Nibbles: Rescue, Biofuels, Striga, Dogs, Vegetable seed, Mulberry, Afghanistan, Aquaculture, Abaca

Global Crop Diversity Trust “on track” to reinvigorate 100,000 varieties, “one of the largest and most successful biological rescue efforts ever undertaken”. Jeremy says: “Kariba Dam.”
More reasons to go perennial. And native to boot.
Farmers go crazy with Striga-resistant maize.
Design-a-pooch just around the corner, thanks to genome sequencing. Well it was all worth it then, wasn’t it.
AVRDC teaches Solomons farmers to save seeds, grandma to suck eggs.
Mulberries cryopreserved. Yay! Now for that productivity.
Turning grapes to raisins, swords to plowshares, in Afghanistan.
District Fishery Officer (In-charge) tells of guy “farming in a floodplain adjacent to Coler Beel under the same upazila and earns a net profit of Taka 9 lakh after selling 80 metric tons of harvested fish from the Beel last year.”
Abaca: quantity or quality?

A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
There’s diversity in asparagus too.
Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
Even big international genebanks.
Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But some are in trouble.
Though others are coming back.