- The Coffee Science Foundation is the science foundation we all need.
- In search of Bob’s ganja.
- Vox vid on saving crop diversity. Pretty good, except for that thorn apple thing.
- GIZ support for the CIP genebank.
- Ex-CIP breeder works with VIR to bring wild potatoes to Cornell.
- Or friend Lex Thomson on why Fiji is a hibiscus hotspot.
- Celebrate European cereal diversity.
- Dan Barber on freeing the seed. The polarisation continues.
- The first British farmers walked there.
- CIMMYT rebuttal of a paper saying European wheat varieties are decreasing in their climate resilience.
- Celery was once a luxury.
Don Barber on freeing the seed
Exceptional graphics. It says: “From the Big Bang of agriculture around 10,000 B.C. until a hundred or so years ago, farmers saved their seeds to plant for the next season. Thousands of varieties evolved across the globe, constantly adapting to their environment and to the preferences of the culture and cuisine. … Nineteenth-century American farmers benefited from this diversity of vegetables, grains and fruits.”
What it does not go on the say is that this `benefit’ was a result of the fantastic efforts of the USDA Plant Introduction system searching the world for the best varieties (not, note, the most variation) of just about every crop from a very wide range of countries. Although the meaning of `rape’ has since changed to include the concept of force, the original Latin was “to snatch, to grab, to carry off”: an almost exact description of what Meyer and Fairchild and Popenoe did starting more than a century ago when there were no laws or treaties to prevent them. It was this system of varietal introduction that was the major benefit to US farming rather than `free’ seed management by early US farmers.