Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Are you working in a university which includes or is intending to include a course on food composition in its curriculum? well, if so, you might be interested in this recent announcement from INFOODS coordinator Ruth Charrondiere on FAO’s nutrition listserv. I am pleased to announce that FAO/INFOODS is developing an e-learning course on food …
Continue reading “Food composition training materials planned”
A piece in ChinaDailyUSA wittily entitled Rice of Ages prompted some sleuthing. The gist of the piece is that there’s a traditional rice landrace in a small corner of Jiangxi province… A kind of rice that locals call Wuyuanzao has been grown in Wannian county in northeastern Jiangxi for more than 12,000 years. The age-old …
ICARDA is deservedly getting much traction with the press at the Doha climate change meeting with the report “Strategies for Combating Climate Change in Drylands Agriculture,” which it has produced in collaboration with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). A testament to great research over many years; and an …
Following up on our recent post drawing attention to the overall decline in micronutrients in fruit and veg, here’s a 2008 paper dealing specifically with wheat. Ming-Sheng Fang and colleagues looked at levels of minerals in grain harvested from one of the longest-running agricultural experiments in the world, the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. Not just grain, …
Continue reading “Wheat has become less nutritious since the mid-1960s”
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that one crop variety does disappear every single day. The question still remains: does it matter? After all, the variety that was just lost yesterday might be very similar to one that’s still out there today. That’s part of the reason why a group of French researchers …
Continue reading “The how and why of indicators of agricultural biodiversity”