Nibbles: Seed savers, Lemons, Assam Rice, Striga control, Amaranth, Bearded pigs, Banana, Early nutrition

Seed savers: everyone’s got an angle, from Seeds of Hope and Change to Seed Bank Bingo.
Italian lemons enjoying a renaissance. In California, natch.
India registers Assam farmers’ traditional rice varieties. In other news, rice water “is also used as shampoo, according to community elders”.
US$9 million to “implement and evaluate four approaches” to controlling Striga in Africa. One day we’ll know.
Denver Botanic Gardens does amaranth.
Evolution of bearded pigs. Good to know. Good to eat?
Bioversity banana team guest blogs at Annals of Botany. But surely they have a blog of their own. No, wait…
Agriculture is bad for your health.

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.