- The Lancet goes open source. Well, kinda.
- Alt-World Food Prize winners. None of whom are at the Conference on Agroecology for Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: A Transformative Agenda, though.
- I guess there’s no chance of Jeffrey Sachs landing the actual World Food Prize. Well, you never know.
- If you’re in Britain and you get the urge to measure a tree, now you can share your results.
- Maybe the Tunisians should do something similar, at least for their pears, before it’s too late.
- “The plan notes biofuels have an important role to play in increasing our energy security, fostering rural economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.” Riiiight.
- “We started doing this before heirlooms were fashionable. We knew in our hearts it was the right thing to do.”
- Quite a bit of agrobiodiversity in the latest Plant Cuttings.
- India goes in for high throughput phenotyping for drought tolerance.
Nibbles: Assam and CC, China ag landscape, Breeding for CC, Patenting pros & cons, Quinoa sustainability, Nordic cheeses, Italian endangered breeds
- Rethinking rice-based agriculture in Assam.
- And China, maybe?
- By breeding your way out of the problem, maybe?
- And then patenting the result? Well, maybe not.
- Here comes fair-trade quinoa.
- Nordic cheeses to go with those insects from a few days back. Lack of Norwegian representation pointed out, as well as a remedy.
- I wonder how many Italian cheeses are made from the milk of endangered breeds. Well, now the relevant association has a Facebook page, so I can ask them.
Nibbles: Brazil flora & urban ag, Telling species apart, Canary seed for humans, Training breeders, Solitary bees, Tajik protected area, Rennell Island, Nordic grubs, Belize TV
- Brazil’s flora moves online. And its agriculture into its favelas.
- Taxonomy 101.
- Wish the people who wrote this press release on “canary seed” had taken a taxonomy course. It’s Phalaris canariensis, it turns out.
- African breeders to be trained at UCDavis. Ok, but what about WACCI? What’s going on? Cornell-Davis smackdown?
- Further proof, if any were needed, of the importance of wild bees.
- Tajikistan gets its first World Heritage Site. Includes most of the Pamirs, so surely a whole lot of agricultural biodiversity, both wild and cultivated, plant and animal. Not that that was the prime mover for protection, probably.
- Incidentally, there’s a list of World Heritage Sites in danger, and it includes Rennell Island in the Solomons. The reason I bring it up is that it is famous for a local coconut variety. Hope that’s not endangered!
- Nordic Food Lab gets money to experiment with cooking insects.
- Belize TV looks to agrobiodiversity to cope with climate change.
Nibbles: Mapping by phone, Samoan greens, Rice podcast, Juniper threat, Wild yams, Food book, Coconut conservation
- If you can map neglected diseases by phone, can you map neglected crops? I bet you can.
- It’s the turn of Samoans to be chided for not eating enough leafy greens.
- I had no idea AfricaRice had a podcast.
- Now we gotta worry about G&T too? Enough, already.
- Video on the wild yams of Sri Lanka. Not just yams, though, by the look of it.
- 100 recipes to understand the history of food? Count me in.
- More on the Polymotu Concept from our friends at SPC. Great gig if you can get it.
Nibbles: Indigenous conservation, Rice and conservation, Amazon medicines, Organic products, Sustainable oysters, Cherfas at Seed Savers, Calestous Juma, Cassava website, Israeli agritech, Fragaria breeding, Catacol whitebeam, Weather sensors, FAO Commission & Conference, Amartya Sen
- A toolkit to help indigenous communities do conservation. Should they need one.
- On the other hand… Half of Japan’s endangered species hotspots are found in satoyama, which are under pressure. Compare and contrast with rice farming in Thailand.
- Learn all about some medicinal plants of the Amazon, minus their scientific names. Not including runa tea. Lots of other opportunities out there, though.
- Maybe even including oysters.
- Jeremy no doubt to feast on the mollusc after spilling the beans on the EU seed regulations at the Seed Savers jamboree.
- Wonder what Calestous Juma thinks of those regulations.
- But I bet he (and his father, who introduced the crop to his region of Kenya) would like this cassava website to rule them all.
- The Volcani Institute‘s gifts to the world…
- …probably include new strawberries, but not this one.
- Scientists straining, failing to find plant to meaningfully compare to the giant panda.
- Bioversity does up its iButtons.
- And gets a namecheck in a paean to the FAO Commission on GRFA on its 30th birthday. All this FAO stuff is because its Conference is on this week. I don’t suppose any of it will be more important than Amartya Sen’s speech.