- “È curioso che il grano Cappelli, ora diventato un simbolo della “pasta da gourmet”, fosse una volta il comune grano della pasta di tutti i giorni, e che venga da alcuni considerato “autoctono” quando in realtà è una varietà tunisina.” Curious indeed.
- A woman’s crop? Not as straightforward as it may sound.
- State of the World’s Plants symposium, 11-12 May.
- Above will no doubt consider crop wild relatives such as the peanut’s.
- More on the urban vegetable gardens of Istanbul.
- Tree DGs in the garden getting coffee. On International Forest Day.
- The “Bernie Sanders” vision of biofortification.
- Cowpea to get a genome.
- Q&A with John Torgrimson of Seed Savers Exchange.
- The resilience of rice: “You never find a crop that can span this latitude and altitude.” Really? Wheat?
- Cacao and coffee have a microbial terroir.
- Crop mixes are geographically stable.
- Prof. Kathy Willis of Kew on Feeding the World, including using crop wild relatives. IRRI Kew genebanks featured.
- Denmark interprets EU law to allow seed saving.
Seed Savers Exchange: “Since the early 1600s there have been 20,000 different varieties of apples documented in North America. Today, we think there are a little more than 4,000 varieties remaining.” This is given as evidence for decline in diversity. It verges on being meaningless. The real useful message is how many apple varieties were in North America in 1491? None. The way to get varietal diversity and varietal quality is to introduce varieties from all over the place, if at all possible going for varietal quality rather than quantity of genetic diversity. Try everything everywhere and discard the duds. Only then do you need breeding to refine the good varieties (with, if possible, access to global diversity). The massive success of US agriculture followed this pattern: it could be a very strong model for other countries.