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Nibbles: Amazon, Aquaculture, Bees, ICTs, Food prices, Dates, Cats, Taro
29 08 2008 Not so pristine after all.Farming the sturgeon.Colony Collapse Disorder 101. And how floral scents affect pollinator behaviour.Presentation on how mobile phones are changing rural livelihoods.Urban food gardens to combat high food prices in South Africa. And a different approach in Madagascar.Getting dates in Saudi Arabia is becoming difficult.“Winged” cats.The importance of taro in Hawaii. Thanks, [...]
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Adding value to agriculture
29 08 2008 DEFINITION: Agriculture, value added (% of GDP). Agriculture corresponds to ISIC divisions 1-5 and includes forestry, hunting, and fishing, as well as cultivation of crops and livestock production. Value added is the net output of a sector after adding up all outputs and subtracting intermediate inputs. It is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of [...]
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Lost in genebank database hell
29 08 2008 Navigating around germplasm databases can be a frustrating experience. A posting on CropWildRelativesGroup alerted me to a Science Daily piece on tomato genomics which mentioned the wild relative Lycopersicon pennellii (or Solanum pennellii, but I’m not going there, at least not today). But how many accessions of this species are conserved ex situ? And where is [...]
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Nibbles: Amazon, Aquaculture, Bees, ICTs, Food prices, Dates
29 08 2008 Not so pristine after all.Farming the sturgeon.Colony Collapse Disorder 101. And how floral scents affect pollinator behaviour.Presentation on how mobile phones are changing rural livelihoods.Urban food gardens to combat high food prices in South Africa. And a different approach in Madagascar.Getting dates in Saudi Arabia is becoming difficult.
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Nibbles: Poppies, Gardening, Milk, Grapes, Genebanks, Meat, Biotech, IK, Plant health
28 08 2008 Dropping the poppy.Gardening on windowsills and along roadsides.Cooling camel milk. Via.Fingerprinting grapes.“The seed banks that are run by agribusiness corporations would be a costly pursuit for the government and farmers.” Where to start responding to this? Thanks, Jeff.Further evidence of food price crisis.“What does biodiversity mean to Syngenta?“Traditional healer goes online. Via.Videos from Global Plant [...]
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SINGER maps crop wild relatives
28 08 2008 Putting the new SINGER interface through its paces, I find that it can do something interesting that GRIN cannot. Or at least I can’t see a way of doing it, let me know if you can. Below is a screenshot from SINGER showing a Google Map of the distribution of all wild Arachis accessions that [...]
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Nibbles: Poppies, Gardening, Milk, Grapes, Genebanks, Meat, Biotech, IK
28 08 2008 Dropping the poppy.Gardening on windowsills and along roadsides.Cooling camel milk. Via.Fingerprinting grapes.“The seed banks that are run by agribusiness corporations would be a costly pursuit for the government and farmers.” Where to start responding to this? Thanks, Jeff.Further evidence of food price crisis.“What does biodiversity mean to Syngenta?“Traditional healer goes online. Via.
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Fishy business
28 08 2008 I missed this when it came out a couple of days ago, but a study by Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia shows how small-scale fishers are short changed by “well-intentioned eco-labelling initiatives and ill-conceived fuel subsidies”. I’d expect no less from Pauly, who has always been a champion of artisanal fisheries. Industrial [...]
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Tangled Bank 112
28 08 2008 There was a bit of a mix up over the blog carnival Tangled Bank, which was supposed to appear last week, while its organizer was swanning around the Galapagos, presumably with other things on his mind. Well it is up now, with a couple of treats. One, alas, is broken. Tangled Banks says that “insects [...]
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Nibbles: Small kine, Cedar, Coffee, Cows (again), Niger, Citrus disease
28 08 2008 Mini-cows: Cheaper by the pound, but more expensive by the head.Lebanese icon imperilled.Birds protect coffee from coffee berry borer.Cows (m)aligned. Via.Jessica discovers millet and a grain bank (food, not seed).A new disease threatens citrus in Florida. Yay!
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SINGER’s new tune
27 08 2008 After my intemperate comment about SINGER the other day, I’m very happy to pass on the news that the new SINGER website is now online at http://singer.cgiar.org. According to the announcement made by Bioversity International, the new SINGER has the following features:GIS maps using Google technology.Users are able to search accessions using Google Maps.Presentation of [...]
