- 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.
Nibbles: Switchgrass mixtures, Groundnut genomes, Bean genome, New wild tomato, CC Down Under, Aussie foods, Natural history collections, Wheat genebanks, Pompeii vineyards, Colombian exhibition, Portuguese collard, Istanbul bostan, Kenyan adaptation, Norwegian adaptation, Hybrid wheat, GMO bananas, Indian organic, Coconut generator
- 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.
The hipster future of coffee starts with a genebank
I started a post a few days ago with a quote suggesting that all that commercial farmers are interested in is yield. So let’s balance that today with this:
Geisha in undoubtedly a luxury, but in one important way, it deserves the hype. It is the first coffee to be grown commercially just because it tastes good.
We blogged about the journey of the remarkable coffee landrace called Geisha (or Gesha) a few years ago: from Ethiopia’s forests to the CATIE genebank in Costa Rica to the Peterson family farm in Panama to all over the world, or, more specifically, a hipster coffee shop in Taiwan. But Hanna Neuschwander‘s Coffee in the New Millennium tells the story at much greater length, not to mention with much greater skill. For example, I wish I had thought to describe hillside coffee plantations, with their neat, undulating rows of bushes, as “living corduroy.”
The piece ends with a neat juxtaposition between World Coffee Research’s monumental International Multi-location Variety Trials and the more geographically focussed, but no less ambitious, in its own way, effort by the Peterson family. They’re looking for a new Geisha among hundreds of other Ethiopian landraces they are now testing on their Panamanian farm. I only have one bone to pick with Ms Neuschwander: why not fully acknowledge the role of the genebank at CATIE in all this, rather than just referring, anonymously, to “a research facility in Costa Rica”?
Nibbles: Poleward migration, Pulse infographic, Vodka, Ancient horse DNA, Old fish, Certified cacao, On farm book, Coarse millets, Banana diversity, Pearl millet demo
- Species flying poleward.
- FAO unveils pulse infographic. No word on whether any are harvestable by machine.
- Potato farmer adds value the old-fashioned way.
- Talking of old, here’s a really old horse.
- And the oldest evidence of fermentation for food preservation. But you’ll need a strong stomach.
- KitKat is certified crap.
- How (and Why) Farmers Maintain Crop Diversity: The Book. Some reviews.
- And here’s a specific example from India.
- And here, courtesy of Bioversity’s Ann Tutwiler, is why farmers need some help sometimes.
- Oh and here’s another one. People visit ICRISAT genebank in Niger, see stuff they like.
Tweeting crops
Jack Grieve is a computational linguist at Aston University in Birmingham, England. I came across him on Twitter, where he occasionally posts fun maps showing the geographic distributions (usually within the USA) of different words, usually dialectical variants, based on their appearance in geocoded tweets. He very kindly ran a couple of crop names through his magic box for us, and this is what he got. I wanted to know if the distribution of crops could be inferred from where people tweet about it more than the average. I’ve placed his map for each crop side by side with the relevant distribution map from USDA.
Not a perfect match by any means, but not too bad. Except for cotton, that is. Any ideas why people should be tweeting so much about cotton in the northern Great Plains? They’re certainly not growing it.
Jack’s dataset apparently only covers the US and the UK at the moment, which means I can’t check whether Kenyans, say, are tweeting about maize particularly assiduously where they’re growing it, or indeed about maize lethal necrosis where they’re worried about it. Google famously tried to predict flu outbreaks from search patterns, but that seems to have fizzled out. Could tweeting trends help pinpoint crops (or livestock?) and their pests and diseases in space and time? I don’t see much of that kind of thing in the discussion of ICTs in agriculture.