- “È curioso che il grano Cappelli, ora diventato un simbolo della “pasta da gourmet”, fosse una volta il comune grano della pasta di tutti i giorni, e che venga da alcuni considerato “autoctono” quando in realtà è una varietà tunisina.” Curious indeed.
- A woman’s crop? Not as straightforward as it may sound.
- State of the World’s Plants symposium, 11-12 May.
- Above will no doubt consider crop wild relatives such as the peanut’s.
- More on the urban vegetable gardens of Istanbul.
- Tree DGs in the garden getting coffee. On International Forest Day.
- The “Bernie Sanders” vision of biofortification.
- Cowpea to get a genome.
- Q&A with John Torgrimson of Seed Savers Exchange.
- The resilience of rice: “You never find a crop that can span this latitude and altitude.” Really? Wheat?
- Cacao and coffee have a microbial terroir.
- Crop mixes are geographically stable.
- Prof. Kathy Willis of Kew on Feeding the World, including using crop wild relatives. IRRI Kew genebanks featured.
- Denmark interprets EU law to allow seed saving.
Nibbles: Switchgrass mixtures, Groundnut genomes, Bean genome, New wild tomato, CC Down Under, Aussie foods, Natural history collections, Wheat genebanks, Pompeii vineyards, Colombian exhibition, Portuguese collard, Istanbul bostan, Kenyan adaptation, Norwegian adaptation, Hybrid wheat, GMO bananas, Indian organic, Coconut generator
- If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
- The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
- As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
- New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
- Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
- And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
- Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
- CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
- Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
- Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
- Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
- The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
- Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
- Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
- Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
- The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
- Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
- Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
- Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.
Nibbles: Cover crops, Viet coconut, Water maps, Mao’s mango, Tudor bread, Belgian gardening, IRRI fingerprints, Stay green barley, Miniature donkey
- Uncovering cover crops, the NY Times way.
- Uncovering coconut cultivation in Vietnam, the Roland Bourdeix way.
- Where to expect water shortages, and irrigation. Crying for a mashup.
- When a mango is not just a mango.
- Bread, and much else, according to the Tudors.
- A Belgian plantsman is revolutionizing gardening. No, really.
- How genomics will revolutionize rice breeding. No, really.
- How to get deeper barley roots for drought tolerance? Look to sorghum.
- And today’s miniature livestock is…a donkey.
Nibbles: Threatened foods, Extreme weather, Fancy pix, Mooney video, Traditional diets, Untraditional diets,
- Latest scaremongering about disappearing foods. French fries? Really? And more.
- Ah, wait. Here comes the science.
- Daguerreotypes of heirloom veggies.
- Pat Mooney sets out the history of PGR conservation in ten minutes.
- The beauty of traditional diets.
- Something philosophical for the weekend? Does something count as local if it didn’t come from the local soil, but was instead grown inside a greenhouse that happens to be near where you’re eating it?
Brainfood: Intensification, Diversity double, Mexican homegardens, Coffee certification, US crop diversity, Fig identification, Wild rice origins, Domestication & trophic interactions
- Population and Environmental Correlates of Maize Yields in Mesoamerica: a Test of Boserup’s Hypothesis in the Milpa. Fallows don’t really reduce much with increasing population density. Yields, on the other hand, do.
- If They Grow It, Will They Eat and Grow? Evidence from Zambia on Agricultural Diversity and Child Undernutrition. Unlike other recent studies, this one finds positive correlations among production diversity, dietary diversity and nutritional outcomes.
- Community agro biodiversity conservation continuum: an integrated approach to achieve food and nutrition security. Provides the theoretical underpinning of the finding in the previous paper: conservation, cultivation, consumption and commerce.
- Home Garden Agrobiodiversity Differentiates Along a Rural—Peri–Urban Gradient in Campeche, México. Different species in urban homegardens compared to rural, but same overall diversity levels.
- Does certification improve biodiversity conservation in Brazilian coffee farms? Meh.
- Crop Species Diversity Changes in the United States: 1978–2012. It’s gone down.
- Mediterranean basin Ficus carica L.: from genetic diversity and structure to authentication of a Protected Designation of Origin cultivar using microsatellite markers. Microsatellites can recognize the protected ‘Kymis’ cultivar. Rejoice.
- Population genetic structure of Oryza rufipogon and O. nivara: implications for the origin of O. nivara. Multiple origins of nivara from rufipogon, and climatic differentiation.
- Complex tritrophic interactions in response to crop domestication: predictions from the wild. What’s good for humans is (generally) good for herbivores.