- A bibliography of sesame. Good to have.
- All you want to know about organic farming in China. Who knows when it might come in useful.
- The legacy of Melaku Worede. Proud to know him.
- European pre-breeding meeting. Would be good to go.
- The Spice Trade 2.0. Good gig if you can get it.
- Coconut-tasting pineapple. Why?
Nibbles: Desert afforestation, Breadfruit, Sustainable tea, Biofortification, Cassava breeding, Wheat breeding, Ancient microbrewery
- The Sahara Forest Project: what could possibly go wrong?
- Maybe they should try breadfruit. Or avocados. Or ask this guy for advice.
- Not for all the sustainable tea in China!
- Or all the high-Fe pearl millet in India.
- Or all the wild chickens in South Asia.
- Cassava gets the genomic selection treatment. Maybe wheat too?
- Did someone mention beer?
Brainfood: Bumper bonanza, Old peas, Irrigated meadows, Cereal mashes, Medicinal plants, Diversity and production, Millet gaps, Seed ageing, Flax core
- First off — a pretty big deal. Taylor & Francis have made a bunch of papers related to sustainable agriculture freely available, but only until the end of December. Happy whatever holiday won’t offend you.
- Twentieth-century changes in the genetic composition of Swedish field pea metapopulations. Metapopulations have become isolated populations. In genebanks.
- Effects of different irrigation systems on the biodiversity of species-rich hay meadows. Change from the traditional irrigation system has affected biodiversity levels, but not a huge amount.
- Research regarding the use of wheat biodiversity for obtaining some cereal-based fermented mashes. Let’s go straight to what we need to know here: the best mash come from spelt wheat. Oh, to be the one doing the organoleptic characterization.
- Cultivation and high capitalization of medicinal and aromatic plants in the Romanian-Bulgarian cross-border region. If you’re really interested, there’s a database that brings it all together.
- Crop biodiversity, productivity and production risk: Panel data micro-evidence from Ethiopia. More crops = more production. But the devil is in the details, I suspect.
- Identification of gaps in pearl millet germplasm from East and Southern Africa conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. We used to do this sort of thing by hand in my day.
- At3g08030 transcript: a molecular marker of seed ageing. This mRNA could predict germination performance of a dry seed lot across species. Good for genebanks?
- Assembling a core collection from the flax world collection maintained by Plant Gene Resources of Canada. You don’t hear much about core collections these days, why is that?
Nibbles: Old rice, New quinoa, Fishy stuff, Cropland landscapes, Forest landscapes, Old seed, Superdomestication, Intensification
- Youth compiles list of rare and extinct rice varieties of Assam. Maybe he should look at weedy rice too?
- Meanwhile, American farmers are learning to grow quinoa, probably including some rare varieties.
- The smelliest fish in the world. No traceability needed for that one, I guess.
- Cropland getting mapped. Presumably including the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). Help needed by both, by the way.
- Follow the forest discussions at COP18. High on the agenda: what is a landscape? It’s what you study when you’re being holistic, no? Anyway, there’s got to be a connection to the previous links.
- Boffins find a genetic marker for old seed. Will need to Brainfood this one.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison breaks down superdomestication for you.
- SRI gets a scaling up. What could possibly go wrong?
Nibbles: Fungi, Fireblight, Flood Relief, Irrational Ghanaian men, Symposium, Dust Bowl Blues, SRI, Brazil’s agro-policy
- Where do new mushrooms come from? Hint: domestication of wild species has not stopped.
- And resistance to fireblight in apples? Hint: a single specimen of an old variety.
- How about help for flood-stricken Nigerian farmers? Hint: a gene bank!
- Where do people get gender in agriculture all wrong? Hint: women may bring home the bacon, but if that threatens their husband’s status, rationality flies out the door.
- Where, from 10-13 December, can you learn about “Crops from the past and new crops in adressing (sic) the challenges of the XXI century”? Hint: Córdoba, Spain.
- Where did the Dust Bowl go? Hint: it never went away.
- Where to get the straight dope on System of Rice Intensification? Hint: an SRI researcher may not be unbiased.
- Where are government and civil society elaborating a National Plan for Agroecology and Organic Production? Hint: a river runs through it.