Managing seed on the web
The ambition of the CoEx 1 project is to improve our understanding of the gap between (1) seed policies and laws and (2) farmers’ seed management practices. Such a gap is detrimental to the access and mobilization of a wide variety of seeds by farmers.
Intrigued? Speak French? There’s a webinar on the project today.
Feed on a better food system
I missed WWF’s report Bending the Curve: The Restorative Power of Planet-Based Diets when it came out in October last year, but the interview with one of the authors, Brent Loken, on the Feed podcast was an excellent way to catch up.
Well worth listening to the whole thing, and indeed reading the report. I really like it when complexity and nuance are embraced, and silver bullets eschewed. Here’s a few take-aways to whet your, ahem, appetite:
- Shift diets: it’s not that hard. Start by de-centering beef.
- Reform national dietary guidelines.
- Regulate marketing food to kids.
- And, speaking of marketing, learn how to make healthy food sexier.
- Cut waste.
Brainfood: Filbert genome, Weed evaluation, Cocoa bugs, Grass genes, Perennial ag, Forage quality, Forest gardens, Protected areas, Anthropocene, Pollinators, Neolithic burials, House mice
- The Corylus mandshurica genome provides insights into the evolution of Betulaceae genomes and hazelnut breeding. Yeah, but can it make Nutella better?
- Widely assumed phenotypic associations in Cannabis sativa lack a shared genetic basis. More work needed. Much more work.
- Dissecting industrial fermentations of fine flavour cocoa through metagenomic analysis. There’s a core of microorganisms in common even in very distant farms. Though I suspect the fun will be in the others.
- Widespread lateral gene transfer among grasses. Especially in rhizomatous species. That should relieve the anxiety about genetic modification, right? Right.
- An agroecological vision of perennial agriculture. Wait, what about those rhizomatous perennial grasses, though?
- Comparison of benchtop and handheld near‐infrared spectroscopy devices to determine forage nutritive value. The handheld devices are just fine. How long before Alice asks Chris for some for the ILRI genebank? To test on rhizomatous grasses, of course.
- Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity. Forest gardens in the Pacific NW still have more diversity 150 years after their indigenous managers were forced off them.
- The minimum land area requiring conservation attention to safeguard biodiversity. 44% of terrestrial area, home to 1.8 billion people. Presumably including a lot of indigenous managers.
- People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years. 75% of terrestrial area, in fact.
- Protection of honeybees and other pollinators: one global study. Focus on habitat loss and pesticides. And more monitoring.
- A sexual division of labour at the start of agriculture? A multi-proxy comparison through grave good stone tool technological and use-wear analysis. Guess which gender was buried with tools associated with interpersonal violence.
- Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Well, hence the name, right?
- Commentary: Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future. Don’t warn. Resist.
Nibbles: Emissions, Anthromes, S Asian farming origins, Old seeds, Chestnut, Canadian heirlooms, ABS newsletter
- Food contributes 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions.
- How we got to the above.
- And a focus on how farming started in South Asia in particular.
- A long-term seed experiment carries on.
- Another chapter in the story of the comeback of the American chestnut?
- Want to help a heirloom make a comeback?
- There’s a newsletter on the law and policy behind all this stuff.