- The National Fungus of Japan explains itself.
- The aurochs recreated in fact and fiction. And more.
- Yes, that’s what we need to make good on all those GM drought-resistance promises: a new model system. And now for something a little more serious.
- Some protected areas don’t work terribly well. Here comes the science.
- Darwinian Agriculture explained by the man himself.
- Ancient diets deduced from teeth crap and crap crap.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Nibbles: Wild goat, Heirlooms, Queen’s garden, Baobabs, Bison demise, Friendly yeast, Peruvian potatoes, Saline rice
- Old goat redux.
- A really nothing piece in the Washington Post about heirlooms.
- This is more like it: take home the Queen’s heirlooms. Well, almost.
- Here’s a baobab truly worthy of a factsheet.
- It was international trade that wiped out the bison.
- Fundamentals of On-Farm Plant Breeding Course: The Video.
- Another use for yeast.
- The Parque de la Papa highlighted. But doesn’t say seeds are even going to Svalbard.
- Salinity tolerance in rice: in Goa, and at IRRI.
Nibbles: Impact evaluation reviews, Coffee podcast, Pretty on sustainable intensification, Patient capital, Searching for species names, Searching in general, Palestinian agriculture, Korean Neolithic, Mesquite in Africa, CIMMYT-China, Banana trade, UK plant science, Breadfruit, Weed, Beans in Mexico, Macadamia, Organic Cali
- How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
- Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
- How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
- It may well involve patient capital though.
- This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
- How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
- Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
- And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
- The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
- CIMMYT in China.
- The banana as a weapon.
- Touring UK plant science sites.
- Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
- “Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
- “We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
- If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
- Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.
Nibbles: Data visualization, Soil, Heirlooms, Organic, Bugs, Veggies, Rome, AnGR, Meat, Mexico, Date palm pollination
- Cool infographics on food, trade and, well, a particular sort of trade. And how to make your own.
- Soil would be a cool place to start.
- The bananas of your grandchildren and the carrots of your grandparents. Plus a funny peculiar idea about how to keep seed of such stuff for 50 years.
- Which you don’t need to do anyway because “[r]eplacing traditional seeds with commercial varieties is not an official government policy,” at least in South Africa. Unlike in the EU, I guess. Oooooh, did I just say that? Such a naughty muppet.
- Ok, let me make up for that with some thoughts on breeding for the sorts of places where those traditional seeds might be found, in Africa and in Europe.
- Of course, in such places, you have to know your aphids. Before they go and eat a bacteria and change their DNA. Tricky to breed for resistance to that, I would guess.
- Oh, but here are also the views of someone in Europe who would rather not have anything to do with traditional seeds and their accompanying aphids at all. Why can’t we just get along?
- Why, for example, can we all not get to love mboga za watu wa Pwani. You heard me. And no, residing far from the Swahili Coast is no excuse. Jeremy unavailable for comment.
- He did, however, point out that “[t]he value of male prostitutes exceeds that of farmlands.” Yep, Robigalia time again.
- Meanwhile, not far from the Swahili Coast, some people are thinking that man does not live by mboga alone… No, he must have nyama too.
- And speaking of which: giving sausages a name. On this, I am with Bismarck. No such porky nonsense from the French.
- “Nine thousand years of Mexican agriculture” online. And five hundred on the stove.
- Pollinating date palms just got a whole lot easier. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with any of the other nibbles, but I thought it was cool.