Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Everything to do with our spiffy competition
By the late 18th century, a ton of Mexican vanilla was worth … “its weight in silver.”
That’s just one of the fun facts I learned from Robert Krulwich’s rendering of the bittersweet story of the slave boy on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion who discovered how to manually pollinate vanilla. Or did he? Well, that’s the point of the story. If you read the whole thing over at National Geographic’s blogs, you also get the benefit of some really charming drawings.
Nope, not here. ((Promise to deal with that, soon.)) Over at the Asian Development Bank. You have to be a citizen of an Asian country, and your video of between one and five minutes has to be about climate change in Asia and the Pacific. Big prizes, too. You have until 31 January 2010. We saw it at the Development Marketplace blog.
I was cleaning out a mailbox the other day, and came across a message from Karl Haro von Mogel, who is quite well known around these parts. He was advising me that his new pollination video — on Cucurbits — had just been uploaded to YouTube. And I forgot to write about it. Apologies to Karl, but I’ll make it up in a minute.
The video is clearly aimed at the more industrial end of the spectrum. Bringing parent plants into a greenhouse was never an option for me. On the other hand, wandering through the pumpkin patch soon after dawn to gather ripe male flowers that had not quite opened was one of the great treats of saving my own seeds. And Karl deals with more than just controlled pollination. The first 3 1/2 minutes gives a good overview of cucurbit diversity, centres of origin and wild relatives. And near the end he reveals the secrets of the seedless watermelon. All in all, well worth 10 minutes of your life, even if you plan never to pollinate a pumpkin.
In his email Karl mentioned that he had entered the video for a competition at Chlorofilms. It was one of 17 2nd prize winners. So were some of his other films, including this one on pepper breeding.
Maybe if we could rustle up “at least $8000” in prize money we’d get some entries to our own competitions. Or maybe we should just enter the next Chlorofilms competition, if and when it happens.
People from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Albaeco interviewed researchers to get usable answers to important questions. They asked Professor Gretchen Daily, of Stanford University, to tackle “Why is biodiversity important?”. Watch her reply here. She gets going at about 1’15”. Could you do better?
Ok, so it’s International Day for Biodiversity today and we had this really cool idea about how to celebrate it this year. You’ll recall the theme is Biodiversity and Agriculture, so we figured we had to do something sensational, this being the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog and all. Basically Jeremy and I were going to dress up as vegetables (or fruits — there was much debate on the subject, although thankfully not on the status of the tomato) and run through the Roman Forum shouting anti-biofuel slogans to the tune of “Taxes on the farmer feeds us all.”