- Compost can boost yields, save water shock.
- Tom Wagner shows off new tomatoes and potatoes.
- Our pal Neil tells one tree man’s story: Maurice Kwadha: farmer, entrepreneur, and climate-smart.
- The UK has a policy on animal and plant diseases in the 21st century. Doesn’t everyone?
- NPR nips at our heels, with stories on heirloom seeds and that Chinese zombie insect fungus Cordyceps.
- What to do with star anise.
- Size matters; corn ear edition.
- Soil microfauna really diverse everywhere shock.
- How scientists should work with indigenous people (in the Arctic).
- “On the matter of seeds.” Art meets PGR. Danny, this one’s for you.
World Food Day deconstructed
Lately we’ve done a fair bit of pointing you to other blog posts that have something worthwhile to say on topics of interest here. You may call this laziness. We call it content curation. And in that spirit I offer you one person’s take on World Food Day, which unfolded yesterday here in Rome and which continues all week with a diversity of talking shops. I’m not going to comment on the commentator, except raise a question about his description of FAO as
[T]he single entity that we rely on the most to inform us about the state of cultivators, what they’re growing in our world, and who isn’t getting enough of those crops as food.
Is it? Really? I’m too deep in to know whether this is a genuine reflection of how people see FAO, and would welcome enlightenment.
Nibbles: Chickens, Millet adoption, Specialty crops, World Food Day, Migrating forests, Vietnamese pheasants, Yews, High prices, Genebank tour, Climate change conference.
- Why did the Chinese chicken cross the road? To get a new date. For domestication, that is.
- The Indian Farmer is actually three, millet-wise.
- USDA wades into specialty crops. Wonder if one of them is baobab, and a factsheet is involved. Or “small scale grains” for that matter.
- “Life in the countryside is hard.” But fear not, FAO is on it.
- Forests are not migrating. Species are actually undergoing range contraction at both ends. Well that’s weird.
- The first pheasant extinction? Say it ain’t so.
- I like pictures of old trees. So sue me.
- Jess stops traffic.
- Tour a cocoa genebank. Could this catch on?
- International Conference on Climate Change and Food Security (ICCCFS). Not hot air.
Nibbles: Book, Breeding, Labour, Tallante’s chickpea, Bacardi yeast, Solutions, Sandwiches, Mapping resistance, Cucumber history, Maya nuts
- Can a person called Rushing really have written a book on Slow Gardening?
- Genetic Engineering vs. Breeding. No contest, really.
- Georgia peaches, rotting in the sun. Can the consequences of clamping down on immigrant labour really have been unintended?
- Tallante’s chickpea back from the brink. No, I don’t know why as species of Astragalus is called a chickpea. Is it even a CWR?
- Bacardi and its yeast. A tale of derring-do and intellectual property rights. h/t CAS-IP.
- Back40 takes aim at Solutions for a Cultivated Planet, so we don’t have to.
- UK productivity 5,263 beef sandwiches per hectare(bsp/h), compared to 2,439 bsp/h in the mid-18th century. h/t The Tracing Paper.
- Another great interactive map, this time of bacterial diversity of the worst kind.
- Cucumbers in Europe: a history. AoB blog explains all.
- The good old Maya nut to the rescue again.
Nibbles: Livestock films, Sea cucumbers, Plant collecting, Nutritional composition, Intensification, Mongolian pastoralists, Low resource tolerance
- More livestock films than you can shake a stick at.
- The Consortium all at sea.
- Road trip! Herbarium specimen collecting in Nepal.
- Call for nutritional composition data on the staples of Papua New Guinea.
- Wanna intensify agriculture in the highlands of East Africa? Here comes the PowerPoint.
- The Tragedy of the Commons averted in Mongolia through collective action.
- A new approach to functional traits? I don’t see the difference myself, but I’ll take their word for it.