- An ODAP detective story.
- Ancient maize gets a map.
- Diversity is the key to sustainable cacao.
- New Bioversity DG answers the tough questions.
- Be the first on your block with an unusual fruit tree.
- How to grow awesome carrot seed.
- The hard life of Nigerian wine tappers.
- Bringing back buckwheat in Bhutan.
- Annals of Botany to do halophytes.
- Come down to earth with the realization that most people have never heard of cowpea and cassava. Would they have heard of black-eyed peas and tapioca, though?
- Big report on urban malnutrition. Maybe cassava (see above) can help?
- The last orange grove in the San Fernando Valley. No word on what the variety might be.
- All about molasses.
- Indian tree breeding institute, and accompanying genebank, get a write-up.
- Yes, I know that I could have done a better job of pointing out the connections among some of these things, but it’s been a long week.
Hari Upadhyaya of ICRISAT genebank recognized by CSSA
Congratulations to Dr Hari Upadhyaya, head of the ICRISAT genebank, on being awarded the Frank N. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources by the Crop Science Society of America. If you’re going to the award breakfast, you’ll be able to hear Hari talk in person about “Crop germplasm to overcome challenges to global food and nutritional security.” If you’re not going, here’s a taste of what you’ll be missing. Well done, Hari!
Si huele a caña, tabaco y brea…
Our friend and colleague Colin Khoury knows a lot about crop wild relatives…
…but he’s a man of many parts, another one of which involves salsa dancing. I can’t locate a video of him strutting his stuff on a Cali dancefloor, but here’s the next best thing, his thoughts on the nexus of salsa and agrobiodiversity, courtesy one of CIAT’s myriad blogs.
The National Heirloom Exposition is here!
Please someone tell us that you’re at the National Heirloom Exposition at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa, California, and would like to write about it. More than 20,000 expected to attend, surely one of you wants to blog it for us?
Botanic gardens conserve crop diversity too
We forget sometimes, in our cosy little crop genebank world, that botanic gardens do ex situ conservation of agricultural biodiversity too. 1 Witness the Royal Botanic Gardens Endinburgh and the Really Wild Vegetable Project. I only know about it because they tweeted on it earlier today, and the tweet caught my eye because it mentioned wild cabbage, and had a nice picture too. It turns out, however, that the particular population of wild Brassica oleracea oleracea involved is not in the national UK inventory of crop genetic resources as known by Eurisco, and thus Genesys, which basically just sucks up Eurisco data. 2
@RBGE_Science @BrianFLloyd Map of wild B oleracea oleracea accessions at @WarwickGRU based on Eurisco/Genesys pic.twitter.com/BuADxfcHjF
— AgroBioDiverse (@AgroBioDiverse) September 12, 2013
That only includes material from the Warwick Genetic Resources Unit, which happens to be mainly from the southern part of the UK. So the material mentioned in the Edinburgh tweet, which comes from Fife in Scotland, is likely to add significant diversity to the “national” collection at Warwick. Scope for some closer collaboration between these two institutes? Well, maybe it’s already there and I haven’t caught it. Do let me know if I’m being unfair.