RCVS Knowledge, the charity partner of the UK’s Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, has awarded its inaugural Plowright Prize to Professor William Ivan Morrison of the University of Edinburgh for his research combating the cattle disease East Coast fever. Ivan Morrison started his career at ILRAD, a predecessor of ILRI, where he worked from 1975 to 1990, leading, and building up, ILRAD’s research program on East Coast fever for many of those years. Continue reading
Category Archives: Europe
Belgium confirms two cases of African swine fever in wild boar
The Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain (FASFC) has confirmed ASF in 2 wild boar near the Belgian village of Étalle, in the southern province Luxembourg. Continue reading
Mobile pastoralism—A 10,000-year-old practice still robust, if threatened, in the Mediterranean today
Mobile Pastoralism in the Mediterranean: Arguments and evidence for policy reform and its role in combating climate change presents over 100 arguments detailing the benefits of mobile pastoralism to biodiversity, carbon storage, wildfire prevention, climate change, food security and quality, traditional ecological knowledge, rural economies, tourism—to name a few. Continue reading
DFID/UKAid fund British, ILRI, African genetics research to advance African livestock development
During the visit Ms Mordaunt also announced plans to develop the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health, which is based in both Edinburgh and Nairobi. The centre uses the most recent scientific advances in genetics and genomics that are being used by farmers in the UK and apply these to help smallholder dairy and poultry farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Continue reading
No mean feat: Putting reindeer and goat (and parts thereof) on holiday tables in the Arctic and Africa
No mean feat: Putting reindeer and goat and chicken (and parts thereof) on Christmas tables in the Arctic and Africa. Continue reading
Fighting climate change in a post-modernist world of pop art politics—Opinion by Phil Thornton
Phil Thornton leads CGIAR research on institutions and policies for climate-resilient food systems. He makes the case for better and closer scientist-citizen engagement in an opinion piece published this week in the wake of this year’s national political election results in Australia, the UK and the USA. Continue reading
Belgian artist’s 20-year chicken breeding project makes artistic, environmental (maybe philosophical) statement
Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen has created a chicken with genes from different chicken breeds from all over the world. Now he’s bringing it to America to help diversify our poultry. Continue reading
Goat meat—which makes up 60% of red meat worldwide—begins to go mainstream in the UK
Goat meat makes up 60 per cent of red meat worldwide, but the UK is one of the few places in the world where it’s not commonly eaten. That is slowly changing. Goat meat, kid, is in fashion. It . . . will soon be on supermarket shelves. Continue reading
Got milk? It may have built Europe’s long-run economies–The Economist
The Economist magazine recently ran a piece on research indicating that the ability to digest milk may explain how Europe got rich (28 Mar 2015). Continue reading
Europe’s ‘milk revolution’: First Neolithic cheese-making, then a genetic mutation allowing lactose persistence
Oscypek, a ‘must taste’ when visiting Polish mountains, is the most famous cheese in Poland today; it is made from salted sheep milk, smoked and formed in traditional wooden forms (photo credit: Tom Karas/PolishFoodInfo.com). In 2011, Mélanie Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that early farmers, … Continue reading