Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
First there was Carolina Gold. Now there is “upland red bearded” or “Moruga Hill” rice. Mr. Dennis had heard about hill rice…through the culinary organization Slow Food USA and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, the group that brought back Carolina Gold in the early 2000s. He’d also heard stories about it from elderly cooks in …
To the standard hymn-sheet of crop failures associated with genetic erosion we can now add an example from livestock. A mutation in a single Holstein bull — Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, who happens to father super-productive daughters — also causes spontaneous abortion. The mutation spread through the US dairy industry and caused $420 million in …
Continue reading “The perils of reduced diversity: animal edition”
Slate puts a fork in, well, the fork. Gotta love the Prairies. Mysterious Cattle Deaths Caused by GMO Grass: not GMO, not particularly mysterious. Gotta love the Spice Islands. How scientists can extract impact from their navel-gazing research. Gotta love online mapping platforms. Another journal starts a blog. Horses in agriculture, and history. Gotta love …
The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it? No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are! Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest …
…Caroline [Chartrand] and about 100 other indigenous farmers and gardeners—along with students and community members—gathered in March on the White Earth reservation in Northern Minnesota to share knowledge, stories, and, of course, seeds. Don’t know how we missed this from yes! magazine a couple of weeks back. In particular as one of the stories was …
Continue reading “The 8th annual Great Lakes Indigenous Farming Conference passes us by”