Urban agriculture

March 10, 2009

Nibbles: Aquaculture squared, Food policy, School, Beer

More audio aquaponics goodness.
“The road from growing rice to raising shrimp to misery.”
Angola’s national strategy on food, nutritional security includes seeds. Anyone know more?
Handbook for School Gardens.
Oh no, climate change to screw up Czech hops! Now I’m really mad.

March 7, 2009March 8, 2009

Nibbles: Ginseng, Worms, Cities

Biodiversity in cultivated Panax notoginseng populations.
Worms add value to waste.
Urban homesteading? Whatever next?

March 5, 2009March 5, 2009

Urban farmer, ex-basketball player, genius

Did we note that Will Allen, urban farmer extraordinaire, won the Genius Award last year? Congratulations! Via.

March 4, 2009March 4, 2009

Nibbles: Urban agriculture, Rural agriculture, Assisted migration, FAO prize, Traditional medicine, Diseaese

IDRC reports on Agriculture in urban planning.
French end subsidy hypocrisy. Mais non? Mais oui! Via .
More on assisted migration.
Chinese pig farmer wins FAO plaudits.
India puts traditional remedies into public domain for their own good.
Kenyan crops in trouble from diseases.

February 27, 2009February 27, 2009

Nibbles: Book, Moral and physical revulsion, DNA bank, Cacao genome, Cassava, Agroforestry, Dung products, Pork brain

“How One Man Nearly Lost his Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.” Thanks, Danny.
Bitter food=betrayal.
DNA bank for Irish dairy and beef cattle being established.
“… a document from 1631 … mentioned threats to the cacao crop.”
USAID supports cassava farmers in Africa.
The simpukng forest gardens of the Dayak deconstructed.
Shit!
1170% of your daily cholesterol per serving. Sounds good to me.

1. What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
2. Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
3. Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
4. What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
5. Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
6. Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
7. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
8. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
9. Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
10. And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
11. And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
12. Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
13. You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
14. I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
15. Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
16. No, not using ancient DNA, but actually…
Published on April 4, 2025