Nibbles: Organic Greek, Mexican maize heirloom, Community seedbank, Arizona chilli, African maize, Chinese trifecta, Sex-changing solanum, Breeding oddities, Breeding costing tool, Chicken project, WFP, Cattle book, Agroforestry database, Minor cereals, Reviewing genebanks, Wheat breeding, Rice seeds

Greek organic farm resists.
Communities getting into seed banking all over.
Saving zapalote chico.
Would you like chiltepines with that?
No zapalote chico in South Africa, but lots of other maize.
Conserving agricultural biodiversity in China.
Including in Hainan.
At the same time, China restricts foreign access to human genome data.
Sexually plastic Australian wild tomato named at long last.
Breeding flavour crops.
And figuring out how much it will cost.
Interesting project on human-chicken interactions.
Veggie breeder wins World Food Prize.
New coffee table book on cattle in Africa.
Flagship agroforestry database gets new version. Anyone wanna test it for us?
Minor cereals in Europe are anything but minor.
And lots are conserved in Europe’s increasingly scrutinized genebanks.
Meanwhile, a major cereals keeps getting the attention it also needs.
“The candidate markers could be used by any rice genebank to potentially identify varieties with seeds that are particularly short- or long-lived in storage. Viability monitoring intervals could then be customized by variety.” And wheat?

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.