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Nibbles: Small kine, Cedar, Coffee, Cows (again)
27 08 2008 Mini-cows: Cheaper by the pound, but more expensive by the head.Lebanese icon imperilled.Birds protect coffee from coffee berry borer.Cows (m)aligned. Via.
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SINGER’s new tune
27 08 2008 After my intemperate comment about SINGER the other day, I’m very happy to pass on the news that the new SINGER website is now online at http://singer.cgiar.org. According to the announcement made by Bioversity International, the new SINGER has the following features:GIS maps using Google technology.Users are able to search accessions using Google Maps.Presentation of data [...]
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Nibbles: Small kine
27 08 2008 Mini-cows: Cheaper by the pound, but more expensive by the head.
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Another feel-good crop wild relative story
26 08 2008 When I saw news stories a short while back about a new peanut variety called Tifguard, famous for having resistance to both peanut root-knot nematode and tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV), the main question I had was where the resistance(s) came from. So I consulted our resident peanut expert, and it turns out that the [...]
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Nibbles: Extension, Seed, Vegetables, Sushi, Beetroot
25 08 2008 Talking to farmers. Gotta love it.ASTA’s Guide to Seed Management Practices. Need to register, but it’s not a big deal.The next Oxford Symposium will take place at St Catz on 12-14 September 2008. The Topic is Vegetables. Jeremy will be there.Fishy diversity … and not in a good way.Everything you ever wanted to know about [...]
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Nibbles: Extension, Seed, Vegetables
25 08 2008 Talking to farmers. Gotta love it.ASTA’s Guide to Seed Management Practices. Need to register, but it’s not a big deal.The next Oxford Symposium will take place at St Catz on 12-14 September 2008. The Topic is Vegetables. Jeremy will be there.
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Soil: don’t treat it like dirt
25 08 2008 That headline, seen on a few big ol’ pickup trucks in the US, only really works in the US, where people do have a strange habit of referring to soil as dirt. But pop on over to National Geographic magazine this month for a full discussion of the state of US soil. It’s the basis [...]
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Slight mess
23 08 2008 I spent the afternoon upgrading the engine that powers this site, and that might have been a mistake. Two things don’t work. Latest Posts over on the right now shows Nibbles, those little collections of links. It shouldn’t, and it didn’t used to. I can’t figure that out right now. And the Map for geo-referenced [...]
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Nibbles: Wheat disease, Vanilla, Market regulation, Mixtures
23 08 2008 Yay! A new wheat disease answers Jeremy’s prayers.Tahitian vanilla; hybrid a long way from home.Small scale sales stomped on.Mixtures kinda sorta better, depending.Night soil kinda sorta good, depending.
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Nibbles: Wheat disease, Vanilla, Market regulation, Mixtures
22 08 2008 Yay! A new wheat disease answers Jeremy’s prayers.Tahitian vanilla; hybrid a long way from home.Small scale sales stomped on.Mixtures kinda sorta better, depending.
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Natural = fashionable = good
22 08 2008 Did your heart skip a beat when you read the news that a researcher had turned a byproduct of biodiesel into fish that make people healthier? It seems to have been picked up all over the place. In essence, making biodiesel results in large quantities of crude glycerol, which needs expensive purification before you can [...]
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Nibbles: Wheat disease, Vanilla, Market regulation
22 08 2008 Yay! A new wheat disease answers Jeremy’s prayers.Tahitian vanilla; hybrid a long way from home.Small scale sales stomped on.
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Arrant about (agricultural) biodiversity
22 08 2008 There’s something happening out there; what it is ain’t exactly clear.Over the past few days several people seem to have been talking in mystified terms about biodiversity; what it is, why it gets so little respect, what to do about that, whether it matters anyway. On Monday Luigi nibbled an IEED paper on biodiversity and [...]
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Nibbles: Honey, Records, Fowl, Fungi
21 08 2008 GIS used to manage production and marketing of honey.Silly season story number 1 and number 2.Avian flu threatens Turkey’s Hacıkadın chickens.Lybia has truffles? From the new NWFP-Newsletter.
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