Podcasts

March 10, 2009

Nibbles: Aquaculture squared, Food policy, School, Beer

More audio aquaponics goodness.
“The road from growing rice to raising shrimp to misery.”
Angola’s national strategy on food, nutritional security includes seeds. Anyone know more?
Handbook for School Gardens.
Oh no, climate change to screw up Czech hops! Now I’m really mad.

March 3, 2009

Aquaculture podcast

Doug Burdette talks about the history of aquaculture over at Agricultural Innovations, Inc. More to come next week, apparently.

January 27, 2009January 27, 2009

Nibbles: Cotton, Citrus, Fig, Permaculture, Turtles, Wine, Cacao, Fish

Wild cotton use lands prize for boffin trio.
Unesco to protect wild Citrus in India. And read the discussion.
IV International Symposium on Fig.
Permaculture: The Podcast.
The NY Times thinks Americans should eat fewer turtles. And drink more South African wine.
Meanwile, the WSJ gets into single-source chocolate.
Nice map of freshwater fish diversity. But will it last? WWF has a plan.

January 20, 2009

Bananas on the radio

Voice of America has five (count them!) articles and podcasts on the banana in Africa. Going to take me a while to get through the whole lot, but I’ll try to post a summary when I do.

October 7, 2008October 7, 2008

Nibbles: Cacao, Pamphlets, Breadfruit, Goats, Milk, Economic drivers, Truffles

Cacao comes inÂ 10 “flavours”, not just 3.
PDFs of pamphlets on different aspects of agricultural biodiversity from FAO.
Diane Ragone interviewed on breadfruit.
Something for the weekend, Mr Goat?
Got yak milk?
High livestock prices mean lots of livestock on the land means low biodiversity on farmland. Here comes the science.
NatGeo video on the trouble with truffles.

1. What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
2. Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
3. Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
4. What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
5. Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
6. Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
7. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
8. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
9. Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
10. And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
11. And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
12. Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
13. You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
14. I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
15. Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
16. No, not using ancient DNA, but actually…
Published on April 4, 2025