- 40 years of AVRDC celebrated. Lots more stuff on vegetables below, so stick around if that grabbed you.
- Breeding with farmers, an ICARDA manual. Are there any examples with vegetables, I wonder?
- Let’s Go Local! See the ABC piece before it disappears from the front page. But it’s not just karat bananas that you need, of course.
- Going local in Philippines too. And India for that matter. And, ahem, Arkansas. Oh and Amazonia.
- Another use for baobab. I feel a factsheet coming on.
- And here are some utterly different fruits.
- Talking AnGR in Latin America.
- GIFT tilapia in India! Look it up, we did a Brainfood on it.
- A Belgian milestone. Put out more flags.
- Is it Cinco de Mayo yet? Well, break out the tequila anyway.
- Is it World Donkey Day yet?
- “Farmer associations hope TME 419 will soon spread across the whole country.” That would be a fancy new cassava in DRC. Anybody worried about that at all?
- Plant diversity key to zzzzzzzzzz…
- Well this will wake you up.
BBC discovers heirlooms
I suppose the BBC must have read our post a couple of weeks back about the open letter on the EU seed marketing legislation, and our more recent post on the travails of a small US heirloom seed company, and decided this was a bandwagon they could not afford to simply watch rumbling past.
Nibbles: Environmental health index, Data visualization, Hungry World, Vegetables meeting, FFS, ICTs in ag, ILRI review, Devil’s claw, Cassava pests, Greek seed meet, Dolphins
- “…the world’s first environmental health index to be based on long term historical data” not actually as interesting as it sounds.
- Data porn. Aggregated. There oughta be a law… Speaking of infoporn, though, check out the third one here.
- AlertNet site on Solutions for a Hungry World pretty but broken. Media alerted, so by the time you read this they may have fixed it and you won’t get Haiti no matter what you click.
- Warwick meeting to look at vegetables and food security. You going? Will you tell us about it?
- Farmer field schools in El Salvador. Diversification seems to be on the curriculum. But diversity?
- And are they using — or being taught — ICTs?
- ILRI reprises a high-impact article. And why not. Nice idea, actually. I may steal it.
- Devil’s claw: weed or NUS? Both!
- Cassava not such a Rambo after all? Heading for a quagmire in SE Asia.
- Greek seed savers met a couple of weeks back. Where you there? Would you like to tell us about it?
- Speaking of seeds, would you like to help save the D. Landreth Seed Company?
- More social dolphins more likely to help humans fish. I wonder if the same for, say, ancient wolves.
Nibbles: Urban cows, Nutrition conference, Island conservation, Chaffey, Uganda rice collecting, Heirloom prize tomato, Metrics, Investing
- Breeding cows for cities. What about the ones that are already there? Oh and happy birthday, Susan!
- Nutritionists meet. Will they discuss diversity?
- Conservation on islands: Bermuda and Malta.
- Plant Cuttings. Rejoice.
- Rice collected in Uganda to be in the ITPGRFA’s Multilateral System. Was there ever a doubt?
- ‘Amish Destor’ tomato wins big.
- Metrics for Biodiversity is not about what you imagine it ought to be about. (So why link to it? To keep ’em honest.)
- Investing in natural alternatives offers excellent returns … and for agriculture?
Nibbles: Data visualization, Soil, Heirlooms, Organic, Bugs, Veggies, Rome, AnGR, Meat, Mexico, Date palm pollination
- Cool infographics on food, trade and, well, a particular sort of trade. And how to make your own.
- Soil would be a cool place to start.
- The bananas of your grandchildren and the carrots of your grandparents. Plus a funny peculiar idea about how to keep seed of such stuff for 50 years.
- Which you don’t need to do anyway because “[r]eplacing traditional seeds with commercial varieties is not an official government policy,” at least in South Africa. Unlike in the EU, I guess. Oooooh, did I just say that? Such a naughty muppet.
- Ok, let me make up for that with some thoughts on breeding for the sorts of places where those traditional seeds might be found, in Africa and in Europe.
- Of course, in such places, you have to know your aphids. Before they go and eat a bacteria and change their DNA. Tricky to breed for resistance to that, I would guess.
- Oh, but here are also the views of someone in Europe who would rather not have anything to do with traditional seeds and their accompanying aphids at all. Why can’t we just get along?
- Why, for example, can we all not get to love mboga za watu wa Pwani. You heard me. And no, residing far from the Swahili Coast is no excuse. Jeremy unavailable for comment.
- He did, however, point out that “[t]he value of male prostitutes exceeds that of farmlands.” Yep, Robigalia time again.
- Meanwhile, not far from the Swahili Coast, some people are thinking that man does not live by mboga alone… No, he must have nyama too.
- And speaking of which: giving sausages a name. On this, I am with Bismarck. No such porky nonsense from the French.
- “Nine thousand years of Mexican agriculture” online. And five hundred on the stove.
- Pollinating date palms just got a whole lot easier. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with any of the other nibbles, but I thought it was cool.