Threats

Nibbles: Rust, Old rice, More old rice, Sticky rice, Mesoamerican balls, Prioritization, Legumes

Rust boffins meet in St Petersburg. Good luck to them: sounds like they’ll need it.
Did 3000-year-old rice really sprout in Vietnam? Nah.
Indian farmers queue up for old rice seeds. Not old as in the Vietnam case above though.
And more rice. Did the Chinese really use the sticky kind in mortar 1500 years ago? Yep.
More ancient technology. This time Mayan rubber.
“…a major leap forward in species-area relationship fitting…”: where will future habitat loss wreak the most havoc on plant species? And on crop wild relatives?
The pulses of Africa. Well, a couple of them.

Pygmies forced to take up gardening, and they’re mad as hell about it.
An amaranthus a day… And also from Mexico, saving maize from GMO nastiness. Oh, and the NYTimes does a number on maize domestication today to boot.
Protected areas not so bad for people after all. But do they conserve biodiversity effectively? At least when community-managed, that is.
African agriculture in theory and practice. Glib, I know. Get your own blog.
Pollan does his usual shtick. But he does it well.
You are subscribing to Danny’s nutrition thing, are you not? If you were, you’d know about the role of aquatic rice field species in rural Laotian diets.
So how do you restore prairie? Expert opinion summarized and synthesized to within an inch of its life. But you can also hear from a range expert directly.
Ok, so that’s grassland. If you wanted to restore a tropical rainforest you’d have to know about long-distance seed dispersal.

ILRI continues its attempt to take over the internet.
Dorian Fuller summarizes rice in Madagascar in a paragraph. Good trick. And for his next one he rounds up the latest on bananas. The guy’s a machine.
No adaptation without agrobiodiversity, rapt masses told. And here, like manna from heaven, is an example. Well, sort of.
Bruegel on agriculture. With picture goodness.

Dinka men despise manual labour, hence “southern Sudan might soon be on the block for having a lot of its potential farm land leased to, and worked by, foreigners”.
Maasai, on the other hand, “diversifying into cropping, by keeping fewer and faster growing animals and … taking on paying jobs”. Takes all sorts.
What is a small farm? Depends.
Coffee contains insecticides. Who knew?
Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) launched.
Central America’s coffee lands to shrink under climate change, Reuters reports. Enough! I’ve got the shakes.
Africa, meanwhile, needs technological innovations to cope.
Domesticating baobab. You know it makes sense.
Take two snacks in the morning and call me if you don’t feel any better.
Climate change will affect Portuguese ex situ plant conservation sites too.
“How best can communities conserve their medicinal plants?” A case study from China.
Bolivia could make more of its Araceae and Bromeliaceae. Couldn’t we all?
Are protected areas in Africa harbouring crop wild relatives? Just kidding: it’s invasives IUCN is talking about.

First Monsanto donates hybrid seeds to Haiti. So then the Hudson Valley Seed Library says I see that and raise you some open-pollinated varieties. What I want to know is if someone will be monitoring the results.

LATER: Maybe there wont be much to monitor after all.