Organic agriculture

Nibbles: FAO Commission, Alpine plants conference, Young breeders, Indian sorghum, Pastoralists in the media, Neglected genomics, More quinoa, Cape Gooseberry in Europe, Database hell, Tomayto tomahto, Maple syrup, Double cropping, Cloning trees, Belated Earth Day, UK Plant Science Week

Summary of that 14th Session of the CGRFA we were all following last week.
Conferences on “Changes in alpine and arctic flora under climate change” we’ll all be following in September. If you’re from Balkans, Caucasus, Central Asia, the organizers need you in particular. But hurry, before it’s too late!
In other news, young scientists are into beer.
India’s Directorate of Sorghum Research gets a genebank. Relationship with NBPGR unclear.
Media portrayals of pastoralists in Kenya, China and India: The Report. The Brief. The Press Release. ILRI reaction?
Neglected crops get the genomic treatment. And why that might be a good thing.
CIAT wades in on quinoa.
Call for information on Physalis peruviana cultivation in Europe.
Biodiversity databases have errors! Shock! Horror! Probe!
The nutritional difference between organic and conventional tomatoes deconstructed.
Your maple sugaring questions answered. Nice idea.
Double crop for development. I guess that’s the sustainable intensification everyone is talking so much about.
If in doubt, clone it!
Wait, wait, wait, we missed Earth Day?
And also a bunch of UK plant science conferences. (I had of course linked to the storifications here originally, but they’ve gone now of course.)

Vietnamese rice varieties get sequenced. What will IRRI think?
Well, they may be too busy cosying up to SRI to respond.
A rice farmer does feature in a nice Christensen Fund slideshow.
But no rice in these 12th century recipes.
You know what goes well with rice? Beans, that’s what.
And now, for something completely different: Ecosystem Service Valuation Toolkit.

Eat steak!
No, eat cicadas!
Farm pearls!
Get a grant!
CIAT got one, to map crop wild relatives!
Not sure if any of these drought tolerance genes in cassava are from wild relatives, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I would likewise not be surprised if both cicadas and cassava featured in Malawian permaculture.
Punjab’s 1st investigative e-paper doesn’t allow visitors to highlight and copy text, which means that the potentially interesting book about agricultural sustainability it mentions will go ungoogled.
Which is a pity because I was really hoping for a nice segue into this conference on, ahem, agricultural sustainability, to take place in a few months in China.
Which I could then have followed with a plug for the FAO Commission on GRFA, which many of us will be attending next week here in Rome.
No, wait: Agricultural Sustainability: Progress and Prospects in Crop Research.
But of course the best argument for sustainability is the moral one, right?
That. Or beer.

Blogging machine Tom Barnett worried about effect of climate change on his favourite tipple.
BGCI shell out for cool animation on social role of botanic gardens, and it’s totally worth it.
As also, but differently, are IUCN’s videos on forest restoration.
All the world’s forests, online, any day now, to monitor the opposite of their restoration.
Europe tries to stimulate innovation in plant breeding. By holding a meeting. Ah, but there’s a hashtag.
Development economists illustrate interesting point about gender and yam cultivation with photo of sweet potatoes.
The organic attitude to inorganic nitrogen.
Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers ate fish. Well I never.
Reviews of couple books on agricultural origins.
Need bioinformatics training? Who doesn’t.
ICRAF reviews efforts to monitor sustainable intensification. Somewhere. I can’t for the life of me find the actual document.

Botanic gardens get into the restoration business. So that people can again eat nutritious forest foods. No, really, even the BBC says so.
Militant Filipino NGOs target IRRI. Not for the first time. And probably not the last.
Anyone planning to go to the Beltain at Butser Ancient Farm? Only a month to go…
You are probably already using at least one of these.
Paris looking to go all sheepish.
I don’t know about you, but I immediately turn off when somebody says that X is the only answer to Y. Even when the X is agro-ecology.
Même s’ils le disent en français.
Chinese “board beans” are actually lablab shock.
You going to spend an evening at The Genome Analysis Centre discussing the value of genebanks? Tell us about it!
Dutch seed savers looking to get organized.
New York times goes overboard for Digital Green participatory video.