- Chocolate made from camel milk for the first time. And last?
- “Slow rusting” genes from Ethiopian wheat landraces.
- Brits (and Yanks, for that matter) look for ancient trees in woodlands becoming ever less distinctive.
- The world needs GM rice, but alas “the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be.” Meanwhile, IRRI keeps hammering away at drought tolerance and resistance to other assorted stresses. It’s hard being rice.
- ICAR looks at the likely effects of climate change on crops and what can be done about it.
- Climate change making Soay sheep (and, incidentally, European fish too) not just smaller, also darker. Speaking of fish, there’s trouble in the Zambezi too, but not necessarily due to climate change. Although…
- A Greek seed bazaar.
- FAO turns to barn owls to stop Laotian rodent plague.
- US food policy destinations on Google Maps.
- Vermicomposting is good news for the Indian textile industry. Vermicomposting: I like saying that word.
Nibbles: Cheese, Dog genetics, Olives on Crete, Polyploidy, Pollination
- Making French cheese in the Himalayas.
- The latest on how to build your perfect dog.
- “The scientists are putting the all the trees which must be saved into a data bank.” Clever scientists.
- Polyploidization so, so much more than merely the sum of genomes.
- “The expected direct reduction in total agricultural production in the absence of animal pollination ranged from 3 to 8%…” Thank goodness for Operation Pollinator, eh?
CGIAR gets itself a climate change blog
The Communications Team in the CGIAR Secretariat launched a new blog a few weeks ago called “Rural Climate Exchange: Connecting Agricultural and Environmental Science to the Climate Agenda.” It looks nice. It seems to have all the requisite bells and whistles. You can subscribe to an RSS feed or email notifications. We’ll be keeping an eye on it, and contributing as appropriate. Welcome to the blogosphere, Nathan, Danielle, Amelia et al.!
Nibbles: India, City chicks, Rooftop gardens, Black cherry, Prairie grasses, Oryza SNP
- ICRISAT recommends diversity to cope with climate change in India.
- US urban farmers “mad as wet hens“. City chicks?
- US urban farmers with a view to die for.
- CWR becomes nuisance when free of soil pathogen.
- Convicts help with germplasm regeneration and multiplication.
- The “gold-standard set of curated polymorphisms” for rice.
Keeping their heads – and crops – above water
The BBC has a multi-media feature from Bangladesh called “Life above the Floods.” It looks at how the people of Char Atra, a low-lying silt island in the middle of the Ganges, cope with the yearly ravages of the monsoon’s flooding. Which will no doubt get worse as sea levels rise due to global climate change. I hate to say it, but there’s really not much that agricultural biodiversity will be able to do to help these people adapt to the effects of a global 2 degree C increase in temperatures.