- 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.
Rooftop sake
There was a fun story about urban beekeepers in Tokyo yesterday. Keeping bees in cities is actually not huge news, though. There’s been a lot about it in the New York press lately, for example. But the Tokyo story also had this intriguing sidebar.
The beekeepers may be an odd sight in the Japanese capital, but they are not the only urban farmers — on a rooftop just blocks away, barefoot farmers were recently wading through almost knee-high mud to plant a wet rice field.
On top of the building of the Hakutsuru Sake Brewing Co., its employees and their spouses and children were screaming with excitement as they stomped barefoot, the mud squelching between their toes.
“Good job, good job! Well done!” said Asami Oda, 56, the vice president of Hakutsuru’s Tokyo office, who takes care of the rice paddies every day.
“We harvest 60 kilograms (130 pounds) of rice every year, from which we make 80 litres of sake. Of course it’s organic. I like having a pesticides-free harvest, which is also good for the honey bees,” he said.
Which made me scurry around the internet looking for photos. And while I was doing that, as coincidence would have it, another piece on rooftop vegetation popped up, this time bamboo on top of a museum. Never rains but it pours.
Nibbles: Wetlands, Cucurbit phylogeny, Herbology, Malnutrition, Fungi, India, Livestock, Ug99, Madagascar, Beer
- Conserving dambos for livelihoods in southern Africa. How many CWRs are found in such wetland habitats around the world, I wonder.
- Cucumis not out of Africa.
- Exploring “the connection between traditional knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants and media networked culture.” And why not.
- PBS video on malnutrition.
- Fungal exhibition at RBG Edinburgh.
- Indian Council on Agricultural Research framing guidelines for private-public partnerships in seed sector. That’ll stop the GM seed pirates.
- Conserve African humpless cattle! They’re needed for breeding.
- UG99 — and crop wild relatives — in the news. The proper news. The one people pay attention to.
- Vanilla lovers better start stocking up.
- Kenyan farmers earning money selling sorghum to brewers. What’s not to like.
Potatoes in the limelight
It’s potato season at the US Botanical Garden, it seems. There’s a temporary exhibit on the spud. And a number of talks between now and the end of the month, including one on the USDA Potato Genebank. I know because Smithsonian Magazine posted this video on Facebook.
Needless to say, if any of our readers go, we’d love to hear about it.