Nibbles: Plant Guardians, Peruvian Solanum, Sunflower genomics, California drought, Brazil drought, Sri Lankan tea, Minnesota wine, Seed of Hope, Sugarcane engineering, King Cotton, Rubber boom

Do you want to be a Plant Guardian?
Some people are already getting busy guarding Solanum in Peru.
The sunflower family gets a molecular makeover.
What the California drought means for food.
And the one in Brazil for coffee.
And tea in Sri Lanka is also in trouble, though for once drought is not to blame.
Minnesota has a wine industry thanks to wild relatives. But I won’t hold that against them.
In today’s Seeds of X story, X=hope and the place is Aceh.
If sugarcane was a cold-tolerant oil-producing crop, would it still be sugarcane?
Cotton has a lot to answer for. Or rather, the people who grew it do. Or did. Oh crap.
Rubber too. Though not as much. I guess. Oh crap.

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.