- Oh gosh, it was Tree Diversity Day and nobody told us.
- Bioversity catch up with their own cacao strategy.
- And IFPRI has a new one for you to comment on.
- Caribbean agriculture gets another signed document to help it along. No word on whether agrobiodiversity featured.
- Mango conservation gets organized. But not to the extent of an RSS feed, alas.
- California owes Morocco for its olives.
- Virus-resistant cassava imminent. Haven’t they been saying this for a while now? And is anyone thinking about what will happen to the virus-susceptible varieties?
- Push-pull in the news.
- The cost of everything, and the value of nothing, nature edition.
- What’s the value of Arabidopsis, then?
Nibbles: Innovative crops, twice, Seed saving, Jatropha, Cimmyt, Common ownership
- Of course garlic and dill are innovative crops – if you live in the Pamirs.
- So is Stevia, in Spain.
- A big new book on saving your own seeds. Ignore the rhetoric, and don’t try this in Europe, folks.
- Crops for the Future calls Jatropha a “debacle”. Hard to argue with that.
- All about CIMMYT at an agro-biodiversity fair.
- Put a price tag on natural resources, and you risk undermining common ownership.
Nibbles: Cryo primer, Ag development paradigms smackdown, Edible book, Roots & tubers conference, Deep taxonomy, WWF ag investment report, Forecasting rape disease, Amaranth, Competition
- Science 2.0 Conservation 101 #fail.
- It’s the roads, stupid. Well, not only. Cowen cowed.
- Big book on the edible plants of Central America online.
- Big root and tuber meet gets off the ground in Nigeria with pean for cassava.
- How to link taxonomic names to everything
- Responsible investment in agriculture. Mitt Romney alerted.
- Video on diseases of oilseed rape, Rothamsted shares forecast (and it’s not good). So, is there any diversity in host response?
- Amaranth, big time.
- Correcting the capitalist tools on their misunderstanding of evolution. The tragedy is, they don’t seem to know they don’t know.
What I read on my summer holidays
Yeah, summer is over and I’m back at work. Maybe you noticed I haven’t contributed much here in the past month or so. Or maybe you didn’t. Jeremy kept up a steady stream of agrobiodiversity nuggets pretty much all through August. But my lack of activity on the blog doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to keep up, as you would know if you followed us on Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it. Anyway, for those that don’t, and would like to catch up on my summer reading, here is, in nibble form, what caught my eye during the past month or so:
- “The potato is a religious commodity in America.” Explaining the governance crisis in the US using the humble spud.
- Wait a minute though: “The sizzle seems to be gone from America’s long-term relationship with the potato.” Which apparently means it needs an extreme makeover, colour-wise. For which you’ll need a genebank.
- A tree’s leaves can be genetically different from its roots. Does that mean we have to re-think all molecular phylogenies?
- And speaking of a tree’s leaves, these ones are a thousand years old and give you a buzz.
- A toff with a passion for pigs. P.G. Wodehouse had something to say about this, didn’t he?
- Turns out WFP has a podcast. And ICIMOD has an RSS feed.
- A mathematician factchecks Michael Pollan.
- Pear with me please, while I tell you about another USDA fruit collection.
- 15 Africa-changing innovations include orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. As if they weren’t there before. Anyway, they were THE story for a couple of weeks in August.
- 12 food security innovations include increasing crop diversity. With orange-fleshed sweet potatoes?
- How to put that banana genome to some use.
- Getting the most out of your enumerators.
- IUCN’s Conservation Campus. Any ag? And on a similar topic, training materials in anthropology.
- Automating conservation assessment of plants. You’ll need provenance data from herbaria such as this one at CIP, of course. Oh, and speaking of CIP, they need a phylogeneticist.
- A market opportunity for the mother-in-law?
- Measuring the health of the oceans. Hey, but it’s not all bad for fish.
- Ten species which rely on ex situ conservation. And why that number will go up. How to pay for it all, though?
- Book on the recent history of agricultural research reviewed. I wonder if they looked at the private sector. Because it seems there may be a case to answer.
- Another big grant for taxonomic databases. Ah but this is all going to be community-driven.
- Looks like this Australian genebank could have done with a decent database, community-driven or not.
Nibbles: Community gardens, Malnutrition in Peru, Good nutrition and longevity, Efficient conservation.
- A film about community gardens in the city of Washington DC.
- “Ricos en agrobiodiversidad, pero pobres en nutrición.” Huancavelica, in Peru, has plenty of agricultural biodiversity and plenty of malnutrition. Go figure.
- Good nutrition is more important than reduced calories for longevity, in rhesus monkeys at least.
- Conservation magazine reports that return on investment is the best guide to economically-efficient conservation. We ask … well, you know what we ask, right?