- Nepal’s malnutrition rate apparently the highest in world. But the Micronutrient Initiative is on it. But what about homegardens, I hear you ask. And rice biofortification?
- The advice I’ve been waiting for all my life: better nutrition through alcohol.
- The plight of Kenyan tea workers.
- Harlem church helps Ethiopian coffee farmers.
- Botanic gardens drop flowers, do food. About time too. And botanical art too.
- Jeremy’s farro photos.
- “Iconic” catfish in trouble due to Mekong dam. Everything is an icon these days. Something to do with post-modernism, I guess.
- Seedbomb something today. You’ll feel better.
- WTF is it with garlic in China?
- EMBRAPA reaches out to Africa.
- KARI scientists push Opuntia for livestock. Ok, but surely there are enough native desert plants in Kenya to be going on with? Well, maybe not.
- Zimbabwe market turns to sun-dried vegetables. Wish I knew what umfushwa was, though.
- The Rice-Ducks Integrated Farming System sounds like great fun.
- Why the salmon thrives in Oregon: “Tribal people have practiced a natural, sustained-yield conservation since time immemorial and are taught to plan seven generations ahead.”
Nibbles: Plant breeding book, Ug99, NGS, Monitoring, Genetic diversity and productivity, Adaptive evolution, Amaranthus, Nabhan, Herbarium databases, Pepper, Shade coffee and conservation, Apples, Pathogen diversity, Phytophthora
- Book on history of plant breeding reviewed.
- Rust never sleeps.
- Ask not what next generation sequencing can do for you.
- Long-term datasets in biodiversity research. Nothing about genetic diversity though. Bummer.
- And genetic diversity is important, is it? Yep, it increases productivity, at least in Arabidopsis.
- No evidence of adaptive evolution in plants. What? Surely some mistake? I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
- The latest from Worldwatch on African leafy veggies. Again, some links would have been nice.
- And Worldwatch also interviews Gary Nabhan on Vavilov.
- You can browse Tropicos specimens in Google Earth.
- Using pepper to protect stored rice.
- More evidence of the goodness of shade coffee.
- The diversity of Bosnian apples.
- Mammal plus bird species richness explains 72% of country-to-country variation in the number of human pathogens. Diversity begets diversity. But which way does the causality go?
- Phytophthora infestans in Estonia: “…higher proportion of metalaxyl resistant isolates from large conventional farms than from small conventional farms or from organic farms.” Metalaxyl is a fungicide.
Nibbles: Beer and fungus, Maize breeding, Coconut on the Salalah plain, Zen, Camel, Grazing, Berries
- Beer with shrooms. Well, not quite, but one can hope.
- No more corn detasseling? Say it ain’t so.
- “Oman to Plant 100,000 Coconut Trees in Dhofar.” That’s in the south of the country, a fascinating area. And one asks, as ever: What varieties, and what’s going to happen to the local material?
- Be like the bamboo, man.
- From DAD-Net, news of a mini-conference on the camel. And an article on same.
- The struggle for forest grazing rights in India.
- Dump blueberries, eat local berries, Brits told. Pavlovsk still in trouble.
Nibbles: Protected area management, Yam domestication, Ottoman cooking, Measuring rice drought tolerance, Proteomics, Lupinus, Areca, Jethobudho, Nutrition megaprogramme, Soil bacteria
- Concentrating management practices on conserving a particular plant species may have bad consequences for other bits of biodiversity. Lessons for crops wild relatives?
- Benin’s farmers ennoble wild yams.
- A Lebanese lunch is an educational experience. Right.
- Paddyomics video. Nothing to do with the Irish. It’s about how IRRI is automating, er, everything about its phenotyping.
- Tamarind’s environmental niche is, in fact, er, niches?
- Different wheat genomes generate distinct protein profiles.
- Phylogenetic relationships of a new Mediterranean lupin.
- Betel nut chewing endangers coral. Kinda. Traditional and all that, but an unpleasant habit nonetheless.
- Our friend Bhuwon and others tell the story of the participatory improvement and formal release of Jethobudho rice landrace in Nepal.
- CGIAR elicits comment on the Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health megaprogramme. Until August 1.
- Bacterial diversity boosts maize yields.
Oyster day
“Are oysters the sort of elitist, anachronistic foodstuff that should be consigned to history?” That’s the provocative question posed by an article in The Guardian’s food section today, by way of introducing tomorrow’s Whitstable Oyster Festival (July 24-30). And serendipity decreed that the answer would come on the very same day from Banjul in the Gambia, where a group of “women rely on oysters for their livelihoods and contribute to food security in a country that is heavily dependent on seafood for protein.” The workers at Ameripure Oysters and in the fisheries of Kent can probably relate to that, and they were also in the news today. Anachronistic indeed.