Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The NY Times is the latest media outlet to freak out about Italian olives. There’s quite a lot to freak out about. Xylella fastidiosa, the bacterium that is believed to have caused serious damage to perhaps a million trees in Puglia, Italy’s heel, can be spread widely by insects and attacks a wide range of …
Image-Based Goat Breed Identification and Localization Using Deep Learning. Fancy maths can identify goat breeds from photos. Ok, cool, now what? AI Naturalists Might Hold the Key to Unlocking Biodiversity Data in Social Media Imagery. Fancy math can often identify common flowers on Flickr. Ok, cool, now what? FoodMine: Exploring Food Contents in Scientific Literature. …
Lawrence Haddad on how to start transforming the food system. Here’s an idea: CIMMYT genebank recognized for restoring agricultural diversity in Guatemala. And another. Cash transfers are better than more conventional interventions for malnutrition, but they have to be real money. But, of course, they don’t always work. That’s one of many development myths listed …
We’ve mostly (though not entirely) steered clear of the Xylella crisis in Italy, because it all seems to futile. I was in Puglia earlier this summer and it was heartbreaking to see entire olive groves dead and dying, and for what? Because of fear and mistrust all around, and an absolute absence of any kind …
Just a quick follow-up to my post a few days back on the Madrid botanical garden. There is a small shop at the entrance, and you can get some pretty weird plants there, like baobabs, for instance, of all things. Not, alas, any of the local grapes and olives on display within. Which seems like …