- NASA says there has not been a drought-driven decline in plant productivity after all. Yeah but where’s my jet-pack, guys?
- Hanging Gardens of Babylon had date palms and tamarisk. At least.
- Edible wild Armenian plants.
- AVRDC on how to grow vegetables in all sorts of different containers.
Nibbles: European diversity, Cassava bugs, Livestock funding, Malnutrition
- Genetic diversity in European men and one of the organisms they exploit. And another.
- CIAT cassava entomologist rings warning bell.
- ILRI boffins point out why they don’t have enough money. Yeah, but what’s to be done about it?
- Malnutrition in Kenya and Guatemala. Are school gardens an/the answer? FAO thinks so.
Nibbles: Median strips, Vitamin A, Mapping in Kenya, Chaffey, Small farms, Rennell Island coconuts, Sweet potato breeding, Acacia nomenclature, Crop models, Pulque, Fruits
- Planting roadsides with natives, including crop wild relatives. And here comes the database.
- Orange Maize: The Movies.
- VirtualKenya really here. Mother-in-law beside herself.
- Plant Cuttings is out. And all of a sudden I’m in a much better place.
- Small is beautiful, farm edition. And as chance would have it, coffee farm edition. And urban edition.
- Dispute at iconic coconut plantation resolved. Apparently there are some really unique varieties there.
- I say boniato. For the first and last time.
- Acacia on the brink. Easy, tiger. The name, not the genus.
- We’re going to need a better model.
- Pulque comes back. Never knew it had gone away.
- Domesticating fruit trees in Kenya. Something for VirtualKenya?
Nibbles: SusAg WWF-style, Obesity, Innovation, African farmers, Cyanobacteria, Climate change experiment
- See what WWF thinks will make agriculture sustainable.
- Americans are dying younger. Obesity partly to blame.
- Study shows how scientists can get farmers to innovate. And vice versa?
- Iron-age beer in France. “Beer … might have resembled modern home brews.” Which might have created a nation of wine-drinkers.
- Voice of America ♥ Nourishing the Planet. (African farmers also important.)
- Bacteria in mosses on tree branches fertilize forest soils. How long before the whole thing is available in a packet?
- Bioengineering the prairie. Together with, presumably, its crop wild relatives.
Brainfood: Cabbages, Crops in Darfur, Sowing dates, People and biodiversity, Honeybees, Rhizobium, Figs, Urban ag, Wild olives, Ancient textiles, Ducks, Wheat introgression, Food citizenship, Crop models, Trifolium, Variety choice
- Genetic diversity of Brassica oleracea var. capitata gene bank accessions assessed by AFLP. Czech genebank; subgroups reflected place of origin.
- Optimizing the cropping mix in North Darfur State, Sudan. A study of Umkdada district. “…the results of the model were different from the real practices of the farmers.” Oh dear. To improve the fit, schoolboys should work in the fields more. And crops should fetch more. The dismal science indeed.
- Climate-driven simulation of global crop sowing dates. Ok, this model works. You can predict sowing dates under rainfed conditions for various annual crops from climatic conditions. Not entirely sure why you would want to, though.
- Exploring some of the myths of land use change: Can rural to urban migration drive declines in biodiversity? Yes, counter-intuitively, at least in the forests of Mexico’s southwestern highlands. More from Conservation Magazine.
- Pollination services in the UK: How important are honeybees? Quite a bit, but maybe not as much as previously thought. It’s the wild bees, stupid!
- Genetic diversity and symbiotic effectiveness of rhizobia isolated from root nodules of Phaseolus vulgaris L. grown in soils of Iran. It is high, and it varies, respectively.
- Interspecific hybridization of fig (Ficus carica L.) and Ficus erecta Thunb., a source of Ceratocystis canker resistance. It’s a breakthrough!
- Exploring the diversity of urban and peri-urban agricultural systems in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa: An attempt towards a regional typology. There are 6 types. Not 5; not 7. On this one, the journey is more interesting than the destination.
- Variability of wild olives (Olea europaea subsp. europaea var. sylvestris) analyzed by agro-morphological traits and SSR markers. There’s a lot of variabzzzzzzzzzz…
- Hemp in ancient rope and fabric from the Christmas Cave in Israel: Talmudic background and DNA sequence identification. Mainly flax, but some hemp, from both Roman and Chalcolithic periods. But can you smoke it?
- Modelling the distribution of domestic ducks in Monsoon Asia. Low resolution data, plus fancy modelling, can be used to get pretty good high resolution predictions.
- Gene flow between wheat and wild relatives: empirical evidence from Aegilops geniculata, Ae. neglecta and Ae. triuncialis. It happens, a lot.
- Toward food system sustainability through school food system change: Think&EatGreen@School and the making of a community-university research alliance. Food citizenship?
- Simulation of winter wheat yield and its variability in different climates of Europe: A comparison of eight crop growth models. Big differences among models, so best thing to do is to use the mean of all of them.
- The potential of plant viruses to promote genotypic diversity via genotype × environment interactions. The negative effect of White Clover Mosaic Virus (WCMV) infection on performance differs from white clover genotype to genotypes, which means differential selection, which means negative frequency-dependent selection in host populations, which means diversity. Via.
- Amplifying the benefits of agroecology by using the right cultivars. Why should we summarize, when an author has already done so?