urine soft drink, Medicinal plants
- A way out of hell: workshop on Database Challenges in Biodiversity Informatics
- Potato man honoured.
- Farm diversity reduces nitrogen runoff.
- Darwin on the Farm, from our friends at the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
- Yeast and wheat genome sequencing going gangbusters.
- Coffee!
- Fermented tigernuts more nutritious? No, they’re not from an endangered species. Via.
- Cow water!
- Lots of medicinal plants conservation projects going on in India.