Category: Organic agriculture

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Nibbles: Ginger, Cover crops, Pulses, Campbell Soup, NASA, OWD, Göbekli Tepe, Sydney herbarium, Bourdeix museum, Mezcal folk vocabulary, Mango love, Probiotic ag, Andean ag

  1. China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
  2. US doubles down on cover crops…
  3. …and pulses. No word on ginger.
  4. How Campbell’s doubled down on tomato breeding. But never released the seeds.
  5. Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
  6. Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
  7. Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
  8. Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
  9. A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
  10. How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
  11. A paean to the mango.
  12. Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
  13. It kind of already is in the Andes.
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Nibbles: Seed saving edition

  1. Seed saving in The Guardian.
  2. Seed saving in Nigeria.
  3. More seed saving needed in Zimbabwe.
  4. Save seeds instead of growing GMO crops? The “debate” continues…
  5. Is seed saving among the best-bet government interventions to fix our diets? Find out.
  6. Seed saving on rsmag.com, whatever that is.
  7. Will the new Oxford nature recovery centre look into seed saving, I wonder?
  8. Saving baobab seeds in Burkina Faso.
  9. We need joined-up food system thinking. Starting with seed saving?
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Nibbles: Seed saving, Ulu, Diet diversity, Azeri fruit/veg, Tomato breeding, Indigenous farming, AGRA-ecology

  1. Food security through seed saving in the African diaspora.
  2. Food security through breadfruit in Hawaii.
  3. Food security through the dietary diversity of women.
  4. Food security through preserving fruits and veggies in Azerbaijan.
  5. Food security through tomato wild relatives.
  6. Food security through Native American farming practices.
  7. Food security through agroecology.
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Nibbles: Presentations, Taro leaf blight, Agroforestry, Agroecology, Photosynthesis

  1. Two guides to making good presentations. For what it’s worth, here’s my take: fewer words.
  2. The latest on taro leaf blight in Samoa, from an Indigenous perspective. Not a presentation in sight.
  3. Agroforestry in the Solomon Islands involves 132 species. Probably including taro.
  4. The case for agroecology from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. You could also see the above.
  5. Or, we could tweak photosynthesis.
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Nibbles: Maize landraces, Indian plantain, Indigenous conservation, Slow Food, Design a tomato, Saffron in Vermont

  1. A Mexican entrepreneur and a Pawnee Keeper of the Seed try to save maize landraces in their different ways.
  2. Indian farmer tries to save plantain varieties.
  3. Indigenous conservation will save conservation.
  4. Alice Walters cannot save the food system. But why not let her try?
  5. None of the above of them would understand the concept of designing a perfect tomato.
  6. Saffron is the perfect spice.