Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Fancy a bamboo tour of China? Maybe these guys from Alabama will go. You can build with it, of course. Even help build a wall, perhaps. Rubber won’t be much good for that, I guess. But it has its uses. Always has. And then there’s cacao. Sustainable, of course. With all that that entails with …
Continue reading “Nibbles: Bamboo, Green Wall, Rubber, Cacao, Quinoa”
Lethal Yellowing doing for coconuts — and livelihoods — in Mozambique. And typhoons in the Philippines. Potted history of maize hybrids from 1998. Unusual rice and tomato species sequenced. The challenges of measuring the impact of nutrition interventions. Old interview with Michael Pollan on biodiversity and health resurfaces, maybe to coincide with the above. What …
“Productivism” skewered one last time. Until the next time. The Malagasy Bean Renaissance. No, really. The science of beer foam. Now there’s no excuse. Cocktails can be biodiverse too. You bet they can. CIAT’s new strategy makes a splash. Genebank front and centre. New ICIPE director tells all. She used to work at CIAT, did …
Let’s recap. First, the Quinoa Boom on the Bolivian Altiplano was A Good Thing. A backlash was, in retrospect, inevitable. Soon enough, it was A Bad Thing. Then, slowly, sense prevailed, and we were all, like, We Need More Data. Most recently, we’ve had It’s Complicated. So it’s interesting, don’t you think, that Alternet, which …
“You can trace the genetic makeup of most corn grown in the U.S., and in many other places around the world, to Hawaii.” There’s a GMO angle, but that’s frankly the least interesting thing about this. Disneyland protects really old date palm. Sweet. “A Hymn to Ninkasi.” Sumerian beer 101. Bronze Age beer: not quite …