- Faidherbia albida gets another push. To quote from the recent Crops for the Future dissection of neglected/underutilized species: if it’s so good, how come it’s not used more?
- The Indo-European roots of names for pulse crops. Not nearly as boring as it sounds. Oh, and since we’re on the subject…
- Human biodiversity files: athleticism, foodism.
- Huge EU project monitors pollinators. What could possibly go wrong?
- Cleaning up DNA Sequence Database Hell.
- Nice biodiversity hotspot maps. No plants. Definitely no agrobiodiversity.
- A philosopher’s take on that organic agriculture meta-analysis.
- Not Musa, but still edible.
Nibbles: Aguaje, Super pasta, Banana battery, Tomato love, Tomato hate, Microgreens, NUS, Fortuneii, Coffee, Uran agriculture
- Today’s new superfruit. This one doesn’t surprise me.
- Tomorrow’s super-spaghetti. This one really baffles me.
- Today’s new source of bioenergy: bananas. Shocking.
- 50 ways to love your tomatoes. Turn ‘em to jam, Pam.
- One reason to hate tomatoes, for good bad muslims.
- Trendy micro greens are more nutritious. Get ‘em young, chum.
- “If they are so good, why are they not spreading on their own?” Crops for the Future gives NUS the third degree.
- Robert Fortune, pioneer biopirate.
- Forget oil, water and phosphorus. Peak coffee is as scary as it gets.
- How to save urban agriculture: by the numbers.
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.
AVRDC’s shiny new website
AVRDC has a nice new website. You can subscribe to a couple different newsletters, and also follow the institute on Facebook and Twitter. You can buy a porcelain coffee mug and donate money. And there’s a decent RSS feed at last. The first thing that popped up when I subscribed to it was, almost inevitably, a fact sheet on the baobab. Yet another fact sheet on the baobab. Incidentally, I know I’ve already nibbled this, but also newly online is CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank, an “online resource with information for all involved in plant health.” Where, almost inevitably, you can get information on the baobab.
UK vegetable diversity safe
Readers with a long(ish) memory may remember some uncertainty a couple of years back over the future of the UK’s national collections of vegetable diversity at Wellesbourne. I’m glad to say the genebank is flourishing as part of Warwick University, with funding from Defra. It even has a Twitter feed, over which there is currently in course an interesting discussion of Cornish cauliflowers.