- Revitalising socio-ecological production landscapes. It’s all the buzz, even though it doesn’t trip off my tongue.
- And the buzz keeps building for AgBioDiv 2012 in Ireland, 9 February.
- The great house of Veitch — but not a word about their many veg varieties.
- The first “really” purple tomato now available as seed.
Nibbles: Indian livestock, Borlaug book, iFOn, Brassica meet, Pat, Agave, Penguins
- More evidence of India’s fascination with little-known indigenous
cattle breeds. - Forbes reviews Borlaug bio.
- FAO Forestry has a nifty new mobile app. No idea why.
- VI International Symposium on Brassicas and XVIII Crucifer Genetics Workshop looking for sponsors. Any ideas?
- Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison is today’s “Face of Plant Cell Biology“.
- Of course it is a daft idea to claim rights over the word “agave”. But will anyone listen?
- Blimey! A penguin is like a lime juice.
Nibbles: Citizen science! Apples in Vietnam, Pyramid builders, Ecosystem services, Vegetable network, India’s shame, Dryland diversity
- Unlike spring, we’re late to The Guardian’s citizen science map of “weird nature”. Please Sir, can we have one for agriculture?
- Apples in French Indochina; more histoire des pommes française, or something.
- Scaling up food supplies — in ancient Egypt.
- “Conserving biodiversity could benefit the world’s poor,” it says here.
- South Asian boffins launch regional vegetable research network. Only 5 crops, but open-pollinated varieties will be included in the trials.
- “Ending malnutrition is a matter of political will. If India wanted to address childhood malnutrition in any serious way, it could.” Marion Nestle lays it on the line.
- Diversity in drylands linked to greater resilience. A press release, and a news report.
GlobalHort provides focused searching for horticulture
Ever google “onions” to get information on what varieties to plant or the crop’s nutritional composition or how to grow it and get bombarded with nothing but recipes for the first n pages? No, neither have I, but one of the things I learned at yesterday’s GlobalHort meeting on DOCNet here in Rome is that they have a nifty function on their website which limits searching to a number of technical websites, thus minimizing this problem. What it doesn’t do, alas, is return the results from searches of different online species databases, as we’ve seen in these case of the taxonomic information aggregator we discussed recently. I also learned that the GlobalHort website, for all its searching sophistication, lacks an RSS feed.
Brainfood: Cassava in Colombia, Tubers in Peru, Breadfruit diversity, Hominins and elephants, Evolution, Domestication, Mongolian sheep, Roads, Econutrition, South Asia food composition
- Informal “Seed” Systems and the Management of Gene Flow in Traditional Agroecosystems: The Case of Cassava in Cauca, Colombia. Farmers move cassava around a lot.
- Ecological and socio-cultural factors influencing in situ conservation of crop diversity by traditional Andean households in Peru. Farmers should be supported in moving tubers around more.
- Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. There’s a lot of it.
- Man the Fat Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant. Disappearance of elephant led to replacement of Homo erectus. Quite a difference from the more recent hominin-elephant dynamic.
- Fitness consequences of plants growing with siblings: reconciling kin selection, niche partitioning and competitive ability. All agriculture is about reconciling kin selection.
- Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Revisionism rules.
- Tracing genetic differentiation of Chinese Mongolian sheep using microsatellites. Five populations clustered by fancy science into, ahem, five populations.
- Road connectivity, population, and crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fancy science reveals better roads would be good for agriculture. Hell, my mother-in-law could have told them that.
- Econutrition: Preventing Malnutrition with Agrodiversity Interventions. Home gardening is the way to go.
- Carotenoid and retinol composition of South Asian foods commonly consumed in the UK. Palak paneer is not just good, it’s good for you.