Tourism

Nibbles: PPB, AnGR, Children of the corn, African wildlife & China, Japanese plastic food, Hedge balls, Falanghina et al., NY hipster kava bar, Genetics & diet

The next step in the evolution of participatory plant breeding is evolutionary plant breeding.
1458 livestock breeds are in trouble.
A blast from corn’s past. In more ways than one, as this article from High Country News is kinda old.
The Chinese market in African wildlife is bad for both.
Let them eat plastic.
Maclura pomifera is apparently all the rage in Iowa.
There’s more to Italian wine than chianti.
“You can’t really get fucked up on kava.” I beg to differ.
Two independent pieces on the continuing evolution of humans to cope with their diet: starch, milk and meat.

Mike Jackson wants to know how many crop varieties you can name. Please tell him. My number is 42.
This is what CRISPR looks like. In an infographic, that is.
Japan’s rice terraces were better for biodiversity when they were, you know, full of rice.
A Wendell Berry biopic?
Yep, more on eating insects. It’s definitely a thing now.

Peak hops? Say it ain’t so.
Day-long plant-breeding-for-the-masses course at Oxford in April.
Botanists of the twenty-first century: Roles, challenges and opportunities. An e-book for the ages.
Genes to beans: polyploidy on a plate. A Royal Society lecture by Kathy Willis.
Some naughty people have been collecting plants in India without permits.
IPBES tells it like it is on pollinators. In a press release. You try to find the actual report online. Oh and here’s FAO getting in on the act. Though at least for this the report is easy to find.
Great interactive map of the work of the Rainforest Alliance. Check out the agriculture tab.
Italian researchers build a time machine. A phytotron, really, but let them have their little fun.
Speaking of fun, GCARD3 Youth Agripreneurs Projects on “Climate Resilient Indian Cattle” and “fake seeds.” Lots more too, all interesting.

BBC Food Programme on crop diversity in India, with a little help from Bioversity’s Stefano Padulosi (whose name manages to be pronounced in three different ways in 20 minutes.
How to measure photosynthesis on a grand scale.
The origins of our diet. It’s the interactions, stupid.
Barley as superfood. No, not the fermented kind.
More diverse freshwaters give higher fish yields.
European earthworm diversity mapped. No word on relationship with yields. Surprisingly difficult to see any correlation with agricultural intensification.
It’s been a bad time for livestock (and therefore people) in Mongolia and in Ethiopia.
Domesticating the wild mango that is not a mango but is almost as tasty.
The weird world of the pure caffeine trade.

If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.