Nibbles: USDA maize genebank, Apple breeding, Seed conservation, Soil map, Scoring supermarkets, DNA barcoding, Stone Age Hypoxis, Hybrid wine, Lost crops, Boswellia, Leucokaso, Species mixtures

Nice student video on the genebank and breeding programmes at Iowa State.
Speaking of breeding programmes and videos, here’s Sean Myles on his work on apples in Canada.
Seed conservation legend Richard Ellis on what climate change is doing to seed quality.
An amazing new global soil properties map is open for business.
Scoring supermarkets for the human suffering they represent.
The future of DNA barcoding…is here.
Cotton 101.
Strong evidence of Middle Stone Age tuber cooking in southern Africa.
French wine growers dip a cautious toe into the grapewine interspecific genepool.
Yields of mixtures of now “lost” native American crops comparable to those of maize.
The canonical yearly frankincense story in honour of Epiphany.
Biblical white olive makes a comeback in Italy.
Useful update of mixture studies.

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.