- Palmhugger, an oilpalm advocacy group, likens Greenpeace to Goebbels. Who are they really? CIFOR is linking to them on Facebook, so they’re probably kosher, right?
- Nice story on breadfruit in Hawaii.
- More barcoding stuff.
- Reader: We must have a bank of seeds of our fruits and vegetables. Minister of Agriculture: We do!
- Australian wheat boffins: “Adaptation strategies need to be considered now to prevent substantial yield losses in wheat from increasing future heat stress.”
Taro leaf blight in Cameroon?
The wires have been humming lately about a new disease cutting a swathe through Cameroon’s taro crop. It has been in the local news and on ProMed, as “undiagnosed disease.” There’s a discussion about it on PestNet, 1 and some experts think it may be taro leaf blight. There’s a lot of experience on TLB — and resistant varieties — in the Pacific now. They were acquired the hard way, through urgent necessity. Will they be called on to help out in Cameroon?
Nibbles: Vavilov, GOSPs, Robot rice, Carrots, Crisis, Shade cacao, Churro sheep of the Navajo, Sorghum beer, Papal diet, chocolate, Carnival
- World Genepool at the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry and Its Utilization in Agriculture. Anyone got a copy?
- Gloucester Old Spot pigs get protection. Not that they really need it.
- BASF takes hi-tech breeding to the next level: 40,000 individual rice plants on a robotic ride to the future.
- Rebsie does carrots.
- The perfect storm is one element of the triple crisis.
- Nitrogen-fixing shade trees really do feed young cacao trees.
- “Sheep is your backbone.”
- Bringing gluten-free sorghum beer to the huddled masses … of Colorado.
- Eat like a pope. (Not much diversity.)
- Cadbury heiress fancies starting a new chocolate company? Maybe she’ll go all varietal.
- Scientia pro Publica. Carnival time again.
Nibbles: Maize, Millets, Pollinators, Ungulates, Drugs, Orchids
- Long article on the politics (and more) of maize in Mexico.
- Yet more on the slow comeback of millets in (parts of) India.
- International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Health and Policy on July 24-28, 2010 at Penn State.
- Hunted ungulates are semi-domesticated.
- “…psychoactive plant toxins were a mundane occurrence in the environments of hominid evolution, and our ancestors may have been exploiting plant drugs for very long periods of time.”
- “I was confronted with centrefolds showing downy, smooth petals and moistened, hot-pink lips that pouted in the direction of tautly curved shafts and heavily veined pouches.”
The Iraqi Seed Project
You may remember our post a few months back about the heroic Mrs Sanaa Abdul Wahab Al-Sheikh and her efforts to save the Iraqi genebank. Well it seems that those efforts have attracted the attention of documentary film-maker Emma Piper-Burket and her team. I’ll be following their work, and really look forward to seeing the results of the project.