Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
“Never have so many people who plant and consume maize, now and in the future, owed so much to a single person…We value what you have accomplished and future generations of humans will be more food secure because of your service.”
Suketoshi Taba, breeder at CIMMYT, has retired. Awaiting the memoirs …
Berry go Round, the botany blog carnival, is up at Moss Plants & More. Jessica Budke has done a fine job of rounding up the best botany blogging on the web; pop over and take a look. Next month’s host is Bora Zivkovic at Blog Around the Clock. Maybe some of those posts about control of flowering will find a home. Submit here, as usual.
Thanks to Amanda for sending us this photo of one of the exhibits at the Opium Museum at Chiang Saen, Thailand, which is in the middle of the Golden Triangle. A nice way of displaying variation in local knowledge about agricultural practices, in this case the cropping calendar. It was not accompanied, alas, by a similar display of differences in crop or variety menus, alas. But one can imagine how that too could be made rather attractive.
Great video from the Breadfruit Institute on the importance of that fruit in Hawaii.
Philippine National Genebank, a set by Global Crop Diversity Trust on Flickr.
Last Friday, under the upgrading project we mentioned that same day, the Filipino national genebank’s three transformers were adapted to handle the increased power demand. Early Saturday morning the power unfortunately failed. When it came back on, the fire started, perhaps due to a wiring fault. The 2nd floor was destroyed. That housed the in vitro lab, with duplicates of collections of banana, taro, sweet potato and yams which are also maintained in the field. The 1st floor is ok, except for some flooding damage from the fire engines, which affected chemicals and some equipment in the molecular lab. Some data has also been lost. Thankfully, there were no casualties. Our best wishes to the staff for a rapid recovery from this calamity.
CORRECTION: The 2nd floor of the building housed the molecular and cytological characterization labs, as well as the in vitro conservation unit and the documentation unit, library and reseach staff offices. The 1st floor has the in vitro research lab, seed research lab, morphological characterization lab and more research staff offices.
