Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The Eden Project in Cornwall to host harvest festival in October, featuring BBC TV presenter of Grow Your Own Drugs. “Super spuds help beat hidden hunger in Uganda.” Where NatGeo leads, DFID follows. A land grab story with a difference! Russia to lease land to North Korea. UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food …
Strange to have two long articles surface over the weekend that in some respects negate one another and yet that both seem to point to a different future for food security. The Des Moines Register points not merely to perennial grains, a favourite topic here, but specifically to perennial maize. The piece is packed with …
It has been almost 10 days since the publication of Increased Food and Ecosystem Security via Perennial Grains in the Policy Forum of the journal Science. ((Glover, J., Reganold, J., Bell, L., Borevitz, J., Brummer, E., Buckler, E., Cox, C., Cox, T., Crews, T., Culman, S., DeHaan, L., Eriksson, D., Gill, B., Holland, J., Hu, …
Why are there no perennial grain crops? That’s the provocative question posed by a recent paper in Evolutionary Applications written by three scientists working at The Land Institute. ((Van Tassel, D., DeHaan, L., & Cox, T. (2010). Missing domesticated plant forms: can artificial selection fill the gap? Evolutionary Applications DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-4571.2010.00132.x)) Whose institutional mission, of …
Some heirloom tomatoes resist late blight, others not so much. Overweight or obese Americans at 68%, and holding steady. No epidemic, say free-thinkers. “No wonder kids are gaining weight.” But they aren’t, see above. (Where’s that sarc-mark when you need it?) Hydroelectric scheme to save Ifugao rice terraces, cut carbon emissions. W-w-w? Climate Change and …