- “Friends don’t let friends make bar plots.” Of course they don’t.
- Friend also don’t let friends hype the carrot and cassava genomes.
- “The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper. And he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight:” chili con China.
- Salvatore Ceccarelli, who should know, on the centrality of seed. And the guys from Experimental Farm Network would agree.
- Yes, you can now have organic tej.
- “In theory…the undoubted value of these natural treasures should be reflected in their price, which should rise steeply as they become scarcer… In practice, natural assets are often hard to price well, if at all.”
- A “Himalayan solution” for pomegranate breeding.
- Nutsedge definitely needs a new name.
- First formal record of the baobab in Uganda.
- Wind-resistant tree germplasm for the Pacific. Much needed.
Nibbles: Bears loose cherry, Swiss cheese birth, Aussie genebank, Palestinian genebank, Wine genebank, Mexican maize, Beer in Israel & Germany
- Bears shit wild cherry seeds in the woods. But uphill.
- The origins of Swiss cheese. And I mean WAY back.
- The Australian Grains Genebank in the news. Well deserved too.
- Likewise the new Palestinian genebank.
- And the Bourgogne grapevine genebank too, since we’re at it.
- Saving popcorn.
- Jesus’ beer recreated. But would it pass the German purity law?
Nibbles: Drying seeds, Saving citrus, Shakespeare’s food, Ganja double, TPP, Aurochs art, Coffee diversity, Biofortification, Training, Breeding booklet
- Zeolite finds its genebank niche. Remember when we blogged about it?
- The USDA citrus genebank at Riverside gets the podcast treatment.
- Shakespeare, because it’s the 400th anniversary of his death: food and animals.
- Weed, because weed: taxonomy and breeding. Could literally apply to any other crop on earth.
- What will the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) do to farm-saved seeds?
- Bring back the aurochs!
- Barista Magazine on coffee diversity. In other news, there’s a Barista Magazine.
- The chemistry of banana carotenoids.
- Master of Arts in Food Studies in San Francisco! What’s not to like.
- From plant to crop: The past, present and future of plant breeding. Nice booklet.
Nibbles: Coffee taxonomy, Agarwood trade, Apios promotion, Dog species concept, Seed collecting, Kudzu control, ICARDA chickpeas, Ancient maize beer, Quinoa landscapes, History of domestication, Breeding mistakes, EU breeding value, Priming, Wild flower ecotypes, Vitellaria use
- Coffee botany resources.
- Uncovering the illegal agarwood trade.
- Developing the potato bean. First step: find a new name.
- Dog taxonomy explained.
- Project Baseline sets a, ahem, baseline, for studying plant diversity under climate change.
- Ok, random shout-out for my niece Francesca’s work on kudzu bug natural control. Because I can. And she’s fabulous.
- Blooming chickpeas!
- The inhabitants of Casas Grandes brewed maize beer in the 14th century. Well of course they did.
- Peruvian quinoa landscapes have a name: aynokas.
- Crop domestication 101.
- Where (commercial) breeders go wrong.
- Presumably none of above mistakes are made by EU plant breeding companies.
- Stimulating plant defences for faster response to pest and disease attack.
- Germany told to go for local meadow seeds.
- Use of shea butter trees goes way back.
Brainfood: Genebanked clover, Breeding beans, Belgian dogs, Optimization, Migration & diversity, Vanuatu roots, Japanese rice history
- Morphological and phenological consequences of ex situ conservation of natural populations of red clover (Trifolium pratense L.). Regeneration has caused directional morphological changes.
- Breeding Common Bean for Resistance to Common Blight: A Review. A lot is known and has been done, but, still, “Andean and Middle American common bean cultivars with high levels of combined resistance to less-aggressive and aggressive bacterial strains in all aerial plant parts are not available.”
- Half of 23 Belgian dog breeds has a compromised genetic diversity, as revealed by genealogical and molecular data analysis. Especially native breeds with small populations, unsurprisingly.
- Neither crop genetics nor crop management can be optimised. Because of ever-present trade-offs.
- The Influence of Gender Roles And Human Migrations on the Distribution of Crop Biodiversity in Tharaka, Kenya. Crops move with people, and different genders move different crops.
- Somaclonal variants of taro (Colocasia esculenta Schott) and yam (Dioscorea alata L.) are incorporated into farmers’ varietal portfolios in Vanuatu. Farmers have lots of varieties, but they need more variety.
- Morphological and molecular genetics of ancient remains and modern rice (Oryza sativa) confirm diversity in ancient Japan. Modern Japanese rice is a subset of ancient Japanese rice.