Cow Parade

There was an article in the local paper on Saturday which described how some of the exhibits at the recent Cow Parade in San Jose were a bit worse for wear and were being repaired. Well, I’d never heard of Cow Parade, but it sounds like fun. You can check out the entries for the San Jose event online. I just wish there was more phenotypic diversity on show, all the entries in the Wikipedia article look like basically the same breed.

News from the road

Apologies for the light blogging lately, but both Jeremy and I are on the road and busy with other stuff. When last seen, Jeremy was on vacation in Maine, dealing what will probably be the mortal blow to its lobster population. And I’ve been in and out of meetings all week, but I’ve got a couple of days off now and may have time to catch up on the old feed reader.

This is a good place to do that. I’m visiting the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica. They have a very pleasant campus in a spectacular area with a well-developed ecotourism industry:

CATIE has a botanic garden and an active seedbank for forest species. But it also has an interest in agrobiodiversity conservation, with very important field genebanks of cacao, coffee and peach palm, and a crop seed genebank specializing in local vegetables, maize and beans. More later.

Nibbles: Economics, Agricultural origins, Slow Food, Pollinators, India