- Hard times for tea in Kenya. Believe me, I know, the mother-in-law never stops going on about it.
- Agroecology, HuffPost piece and video.
- Lessons on sustainable forest food harvesting from India.
- Fixing Prunus africana harvesting: saying it is easier than doing it. Should have asked the Indians.
- Studying weed.
- Young people don’t like tequila. Farming its raw material, that is. Should maybe switch to weed? No, wait…
- Weird Biblical food.
- Did we miss this thing on perennial cereals when it first came out?
- Nutritional composition of wheat hasn’t changed in 150 years. Not sure if that good or bad. What will happen when it goes perennial?
Nibbles: Beer from fog, Ecoagriculture, Slow oil, Greek diet, Livestock history, Biofortified millet, Zambian crops, Wild tomatoes, Trees & drought, Global genebanks, Saving coconuts, Industrial crops
- Fogcatcher ale? Oh I think so!
- Greenpeace guides donors on ecological farming. Booklet on the preservation of historical monuments to follow.
- Slow Food launches olive oil presidium. Presidium?
- The ancient Greeks had wine for breakfast. Explains a lot.
- Livestock size changes through the ages.
- The sainted Lawrence Haddad on that biofortified pearl millet story from yesterday. Remember that variety can be traced back to a genebank. But not only millet.
- Zambians told to look to their neglected traditional crops. By their government. Which is surely complicit in their neglect. Maybe biofortify them first?
- Collecting tomato wild relatives.
- July drought stops pine trees growing in the SW US.
- Building a global genebank system. And again.
- Saving the PNG coconut collection from Bogia disease. We need a Svalbard for coconuts is what we need.
- Industrial crops and food security in sub-Saharan Africa: mainly complementary, but…
Brainfood: Prunus hybrids, Wild potato gaps, Agroecology & CC, German orchard loss, Downy mildew in millet, Googling birds, Legume genetic resources
- Development of a New Hybrid Between Prunus tomentosa Thunb. and Prunus salicina Lindl.. Prunus just keeps on giving.
- Ex Situ Conservation Priorities for the Wild Relatives of Potato (Solanum L. Section Petota). 32 out of 73 species, mostly in Peru.
- Agroecology and the design of climate change-resilient farming systems. Forget monocultures, go for “…crop diversification, maintaining local genetic diversity, animal integration, soil organic management, water conservation and harvesting…”
- Patterns and Drivers of Scattered Tree Loss in Agricultural Landscapes: Orchard Meadows in Germany (1968-2009). It’s all about the bottom line.
- New Sources of Resistance to Multiple Pathotypes of Sclerospora graminicola in the Pearl Millet Mini Core Germplasm Collection. 62 of 238 accessions resistant to at least 2 of 8 pathotypes tested.
- Searching for backyard birds in virtual worlds: Internet queries mirror real species distributions.
Searches for common names of birds correlated with bird population densities. Wonder if same applies to (some) plants. - Legume Crops Phylogeny and Genetic Diversity for Science and Breeding. 6 tribes, 13 genera, a million accessions. But are we making the most of them?
Nibbles: Youthful ideas, IK, Variety testing, GMO philosophy, Organic GMOs, Oline disease, Cacao doctors, US wheat, Cary Fowler, Bison renaissance, UCDavis, Andean grains, Alaskan ag, Lettuce latex, Collecting strategies, Pulses racing, Huitlacoche, Ecoagriculture, Bowel movement
- Australian yoofs make suggestions for a better agriculture. Not as bad as you might think.
- Emulate, don’t imitate, desert dwellers.
- Webinar on variety trialing.
- A philosopher tackles GMO labelling. Not many people hurt.
- Meanwhile, Pamela Ronald is trying to find a middle way.
- This Italian olive disease thing is getting worrying.
- Indonesians have their own problems with cacao, but at least they seem to be fixing them.
- And the US is gonna have trouble with wheat. The solution: plant maize? No, wait…
- The European bison is back!
- A decade of Plant Sciences at UCDavis.
- Call for more breeding of Andean grains. By an Andean grain breeder.
- “It might not be the Fertile Crescent when it comes to corn and potatoes, but south-central Alaska just might be the cradle of the coming Rhodiola renaissance.”
- Rubbery lettuce? Shhh, or everybody will want some.
- Can’t collect seed at random throughtout a population? Collect more!
- Yeah, yeah, it’s the International Year of Pulses, we get it.
- The Mexican truffle?
- Ecofarming pays. In Kenya. In 2014.
- Sometimes crop wild relatives are a real pain in the ass.
Nibbles: Chontaduro, Pandanus, African seeds, Bangladesh veggie seeds, Black locust, Agroecology, Food security research, Deforestation, Ancient Caribbean
- Colombia plants a bunch of peach palms. Hope they had some genetic diversity in there.
- Crop wild relative can tell you where diamonds are.
- Africa might need better seeds.
- Bangladesh certainly does.
- The black locust made America. The tree, not the insect.
- Another pean to agrobiodiversity.
- Towards a Research Agenda for Global Food and Nutrition Security: meeting at Expo 2015 organized by the EU. It’s today, though, and this is the first we hear of it. Sorry. Will genebanks even get mentioned? Well, if this tweet is from that meeting, it seems not.
- Cutting down forest bad for more than trees. How many crop and livestock wild relatives endangered by deforestation?
- Cubans ate cultivated plants a thousand years earlier than thought.