Nibbles: Innovative farmers, Feed resources, Sweet potato biscuits, Vegetable pests & gardens, Rooting for tubers, Kew collecting, Seed systems, Jess Fanzo, Blogging, Wild foods, Perennial crops, Ghana cacao, Sugar book review

Oh, bloody hell, you mean there’s an International Farmer Innovation Day, and it was yesterday? I suppose agroecology is a form of farmer innovation? And here you can hear the very voices of innovative farmers.
Sometimes farmers don’t innovate enough.
And sometimes they need a helping hand from the media. Or ACIAR. Or WFP.
Sometimes, though, they just go it alone, ploughing a lonely furrow like Rhizowen Radix.
Kew seed bankers visit the Caribbean. Nice gig if you can get it. Any CWR?
Wonder if they’ve read CTA’s new dossier on seed systems. Start here.
The Jess & Jeremy Show goes on the road. All food security and nutrition, all the time.
Is this why Jess blogs?
I wonder if Jess would agree with Jo Robinson on wild foods. Probably.
Whatever, as long as it’s perennial!
CIAT gets its climate-smart cacao work in Ghana into The Economist.
Well of course you need sugar in your cocoa.

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.