Bugmeal?

While I have read some of the people at ScienceBlogs on a daily basis for months, I still have not plumbed the depths of what’s available in terms of good reading.  I recently came across Shifting Baselines, a good ecology/conservation biology blog written by Jennifer Jacquet, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, [...]

Learning not to burn

As the dry season progresses in Trinidad, smoke becomes an ever-present feature.  While people blame “bush fires” on spontaneous combustion, most are either arson or agricultural fires.  While it always bothered me to see the landscape burn, it was the especially intense fire season of 1987 that really opened my eyes to the problem.
The Agricultural [...]

Yoghurt containers as mini-greenhouses

Willem van Cottem of Desertification has a very interesting post about the use of transparent containers as mini-greenhouses. You can use them to get seedlings started indoors in the Spring, or in arid environments (since it cuts down on water usage prior to transplantation). They are also useful for transporting the seedlings.
I would [...]

Bt cotton and the evolution of resistance

Over the last decade, genetically modified crops have become widespread in agriculture. One of the more successful of these are Bt crops - transgenic plants that express genes derived from Bacillus thuringensis. These genes allow the plants to produce toxins which specifically affect certain groups of insects. Since these plants do not [...]

Guardian of the grasses

Anoop Sindhu and colleagues report on a gene that may have played a key role in the evolution of grasses. The gene, Hm1, provides resistance against Cochliobolus carbonum race 1 (CCR1), a fungus that is capable of attacking and killing corn at any stage of its development (images of CCR1 infection). While CCR1 [...]

Beginnings of agriculture in Europe

In the Winter 2007 issue of Planet Earth, Glynis Jones, Caitlin Buck,Mike Charles, Tom Higham and Sue Colledge talk about their project to date the spread of agriculture into and across Europe using the appearance of cereal grains. They found that agriculture spread rapidly from Greece (where it first entered Europe from the Middle East) [...]

New Michael Pollan book

Michael Pollan has a new book out: In Defense of Food.  From an interview with Grist:
The new book is called In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. It’s a book that really grew out of questions I heard from readers after Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was basically so how do you apply all this? Now that [...]

Fruit species blog

Fruit Species is a blog devoted to fruits from all over the world.  So far, there are 19 species on the page, including avocado, guava, rambutan (which I tasted for the first time a couple weeks ago) and soursop.  The descriptions include common and scientific names of the species and several paragraphs of information about [...]

Indian fruit genebank threatened

Jeremy at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog reports that the government of Jharkand State in India plans to bulldoze the field genebanks of the Horticulture and Agro Forestry Research Programme in order to build housing for Members of Parliament and Members of the Legislative Assembly.  At risk are
5253 plants of different varieties of mango and litchi, 6,500 [...]

Serendipity and the origin of crops

In Puerto Rican dry forest, one of the most striking dichotomies is between forests dominated by native species and forests dominated by exotic Leucaena leucocephala. Most forests that have regrown on abandoned agricultural land are dominated by Leucaena. The colonisation of these areas by native tree species is slow - either the native [...]