- How to make coffee, diagrammed and phylogenized.
- Where do seedless watermelons come from? In a here-and-now sense.
- A long and fascinating read about gardens and war and much besides.
Nibbles: Deforestation, Mayan collapse, Agroforestry, One Acre Fund, School gardens
- Cutting down forests worsened ancient Mayan droughts.
- And (among other things) did for the Maya.
- And despite the Mayan end of the world being near, the French are revitalising agroforestry.
- The Financial Times wrote about One Acre Fund’s work to reduce agrobiodiversity in Kenya, then put it behind a paywall (for me). So One Acre Fund sprung it.
- School gardens continue to flourish in some places.
Nibbles: Drought, Vegetable talks, Bees, Communications, Resilience, Fungi, Breadfruit tools, Taxonomy, Orphan crops, ICARDA
- The Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy (Emeritus) and Deputy Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University talks about the drought on his Iowa farm.
- While Ted offers 11 talks on the transformative power of vegetables.
- A new use for urban bees; protecting the lead on church roofs.
- “Agricultural researchers in developing countries are keen to communicate their research …” Scidev.net communicates.
- Growing a high-value crop instead of a staple is not resilience.
- Growing mushrooms in a laundry basket might well be.
- Growing breadfruit absolutely requires some simple processing tools if it is to be.
- Speaking of growth, Jeremy abuses his position of power to direct you to Eight Fallacies about Growth
- HarvestChoice grapples with the nomenklatura problem; which genius came up with SPAM?
- The Christian Science Monitor reports that orphan crops will be the saviour of African agriculture. Again.
- ABC (Oz) fears that war will destroy the ICARDA genebank, forgetting all about that Doomsday vault.
Nibbles: Beef, Dairy, Resilience and vulnerability, Seed systems, Irony beans, Genebanks in the news, Catch a fire, Amazon, Spanish gardens, Conservation, Work exchange
- What is the best beef in Europe?
- When was the first yoghurt of the Neolithic?
- How do you measure smallholder resilience? Or vulnerability, for that matter…
- How does this Kenyan seed story differ from this Malian one?
- How do you address iron deficiency in Rwanda?
- What’s the value of a genebank?
- There’s a downside to plant-derived smoke?
- So what’s the latest paradigm shift on that ancient-people-in-the-Amazon thing?
- How are the Spanish people coping with the crisis?
- How come those transcribed podcasting, medal winning conservationists still don’t get it?
- What are Ethiopians doing in Amazonia?
Nibbles: Nutrition in India, Future food needs, Pollinators, Community gardens, Local inputs
- IFPRI tackles the agriculture-nutrition disconnect in India.
- Makanaka tackles the fact-assumption disconnect in future food needs.
- Jeremy admits to disconnect between his knowledge and World Pollinator Week.
- Spain’s economic crisis connects communities to gardens.
- Local farmers connect to local inputs; everyone benefits.