- Touring the world’s coffee processors.
- Liquorice next? Starting in the UK?
- India has 30% of the world’s cattle. Which you might not be able to guess from these very cool ILRI maps. Including one on chickens, in which the Nordic countries feature perhaps less than they should.
- The Global Nutrition Report will have these indicators at country level. Some stuff there on fruit and vegetable consumption, but why nothing specifically on dietary diversity? Anyway, if you’d like to make suggestions, you can.
- Wait, why is there nothing on alcohol consumption? And is diversity in alcohol-producing plants a good thing? I mean, nutrition-wise.
- Uhm, nothing on urban agriculture either. I bet you that’s an indicator of something or other, nutrition-wise.
- Maybe Amy Ickowitz of CIFOR will suggest some indicators. She has interesting data on forest cover and child nutrition.
- How to make cacao cultivation more sustainable.
- Andy Jarvis on how to scale up climate-smart agriculture without necessarily sacrificing goats. Nor, presumably, nutrition.
- Model says environment can support subsistence hunting and agriculture only up to a point, and no more. Still no cure for cancer. But did someone tell the Mapuche?
- Well, what do you know, genes come, and genes go.
Brainfood: Landscape preferences, Livestock selection, Romanian conservation, Nordic Horseradish, Social structuring, Darjeeling tea, ZFarming, Pineywoods cattle, Cotton breeding, Neglected veggies
- Public preferences for ecosystem-enhancing elements in agricultural landscapes in the Swiss lowlands. People don’t like complex agricultural landscapes as much as they should. Well, in photos anyway.
- Some traditional livestock selection criteria as practiced by several indigenous communities of Southern Ethiopia. The selection methods of elders are based on characters that correlate with production and reproduction efficiency. Now there’s a shocker.
- Needs and gaps in the conservation of wild plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in Romania. 4 out of 300 useful wild species may need better protection. Sounds like a pretty good score to me.
- Genetic diversity in Nordic horseradish, Armoracia rusticana, as revealed by AFLP markers. Each Nordic country has pretty much its own.
- How social organization shapes crop diversity: an ecological anthropology approach among Tharaka farmers of Mount Kenya. Diversity of crops and of sorghum landraces is structured socially, with neighbourhood groups being an important organizing principle.
- The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations. GI has worked because marketing has convinced people that industrial plantations are also idyllic gardens, but the workers know better.
- Urban agriculture of the future: an overview of sustainability aspects of food production in and on buildings. You need to work at it.
- Long in the Horn: An Agricultural Anthropology of Livestock Improvement. “Livestock as landscape” in the southern US.
- Usefulness and Utilization of Indian Cotton Germplasm. Need to try chemical and physical mutagenesis as well as bring in new diversity from abroad. Do I detect a slight whiff of desperation?
- Potential and biodiversity conservation strategies of underutilized or indigenous vegetables in Himahal Pradesh. Improve provision of planting materials, management practices, harvesting methods, post-harvest , marketability, nutritional status and policies and legal frameworks. Really? Is that all? I suspect anyone into NUS could have told you that before you even went into the field.
Purslane possibilities
Sharp-eyed readers may remember a recent Nibble about somewhat quixotic efforts to promote cultivation and consumption of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) in the US, driven more by necessity than conviction. Well, one particularly sharp-eyed reader pointed out that across the border, in Mexico, there’s a whole network of researchers within the Sistema Nacional de Recursos Fitogenéticos para la Alimentación y la Agricultura devoted to this unusual vegetable, which has some half dozen accessions in the bank to play with. There are 106 accessions in Genesys. Purslane researchers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your mineral deficiencies.
Nibbles: Agave pollination, Sanjaya Rajaram, PGR policy history, Ex situ conifers, Botanic garden theft, Kyrgyz forests, Home nurseries, American chestnut, South Pacific action
- Tequila and bats. Two of my favourite things.
- Continuing the Mexican theme, we have a World Food Prize 2014 winner.
- I wonder what he thinks of the changes he’s seen during his illustrious career in the international system for PGR conservation and use.
- I bet there’s a few endangered conifers, and maybe some ex situ collections, in Mexico.
- I hope there weren’t any among the plants stolen from the RBG Edinburgh recently.
- But perhaps there were some fruits and nuts from Kyrgyzstan?
- Well, the way to go is home nurseries, clearly.
- Maybe even with the GM chestnut, why not?
- Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, CePaCT has been really busy.
Nibbles: Colombian chocolate, Urban ag, Subaks, GM debate, Taxonomy online, Genebank tools online, BBC on Kew, Australian seed bank, Cedar of Lebanon, Pizza philosophy, Feijoada
- Move over Juan Valdez. Cacao farmers want to emulate a marketing icon.
- Urban agriculture not all it’s cracked up to be. Living up to that urban ag icon, Cuba, is hard.
- Bali’s iconic, traditional subaks are a complex adaptive system, and much better than modern rice farming alternatives. Makes you wonder why they need protecting, though.
- GM bananas will save us. Not by themselves they wont. I don’t know why I keep linking to this stuff. Nothing at all iconic about it.
- Iconic taxonomic revision tools online.
- Something else that’s online is a bunch of tools for analyzing genebank data. Soon to be iconic, no doubt. As soon as people use them. So get cracking.
- Huge BBC documentary on Kew coming up. I bet the iconic Millennium Seed Bank will feature.
- Speaking of iconic genebank buildings, today’s one comes from Australia.
- The history of an iconic Middle Easter tree?
- The philosophy of an iconic Italian delicacy. Well, Neapolitan, really.
- And in honour of the World Cup (I refuse to put FIFA in front, let them sue me), an iconic Brazilian dish. And don’t worry, those beans are safe. Somewhere iconic.