- What civil society said at the latest Governing Body meeting of the ITPGRFA earlier this month.
- Google Translate fail puts spotlight on the cruciferous crop I’ve always known as fiarielli but which is sometimes called rapini. Both names kinda suck.
- That’s one huge tomato.
- That’s one expensive spice.
- Rediscovering enset.
- Grassland biodiversity good for resilience to climate change.
- Global agriculture: here comes the data.
- Deconstructing organic. The word, that is.
- Empowering dalit farmers by recognizing their knowledge of seeds.
- That ancient underwater wheat DNA wasn’t so ancient after all. Maybe.
- It was migrants who forced the ancestors of the Pueblo people to move.
- Local adaptation in trees: what has it ever done for us?
- Another way to safeguard Syrian crop diversity.
The magic of Svalbard
A short distance from the North Pole, there is a Norwegian island called Spitsbergen. On this remote piece of dry land in the very boreal archipelago of Svalbard is the Global Seed Vault, the world’s underground seed store. Within the concrete walls of a warehouse built to withstand even a nuclear war are endangered seeds from around the world. Among them, until four years ago, there were 40 ancient black Peruvian corn grains that a student of agronomy from Cremona — only 16 years old — has now seen fit to make the cornerstone of his company: the agricultural startup of Carlo Maria Recchia.
That sounds easy enough, but Carlo Maria, selected by Coldiretti Giovani as one of Italy’s the most promising young farmers, had to insist to get those seeds, and not a little either. First, with his school, and then through the Ministry of Agriculture. “Then I spent two years multiplying the seeds so I could start to farm,” Carlo told The Food Makers. “Today I produce beer, biscuits, flour, and breadsticks and other products are coming.”
That’s my translation of a piece on StartUpItalia!. Which, yes, I’m afraid insists on the exclamation mark. And, yes, which I’m afraid is utter tosh.
Because there is just no way on earth that Carlo Maria got those black Peruvian maize seeds from Svalbard, Italian Ministry of Agriculture or no Italian Ministry of Agriculture. Only organizations that have deposited seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can withdraw them, and then only the ones they deposited. And only one organization has ever asked for its seeds back, just a few weeks ago. Making seeds of black Peruvian maize available to random farmers — no matter how young and promising — is just not what Svalbard does.
So I don’t know where Carlo Maria got his seeds. But I can guarantee that it wasn’t Svalbard. Genesys says there are 27 maize accessions from Peru with dark seeds, from the USDA collection. Maybe he got them from there, or from CIMMYT, and given that a lot of that material is safety duplicated in Svalbard, figured he would try to have a little of the stardust rub off on him.
Whatever. I wish him luck, the kid will probably go far. In politics if not farming.
Nibbles: Seed Hunter, Corn Palace, Rice domestication, Solomons cocoa, Simran Sethi book, Cucurbit diseases, Brazilian foodies, Ananas genome, GMOs in Argentina
- Seed Hunter visits genebank. Not many people hurt.
- I’d like to visit this Corn Palace.
- Rice domestication: not once, not twice, three times. Well, really, who’s to say maybe even more than that? Maybe even in Australia?
- Solomon Islands cacao wins award. Looking forward to tasting it one day. But is it certified?
- Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Giveaway.
- Researchers hoping to science the shit out of threat to Thanksgiving.
- Genetic resources and gastronomy in Brazil.
- Pineapple gets a genome.
- Sunflower saves soybean? What wizardry is this?
Sourcing the seeds of restoration
Are you involved in the restoration of degraded land? If so, Bioversity International has a survey for you. It’s all because Sustainable Development Goal 15 “affirms the earlier commitments to restore 150 million hectares of degraded landscapes and forest lands by 2020 and at least another 200 million hectares by 2030.” But how to get hold of all the seeds that will be needed? Yeah, not so easy, is it…
Brainfood: Wild maize, Elderberry phenolics, Barley & boron, Land sparing trifecta, Sustainable diets, Chinese apple diversity, Turkish okra diversity, Barcoding yams, Plant diversity levels, Biotic velocity
- Presence of Zea luxurians (Durieu and Ascherson) Bird in Southern Brazil: Implications for the Conservation of Wild Relatives of Maize. Well there’s a turnup for the books.
- Fruit Phenolic Composition of Different Elderberry Species and Hybrids. Some interspecific hybrids have high phenolics levels.
- Diversity in boron toxicity tolerance of Australian barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) genotypes. There’s variation beyond the 4 known boron tolerance loci.
- Agriculture and the threat to biodiversity in Sub-Saharan Africa. Intensification is good for biodiversity, but not yet.
- Land for Food & Land for Nature? The former, according to modelling. But it depends. See above.
- Wildlife-friendly farming increases crop yield: evidence for ecological intensification. Trifecta!
- Is a Cardio-Protective Diet Sustainable? A Review of the Synergies and Tensions Between Foods That Promote the Health of the Heart and the Planet. Yes, but it will take some work.
- Genetic diversity of Malus cultivars and wild relatives in the Chinese National Repository of Apple Germplasm Resources. The varieties from the former Soviet republics and Japan are different to each other and to the canonical European/North American/Chinese material.
- Genetic and phenotypic variation of Turkish Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L. Moench) accessions and their possible relationship with American, Indian and African germplasms. Turkish okra comes from all over the place.
- DNA barcoding of the main cultivated yams and selected wild species in the genus Dioscorea. 16/21 species I guess is a start.
- Plant responses to climatic extremes: within-species variation equals among-species variation. For a bunch of European grassland plants, within species variation in response to climate was as high as that among species.
- Biotic and Climatic Velocity Identify Contrasting Areas of Vulnerability to Climate Change. Tropical species can’t move fast enough.