- Q&A with Susan Bragdon of Seeds for All on the importance of agrobiodiversity and small farmers.
- Going wild for finger millet in Kenya.
- There’s maybe a previously unknown variety of cacao.
- Brazilian germplasm collection data online.
- A very Fertile Crescentic view of agricultural origins.
- Antidote to above.
- Ft Collins USDA genebank in the (local) news.
Ft Collins: This starts with: “As climate change jeopardizes the world’s doomsday seed vault near the North Pole…”. But the current threat to the Svalbard vault is not at all result of climate change but of a botched design and construction. The vault location gets snow cover every year but, importantly, snow melt also every year – lots of it as there is a long slope above the vault. This has been going on since probably the start of the Holocene. Subsurface water running downhill every summer enters the entrance tunnel and inevitably freezes when it hit the permafrost. The designer should have a) sloped the entrance tunnel slightly upwards (as in the local coal mine entrances) rather than steeply downwards; b) or made very certain the entrance tunnel was watertight (as it evidently is not). At the moment the vault resembles a camel: “a racehorse designed by a committee”. There are several other problems that a competent designer could have avoided – not least the door frames freezing to the doors: a death trap.