- An analysis of the transformative potential of major food system report recommendations. Most recommendations are nudges rather than transformative. But is that such a bad thing?
- Linking farm production diversity to household dietary diversity controlling market access and agricultural technology usage: evidence from Noakhali district, Bangladesh. Farm diversity is associated with dietary diversity, but less if markets and irrigation are to hand. Phew, that’s good.
- Leveraging millets for developing climate resilient agriculture. Never mind the yield, feel the stability. Plus they’re good for you.
- Exploring the legacy of Central European historical winter wheat landraces. Not great that breeding has narrowed the genepool. Will it happen to millets next?
- A European perspective on opportunities and demands for field-based crop phenotyping. Would be good to have more sites in Central Europe, no?
- Genetic dissection of seasonal vegetation index dynamics in maize through aerial based high-throughput phenotyping. 1752 accessions fall into 2 phenological groups. Do it in Europe next?
- Changes in soybean cultivars released over the past 50 years in southern Brazil. Yield has gone up, but protein concentration down. No word on stability. Nor overall diversity. Good and bad.
- The grain quality of wheat wild relatives in the evolutionary context. Breeders should focus on the timopheevii lineage if they want to do some good.
- Signatures of selection in recently domesticated macadamia. Further evidence for the one-step domestication of clonal crops.
- Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process. One-step is precisely how domestication did NOT happen for seed crops in the Neolithic though.
- Conservation and use of genetic resources of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) by gene banks and nurseries in six Latin American countries. Not a great situation for such a financially important crop. Makes you think.
- Chloroplast phylogenomics in Camelina (Brassicaceae) reveals multiple origins of polyploid species and the maternal lineage of C. sativa. Such a lot of work, and they still don’t know in which landscape domestication took place.
- Making the invisible visible: tracing the origins of plants in West African cuisine through archaeobotanical and organic residue analysis. 3500 years of continuity in West African cooking investigated via lipid profiles on pottery. And fast forward…
Nibbles: Ginger, Cover crops, Pulses, Campbell Soup, NASA, OWD, Göbekli Tepe, Sydney herbarium, Bourdeix museum, Mezcal folk vocabulary, Mango love, Probiotic ag, Andean ag
- China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
- US doubles down on cover crops…
- …and pulses. No word on ginger.
- How Campbell’s doubled down on tomato breeding. But never released the seeds.
- Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
- Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
- Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
- Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
- A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
- How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
- A paean to the mango.
- Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
- It kind of already is in the Andes.
Brainfood: Racism, Writing, QMS, Andean ag, Root breeding, Apple microbiome, Manihot phylogeny, Mukodamashi millet
- Overcoming racism in the twin spheres of conservation science and practice. Imagine.
- Getting accepted – Successful writing for scientific publication: a Research Primer for low- and middle-income countries. See above.
- A Performance Management System for Long-Term Germplasm Conservation in CGIAR Genebanks: Aiming for Quality, Efficiency and Improvement. Say what you do, do what you say, have someone verify it, correct it, improve it. Then repeat.
- Quinoa, potatoes, and llamas fueled emergent social complexity in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. Who needs maize, am I right?
- Harnessing root architecture to address global challenges. Something else for breeders to scour genebanks for.
- Evidence for host–microbiome co-evolution in apple. The genetic patterns in the endophytic microbiome of 11 wild and cultivated apple species mirrors the phylogenetic relationships among the species.
- Phylogenomic analysis points to a South American origin of Manihot and illuminates the primary gene pool of cassava. At least five wild species have contributed diversity to cassava. No word on microbiomes.
- Genetic Identification of the Local Mukodamashi Varieties of Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv) in Japan. Mukodamashi means “deceiving husband” and the legend is that when a wife makes dumplings from this millet variety, the husband mistakes them for rice cakes because the grains are white and sticky. Thing is though, it’s not just one variety.
Nibbles: Archaeobotany, Citrus genebank, Vitellaria, Potato genebank, Pignolo, IK, Atlas of Living Australia,
- Q&A with an archaeobotanist looking into the domestication history of maize and gourds.
- Q&A with the curators of the University of California, Riverside Citrus Variety Collection.
- Q&A on the shea tree genome.
- CIP’s potato cryobank. There’s probably a Q&A somewhere too.
- Snippets of a review of an interesting-sounding book about the almost-forgotten Pignolo grape.
- Snippets of the Indigenous ecological knowledge used by traditional agriculturalists in India.
- A more systematic approach to documenting and protecting Indigenous ecological knowledge from Australia.
Brainfood: Transeurasian languages, Japanese rice, Grapevine pip shapes, Citrus evolution & domestication, Yak domestication, Brassica domestication, Coffee diversity, Switchgrass diversity, Onion landrace, Seed systems
- Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages. People speaking the precursor of Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic languages started out around the West Liao River and then spread with their Panicum millet farming, mixing with other populations and picking up rice and wheat along the way.
- Artificial selection in the expansion of rice cultivation. They managed to get to Hokkaido with that rice because of a couple of genes. Rice genes, that is.
- Pip shape echoes grapevine domestication history. If they had carried grapevines, we’d be able to say which varieties.
- Shaping the biology of citrus: I. Genomic determinants of evolution. They maybe had a role in citrus domestication, but a lot of the hard work was done by the prior adaptive radiation of the group. The citrus group, that is. Quick summary of both papers here if you can get access to it.
- Yak Domestication: A Review of Linguistic, Archaeological, and Genetic Evidence. They weren’t involved in yak domestication, though, I don’t think.
- The Evolutionary History of Wild, Domesticated, and Feral Brassica oleracea (Brassicaceae). Nor that of Brassica oleracea, whose closest wild relative turns out to be half a world away on Crete.
- Coffee: Genetic Diversity, Erosion, Conservation, and Utilization. Ok, stay with me here. Brassica oleracea is related to Brassica carinata, which originated in Ethiopia, which is also where arabica coffee comes from.
- Surveying Grassland Islands: the genetics and performance of Appalachian switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) collections. If you can find a close connection between coffee and switchgrass you get a prize. Ah no wait, there are 2 ploidy levels, just like in Coffea. Yeah, I know it’s tenuous.
- Agrobiodiversity-Oriented Food Systems between Public Policies and Private Action: A Socio-Ecological Model for Sustainable Territorial Development. These guys really know their onions. And think they can use their conservation as a spur to local development. In Italy, but who’s to say it couldn’t work in Ethiopia as well.
- Putting diverse farming households’ preferences and needs at the centre of seed system development. Imagine.