Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Scientists at Warwick University’s Crop Centre have examined “96 of the world’s onion varieties” for resistance to basal rot (caused by the ubiquitous Fusarium oxysporum) and their ability to form close relationships with certain beneficial fungi. The press release doesn’t go into any detail, such as which varieties top the lists, or anything useful like …
Here, as our informant put it, is “today’s chapter in a seemingly never-ending story”. The state legislature of North Carolina in the United States is minded to cut all funding to the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund. That’s short-sighted and a great shame. Tobacco, unlike, say, opium poppy, is not an easy crop, to grow …
The latest version of Google Earth has 3D trees! Just a few cities’ parks, a couple of wild sites (rainforest, mangroves…) and a reforestation project for now, but surely more to come. I look forward to seeing the world’s great field genebanks in 3D in due course, such as the coconut genebank in Ivory Coast …
I was a bit flippant a few days ago about the costs of genebanks. And I felt guilty enough about it, especially after Jeremy’s recent piece at Vaviblog on the value of germplasm collections, to look into it a bit more. It all started with an article in IITA’s R4D Review which looked at the …
Continue reading “The dismal science and dismal science writing”
An intriguing press release from the American Chemical Society says that in some respects black rice is better than blueberries: “Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries, but with less sugar and more fiber and vitamin E antioxidants,” said Zhimin Xu, …