Brainfood: Lima bean network, Obake rice, Feral Canadian apples, African plum seed systems, Canary Island potatoes, Wild potatoes & late blight, Wild lentils & drought, Wild grapes & salt, Robusta core, Ethiopian barley diversity, De novo wheat domestication

Nibbles: Singapore genebank, Tianjin genebank, Food system transformation, ENCORE biodiversity tool, Italian olive troubles, Agroecology map, Indian millets

  1. Nice write-up of the Singapore Botanic Gardens Seed Bank, which opened back in 2019 to not much fanfare.
  2. The Tianjin Agricultural Germplasm Resources Bank has just opened, to much fanfare.
  3. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food has a report out on Beacons of Hope: Stories of Food Systems Transformation During COVID-19. All far downstream from genebanks, but crop diversity makes an appearance in the form of Rwanda’s Gardens for Health International, for example.
  4. The ENCORE tool, created by Natural Capital Finance Alliance and UNEP-WCMC, can help assess any potential risks to natural capital which may be caused by planned investments by financial institutions. Well, now there’s a biodiversity module. Where’s the agrobiodiversity module though?
  5. Speaking of natural capital, Italy’s olive harvest is threatened by more than that nasty Xylella disease.
  6. Is agroecology an answer to all the gloom and doom? I don’t know, but here’s a map of the experiences of people who think so.
  7. India definitely thinks millets are an answer.

Nibbles: Forgotten crops special issue, Coffee fingerprinting, Three Sisters, Food gardening, Magic mushrooming, Genebanks in Ukraine, Colombia, Australia, China

  1. Forthcoming special issue of Plants, People, Planet on forgotten crops. Get your paper in about how they’re under-represented in genebanks.
  2. Or about how they need to be DNA fingerprinted, like the USDA is doing for coffee.
  3. I wonder if there is a forgotten crops version of the Three Sisters. Answers on a postcard, please.
  4. Forget about genebanks, grow those forgotten crops in your garden. Rebelliously.
  5. Forget about forgotten crops, how about forgotten mushrooms?
  6. Lest we forget the Ukrainian genebank.
  7. No way to forget the Future Seeds genebank.
  8. Australians are not being allowed to forget about genebanks, plant and animal. With video goodness. There’s hope yet.
  9. Meanwhile, in China

Brainfood: AnGR in the US, Cloning, Reindeer diversity, Lactose persistence evolution, Fish menus, Vanilla agroforestry, Pollinators in India & the US, Dogs & people

Brainfood: First farmers, First dogs, First olives, Food sharing, Seed longevity, Seed germination, Conservation & climate change, Urban gardens, Seed movement, Machine learning, Web crawling, Imaging spectroscopy