- Wheat disease understood; sequence of leaf blotch fungus.
- Wheat disease conquered? “Super varieties” resistant to UG99 and yield 15% more. What could go wrong?
- Zambian farmers urged to dry vegetables for fun and profit (and better nutrition).
- Gates Foundations has spent US$1.7 billion on agriculture in Africa, so far.
- Swaminathan Foundation scores Canadian support for research on agriculture, poverty and nutrition. h/t PAR.
- Bioversity Seeds for Needs distributes preselected genebank wheat varieties to Ethiopian women farmers to adapt to climate change.
Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.
There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. 1
You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. 2 Like I’ve done here:
Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:
But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?
Nibbles: Royal genebank, Fish collection, Plant health, USDA wheat breeding project, Afghanistan, Breadfruit Art, Pests and Diseases, Idaho, Plant breeding, Gates, Panax quinquefolius, Natives
- Thai king has crop genebank on palace grounds.
- Fish in jars.
- Planning Plant Clinics.
- Plant Breeding for Drought Stress: The Project.
- Wait, the Nebraska National Guard has an agribusiness development team? Maybe they should talk to the people responsible for the previous bullet point?
- Kids! (And adults!) An Art Contest to celebrate ‘Ulu. Breadfruit, that is.
- Use of Agrobiodiversity for Pest and Disease Management. A slide show from Carlo Fadda at Bioversity.
- 3rd Annual Biodiversity Working for Farmers Tour in Idaho. 23rd June, you have been warned.
- Huge New York Times story on plant breeding and climate change.
- Bill Gates hails creativity for small farmers challenge.
- American ginseng: use it or lose it.
- Do you live in Ann Arbour? Do you want native plants for your garden? Yeah but how about American ginseng?
Nibbles: ITPGRFA, Hotspots, Adaptation, Agrobiodiversity, Potatoes and climate change, Cowpeas and drought, Apios, Tree planting, Fairtrade, Egyptian archaeobotany, Bolivian video
- All about the International Treaty on PGRFA.
- More, much more, on that climate change hotspots study.
- IDRC on climate change adaptation in Africa. Almost nothing on agricultural diversity as a coping mechanism.
- Unlike this.
- Or this, for that matter. Never knew the Basque country was such a hotbed of potato research.
- Or…oh forget it.
- What, in the name of all that is happy, is hopniss?
- Danone buys some goodwill.
- Fairtrade chocolate: this looks like it should be really important. Is it?
- So, you say you want to know what plant remains were found in the baskets in Tutankhamun’s tomb?
- Bolivian agricultural biodiversity, anyone?
Brainfood: Baby’s veggies, Chickpea and drought, Vine cactus breeding, Paleolithic rabbits, California protected areas, Wild pigeonpea, Pecorino classification, Milk composition, Phenotyping, Wild peas
- Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
- Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
- In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
- Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
- Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
- Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
- Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
- The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
- Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
- Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.