Denise Costich, who has just retired as head of the CIMMYT genebank, gives us a bit of the back story to a paper we included in a recent Brainfood:
Thanks for the mention of our Dry Chain work… the first time I heard about drying beads was at my very first AGM in Rome in 2012. That was a key introduction to this technology for me. It was there in my “knowledge base” when we first began to tackle the problem of seed storage in remote locations without electricity – the community seed reserves and farmers’ corn cribs of the Western Highlands of Guatemala.
AGM stands for Annual Genebank Meeting. The managers of the CGIAR genebanks have been organizing them since 2012.