Posted on by Luigi Guarino

Nibbles: SDG funding, GBIF RoI, Food system revitalisation, Bean Power, British baked beans, Cock beer, Access Agriculture, SCANR, Nuts, Hawaii, USDA livestock, Norway livestock, SPC, and WorldVeg genebanks, Millet ambassador, Mango orchards, Wild foods, Degraded lands, Orphan crops, PPB, Biofortification, Ugali, Variety ID, Variety definitions

  1. The SDGs need proper long-term financing, say Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and co-authors. Maybe he’d like to have a look at the the Crop Trust’s endowment fund for SDG 2.5?
  2. There’s a 15x return on investment from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)? Ok, do Genesys next.
  3. Want to revitalize the food system? Think lentils, bananas, kale and walnuts. My take? Why stop there?
  4. I mean, there’s all sorts of cool pulses besides lentils, nice as they are.
  5. Really no end to them.
  6. Want some cock beer with your Lincolnshire beans? I bet you do.
  7. Shout out for the Access Agriculture farmer-to-farmer educational video platform from the Seed System Newsletter. Nothing on walnuts, alas. Or cock beer.
  8. As we’re on online resources, there’s also the Support Centre for Agriculture and Nutrition Research (SCANR). It “connects researchers with resources and guidance for carrying out interdisciplinary research related to agriculture, food systems, nutrition, and health.” I wonder what it has to say about walnuts.
  9. Nut genebank gets an upgrade in Oregon. No, not walnuts, alas. It’s Miller time!
  10. Lots of genebank action in Hawaii too.
  11. Livestock also getting the genebank treatment in the US.
  12. But not just in the US: Norway too. Love these back-from-the-brink stories.
  13. The regional genebank for the Pacific is one of my favourites.
  14. It’s up there with that of the World Vegetable Centre, which is getting a write-up in the New Yorker, of all places.
  15. Of course you can have community-level genebanks too. Here are two examples from India: conserving millets and mangoes.
  16. Maybe there should be more genebanks for wild food species, but these cool in situ conservation stories will do for now.
  17. Investing in community farming projects can revitalise degraded lands.
  18. Those farming project don’t have to involve orphan crops, but it wouldn’t hurt.
  19. You could do participatory plant breeding on them, couldn’t you. This book says that be just the ticket for rural revitalisation. Lots of revitalisation in these Nibbles.
  20. They would help with malnutrition where maize biofortification hasn’t worked so well, for example.
  21. Maize? Maize needs to be decolonized, not biofortified.
  22. Extension workers need to be better at identifying different crop varieties. IITA is on the case, but doesn’t seem to have thought about putting the data on GBIF. Walnuts next?
  23. Wait, what’s a variety?

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