Author: Luigi Guarino

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Not so sweet potatoes

And speaking of Facebook, which has somehow become the go-to place for fun agrobiodiversity stuff, get a load of this recent photo of “bush potato” from the Waltja Tjutangku Palyapayi Aboriginal Corporation.

bushpotato

Impressive, isn’t it? It’s Ipomoea costata, according to a commenter. And it reminded me of another recent Facebook post of a sweet potato wild relative, Ipomoea bolusiana, this time from southern Africa.

bolusiana

Thinking back to our earlier post today on domesticating promising wild plants, I wonder if anyone has actually tasted these tubers?

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Nibbles: Threatened foods, Extreme weather, Fancy pix, Mooney video, Traditional diets, Untraditional diets,

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Underutilized for a reason?

Over on Facebook, I half-facetiously commented on a piece entitled Global food shortage? How advanced breeding could domesticate 50,000 wild, edible plants by saying that if any of those plants were really any good, they would probably have been domesticated already. I’m not entirely sure I believe that, but I liked Rob Wagner’s and Ian Godwin’s reactions, and I hope they don’t mind me sharing them here. There’s more to adding a new crop to our agricultural menu than fancy breeding.

robwagner

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Featured: MGIS

Max Ruas of Bioversity says they’re still working on the MGIS ordering system:

The availability of ITC material is only visible once you are logged into MGIS. If logged, then, for ITC accessions available for distribution, a tiny basket appears on top right corner of the passport data. I agree it is not perfect and we will continue to improve the friendliness of the web site in the next iterations, in addition of new features in preparation such as cross reference.

Looking forward to the new iteration. In the meantime, when can we expect MGIS data in Genesys?