- 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.
Nibbles: Pharaonic bull, Moving the cheese, Popping the corn, Persian food double, Sweet potato galore
- Cattle in ancient Egypt.
- Because yesterday was National Cheese Day and we missed it.
- The protein to which we owe cheese.
- The anatomy of popcorn.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison interviewed on Iranian saffron.
- And more Persian foodstuffs.
- Orange sweet potato going wide in Mozambique. And where it came from.
Nibbles: Gastronomy edition
- Gastronomy comes to the Amazon.
- Maybe it should come to Tikal too.
- You know it’s already in Mexico.
- Not to mention Peru.
- Preparing decent coffee counts as gastronomy, I guess. But SL28 is not genetically engineered. Not in the usual sense, anyway.
- Not sure that eels have much of a future in gastronomy.
- Into Africa: Indian seeds. And Indian gastronomy along with them?
- Feralization is not domestication in reverse. Lots of gastronomic potential, though.
- Meanwhile…
Nibbles: Tree conservation, Seed fairs, Baobab powder, Simran’s book, Cheesy prince, Companies & CC, Organic breeding
- Crowdfunding the Zero Tree Extinctions project.
- Seed fairs for climate change adaptation in Zimbabwe.
- Make mine a baobab smoothie.
- Another great review of Simran Sethi’s new book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.
- Blessed are the cheesemakers.
- Big Food taking fright?
- Breeding the organic breeders of the future.