- Nice Twitter thread on Asian yams (and incidentally sweet potato and taro).
- Surveying and collecting coconuts in PNG. What will they do with those nuts?
- Belarus genebank gets a high-level visit. Can’t help wondering if the Ukraine genebank being in the news is behind this somehow.
- Jordan to get a(nother) genebank. Apparently.
- Tepary beans to get their 15 minutes of fame.
- Medieval Italian wine was biodynamic.
So are soybeans sorted or not?
Readers may have seen press coverage of a paper in Science suggesting that a biotech tweak to photosynthesis has led to significant yield boosts in soybeans. The tweak involves getting leaves to respond more nimbly to changes in light intensity, including due to shading by other leaves. It has successfully increased biomass production in tobacco in the past: would it also increase seed yield in a food crop under field conditions?
Yes, by up to a third, said the headlines. Not so fast, said Merritt Khaipho-Burch on Twitter: we’re going to need many more and much better field trials before we’re convinced.
That got some push-back, basically saying those kinds of trials are too expensive to be a precondition of publication. But now one of the authors of the original study, Steven Burgess, has weighed in, also on Twitter, saying the criticism is valid, it’s all very complicated, and the paper is just a proof of principle at this stage.
Now to get the press to explain all that.
Brainfood: Canadian berries, Durian, Watermelon domestication, Wild cacao, New Chinese fruit, Animal pollinators, Food impacts
- Berries as a case study for crop wild relative conservation, use, and public engagement in Canada. Berries could be an agrobiodiversity conservation flagship, at least in Canada. If only other types of crops, and countries, were that easy.
- The king of fruits. There’s a dark side to durian that’s thankfully not there with berries.
- Genome sequencing of up to 6,000-yr-old Citrullus seeds reveals use of a bitter-fleshed species prior to watermelon domestication. Neolithic Libyans used wild watermelons for their seeds, not flesh.
- Comparison of bioactive components and flavor volatiles of diverse cocoa genotypes of Theobroma grandiflorum, Theobroma bicolor, Theobroma subincanum and Theobroma cacao. Could use the wild relatives for tastier chocolate. Another potential flagship, surely.
- Akebia: A Potential New Fruit Crop in China. I’d totally try it. And not just because it’s called both “wild banana” and “chocolate vine.”
- Animal pollination increases stability of crop yield across spatial scales. Not just higher yields, greater yield stability too. Important for some of the above, and many other fruits.
- Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products. More nutritious foods tend to be more environmentally friendly too. But how many of these products include the above? I mean fruits, not pollinators.
Nibbles: Wheat diplomacy, Bean improvement, Ghana genebank, Algeria genebank, CIP genebank
- Yeah what we all need right now is to politicize wheat.
- Tepary bean to the rescue of common bean. Politicize that!
- Ghana’s genebank getting some use.
- Algeria gets a genebank. Hope it gets used.
- Pretty sure the CIP genebank is getting used. Find out how on Facebook Live today.
Brainfood: Sweet potato in Polynesia, Land use in Jamaica, Himalayan Neolithic, Early modern Spanish ag, E Asian Neolithic double
- Sweet Potato on Rapa Nui: Insights from a Monographic Study of the Genus Ipomoea. Seeds could just maybe have got there by floating, but more likely sweet potato was introduced to Easter Island by people from other parts of Polynesia, perhaps not by the first arrivals though.
- The legacy of 1300 years of land use in Jamaica. European colonization led to deforestation. And no doubt the spread of sweet potato, but that’s another story. The constant is cassava.
- Prehistoric agricultural decision making in the western Himalayas: ecological and social variables. Large, socially diverse prehistoric sites had more diverse agriculture. At these high altitude anyway. The constant is barley.
- Early Austronesians Cultivated Rice and Millet Together: Tracing Taiwan’s First Neolithic Crops. That would be japonica rice and foxtail millet, which were brought to Taiwan from the SE coast of China.
- Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World’s Most Enduring Mega-State. Meanwhile, back in China, the adoption of agriculture drives state formation.
- A 16th-century biodiversity and crop inventory. 60 crop and livestock species, which doesn’t sound like enough. Alas, no sweet potato or rice, but some Setaria millet.