- The Sustainable Development Solutions Initiative wants your comments on its report Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. You have till 15 August. h/t ILRI.
- We can do you natural decaf, if you’re willing to risk losing the entire coffee crop to drought or insects.
- Likewise, we can do you Turkish ice-cream, but you may have to do without some orchids in future.
- I don’t suppose the January 2014 meeting on “Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in a Changing Climate” being organised by NordGen will be able to help, but it might.
- I confess, I have found myself sipping a Negroamaro and wondering how it got that name.
Nibbles: Feed lots, Tom Wagner, Ag Game, Cereal maps, Climate change, All change, Bananas extinct?, Permaculture course, Criminal urban ag, IPRs and GMOs
- Feed lots, from the ever-wonderful Nicola Twilley – is the first of our eye-openers.
- Bifurcated carrots is hosting a PDF profile of Tom Wagner, prolific breeder of tomatoes and potatoes.
- Katherine McDonald is keen on a farming simulator game. Games? Who has time? Maybe this weekend.
- 1969 maps of cereals in India. I’d love to see them updated. A project for …
- … Jacob van Etten. He and Emile Frison say that “Harnessing Diversity by Connecting People is the Key to Climate Adaptation in Agriculture”.
- On Dr Frison’s last day as DG of Bioversity International. So, farewell then …
- … the banana. Pat Heslop-Harrison consulted by BBC’s The Food Programme. Here’s his take on Bananas and their future.
- Cornell University is offering an online course in permaculture design.
- Wouldn’t it be cool if the city planners in Los Angeles decriminalized urban agriculture?
- Grist gets to grips with the locks that imprison GMO research – real and imaginary.
Brainfood: Coloured wheat, Very wild wheat, Yam bean, Turkish pigeons, Impact of margarine, Refugia, GM and choice, Indian sorghum, Cameroonian oil palm
- The anthocyanin content of blue and purple coloured wheat cultivars and their hybrid generations. In other news, there are blue and purple wheat cultivars.
- Phylogenetic relationships and Y genome origin in Elymus L. sensu lato (Triticeae; Poaceae) based on single-copy nuclear Acc1 and Pgk1 gene sequences. It’s a very diverse genus, probably polyphyletic, and has exchanged genes with Aegilops/Triticum in the past. And could again in the future, presumably.
- Microsatellite Markers for the Yam Bean Pachyrhizus (Fabaceae). They work, both on the 3 (sic) cultivated species and 2 wild relatives.
- The domestic livestock resources of Turkey: inventory of pigeon groups and breeds with notes on breeder organizations. 72 breeds? Really?
- Land use impact assessment of margarine. Land occupation by the crops involved has a bigger impact on ecosystem services and biodiversity than the transformation process.
- Bio-cultural refugia — Safeguarding diversity of practices for food security and biodiversity. Important for food security locally, but also because of the memories of how the “surprises of the past” were handled.
- Farmer’s choice of seeds in four EU countries under different levels of GM crop adoption. More GM adoption = less choice. For maize in 4 European countries anyway.
- Sorghum landraces patronized by tribal communities in Adilabad district, Andhra Pradesh. And now safe in NBPGR too.
- Molecular characterization of oil palm Elaeis guineensis Jacq. materials from Cameroon. It’s all one big populations, and you don’t need that many accessions to represent the whole.
Nibbles: Hunger, Breeds, Jatropha, Value chains, Vegetables, Temperature, Quinoa
- The Lancet waxes optimistic on hunger and poverty goals.
- Korea keen to help compile information on African livestock.
- Is there nothing Jatropha cannot do? Now it’s a carbon sink.
- Fijian ginger and Ethiopian beans; two value chains explored in the latest New Agriculturalist.
- An International Symposium on Vegetables in August 2014, with lots of interest, but as it is under the ISHS you’ll have to pay to read about it.
- “Temperature alters population dynamics of common plant pests.” Ya don’t say.
- “Help a Bolivian farmer: Eat quinoa“. Now there’s a headline with attitude.
Nibbles: Baobab, Courses, Social Media, “Exotic” edibles, Cereals on display, Ithyphallic lettuce, Ancient manure, Entomophagy, SRI, Weed evolution
Quick catch-up after 10 days away edition. If I missed anything spectacularly important, it’s bound to resurface.
- A baobab (not the baobab) in danger of extinction.
- Could it be saved by attending a course on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use?
- And if it’s courses you’re interested in, we have:
- Agriculture nutrition linkages, also from Wageningen.
- Agroecology – the Future of Farming?, from the College of Enlightened Agriculture at Schumacher College. Why the weaselly question-mark?
- And a conference on domestication.
- The value and use of social media as communication tool in the plant sciences deconstructed by AOBBlog.
- AOBBlog also gives the “cunning culinarists” at Kew some stick on their 100 exotic edibles.
- Personally, I’d quite like to try Dead Man’s Fingers.
- And take a look at Kew’s new display of summer cereals.
- I don’t see any mention, however, of lettuce as a sacred sex symbol, with added vocabulary-enhancing properties.
- And speaking of manure, its use is almost as old as agriculture.
- If I had a donut for every why-don’t-we-all-eat-insects article I’ve read, I’d be spectacularly overweight by now.
- Big Picture Agriculture offers An Interview with Cornell’s Dr Erika Styger about the System of Crop Intensification (SRI-Rice).
- Is watergrass (Echinochloa) a problem for SRI-Rice? I don’t know, but it supports Ford Denison’s argument about the speed of evolution in weeds …
- … prompted by Carl Zimmer’s article on weeds in the New York Times.