So apparently Swiss farmers will no longer be able to feed cannabis to their cows. Bummer.
Horticulture and the city
There’s a great feature in the latest New Agriculturist on urban horticulture, with stories ranging from growing food in buckets in Lima to grafting tomatoes on eggplant roots in Vietnam to producing jasmine in the Philippines.
A new route for pigs and people across the Pacific
The standard story of Pacific colonization is that people and their crops and livestock spread across it in a generally southwestern direction. Scientists from Durham University and the University of Oxford are renavigating the details. They looked at DNA from various pigs across the Pacific, and conclude that their journey may have started in what is now Vietnam. It has always been assumed that the people and their agriculture traveled together as a single package. This research indicates that different parts of the package took different routes.
There’s more detail at a Durham web site about pig domestication, but the actual paper does not seem to be available online yet. Here’s the press release announcing it.
Millet beer
Via Timbuktu Chronicles, a great description – with photos – of how they make millet beer in Mali.
Accessing biodiversity in Brazil
Brazil has new procedures in place (called Sisbio) to issue licences to collect biodiversity for teaching and research, according to an article on SciDevNet. They are supposed to make the whole access system much easier to navigate. And faster: what used to take up to two years should now take 45 days at most. This bit struck me in particular:
Scientists will eventually be able to use Sisbio to access satellite images of potential research areas and gauge research activity in areas so they can better plan their research.