Threats

Nibbles: Biodiversity economics, ICARDA social network, Beyond food miles, Heirlooms on BBC, Cannabis, Research funding, Cacao diversity, Agriculture from the air, Sustainable intensification example, Research whine, Japanese botanic garden visit, European PGR network, Tribal Glycene, Youth in agriculture

Oxford Review of Economic Policy has special volume on biodiversity economics. Not much ag, though, settle down.
ICARDA announces on Twitter the existence of a new Facebook page which looks a bit like the old one.
It’s the fertilizer miles, stupid.
Great British Food Revival does heirloom carrots. Oh and beer.
Good news for a particular agricultural biodiversity subsector from Amsterdam and Colorado. The Dude unavailable for comment. For obvious reasons.
If you’re from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda and are doing research on Neglected and Underutilized Species you’ll be interested in this call or research proposals from ISF.
Bioversity deconstructs that paper on the spatial analysis of Theobroma diversity. I still don’t quite get why they didn’t do the gap analysis.
Farming from the air. And more along the same lines. Or polygons, I suppose I should say. Can you estimate diversity from the air? I bet you can.
Sustainable intensification in (sort of) action.
Damn rice farmers not playing ball.
Oxford botany geeks visit Japan, identify wood of bench in noodle bar.
13th meeting ECPGR Steering Committee. All the documents you’ll need. And then some.
Soybean as a vegetable. Possibly an acquired taste.
How to keep young people on the farm? “Perhaps the first point to recognise is that the evidence base on which to build policy and programmes is frighteningly thin.”

Chemical and microbial properties of Chinese traditional low-salt fermented whole fish product Suan yu. “The values of Enterobacteria and Pseudomonads were under the detection limits in six different brands” is about the best that can be said for it.
Tapping into yeast diversity. Some new, diverse wild lineages in China may tell us important things about yeast ecology, evolution and domestication.
Genome size variation among sex types in dioecious and trioecious Caricaceae species. Lots of retrotransposons, and sex chromosomes in some species.
The Archaic Diet in Mesoamerica: Incentive for Milpa Development and Species Domestication. The diet preceded the crops.
Genetic diversity and population structure in the rare Algodones sunflower (Helianthus niveus ssp. tephrodes). Low diversity overall, but some populations quite distinct. Which tells you about how to conserve it.
Albania, the domestication country for pomegranate (Punica granatum L.). Well, maybe.
Mixtures of genetically modified wheat lines outperform monocultures. Two transgenes are better than one.
Climate change impacts on crop productivity in Africa and South Asia. -8% overall. The surprise? Sorghum declines more than maize in Africa, less in S Asia.

BBC pounces on CCAFS report previously trumpeted by Bioversity. Bottom line: adaptation may mean changing crops. Bottom bottom line: Will they have enough diversity?
PGR Secure newsletter is out.
GCARD2 rumbles on.
The ankole cow is threatened. What, still?
Tracking ash dieback. And since we’re talking gadgets…
Old cacao trees being replaced in Nigeria. No word on what’s happening to the diversity they represent. Maybe it’s ex situ already? Maybe it’s not significant? I dunno, I would just like to be told.
Slow Food documents African foods. Thankfully no ugali.
Aussies put together cool bean collection.

World Bank goes inside ICRISAT seed bank and finds in vitro plantlets.
“Did mongrel grains serendipitously meld together and sprout from the sewage dumps of sedentary fishing tribes (a current theory), or was the domestication of wheat grasses, pomegranates, and fig trees a willful act of genius?” Scientific American excerpts a bit of purple prose from from Frederick Kaufman’s “Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food.”
And a book on how (some) food (i.e. weeds) started being food.
ICRISAT legume breeder bags award.
One of the more interesting symposium titles I’ve come across: International Symposium on Fruit Culture and its Traditional Knowledge along Silk Road Countries.
Plant Cuttings.
And plant seeds. Of the open-pollinated sort.
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center establishes Institute for International Crop Improvement (IICI). CGIAR unavailable for comment.
CABI gets to grips with ash dieback.
Perennial grains in practice.
Recovered rare strawberries as art: Marshall Duchamp.
Intrepid journo discovers secrets of Neanderthal cuisine.
Crimson clover cover crop protects aubergines as well as insecticide against Colorado beetles.

So apparently field genebanks are “monotonous orchards packed with tropical trees spanning as far as the eye can see.”
Any ash genebanks, I wonder, field or otherwise?
EUCARPIA pre-breeding pre-meeting.
FAO moans about progress in conserving livestock.
The Green Revolution deconstructed.
Good news for procrastinators: the deadline for Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship applications has been extended to 18 November. Ignore the date of 11 November.
Saving the endangered Canadienne cow. In other news, there’s a Canadienne cow.
Friends of the Earth doesn’t think much of “sustainable intensification“.