- Breeding for organic tomatoes needs to be participatory.
- Theobroma cacao is the oldest species within the genus.
- Threatened local fig varieties being promoted in Morocco.
- Teach a fisherman to garden…
- Neolithic people were consuming honey early, but not in the north of Europe.
- Interactive map showing lands managed by native communities.
- The oldest surviving document in spanish is a list of cheeses.
Nibbles: Seed Treaty, Grelo festival, Large tomatoes, Saffron collecting, Enset redux, Grassland diversity, Census 2016, Organic definition, Dalit seeds, Ancient wheat DNA, Ancient American farmers, Tree adaptation, Syrian crops at OFN
- What civil society said at the latest Governing Body meeting of the ITPGRFA earlier this month.
- Google Translate fail puts spotlight on the cruciferous crop I’ve always known as fiarielli but which is sometimes called rapini. Both names kinda suck.
- That’s one huge tomato.
- That’s one expensive spice.
- Rediscovering enset.
- Grassland biodiversity good for resilience to climate change.
- Global agriculture: here comes the data.
- Deconstructing organic. The word, that is.
- Empowering dalit farmers by recognizing their knowledge of seeds.
- That ancient underwater wheat DNA wasn’t so ancient after all. Maybe.
- It was migrants who forced the ancestors of the Pueblo people to move.
- Local adaptation in trees: what has it ever done for us?
- Another way to safeguard Syrian crop diversity.
Nibbles: Superfood, Superbits, Climate change, CWR, Grape names
- Make way for Dovyalis hebecarpa, aka the Ceylon gooseberry, your new favourite superfood for the week.
- US$6.5 million to breed better cucurbits. Maybe.
- Rise and fall of agrarian states influenced by climate volatility. Those who do not understand history etc.
- Bioversity urges crop wild relatives to avoid the fate of the dodo.
- Name that grape! An extraordinary online resource for Italian ampelography.
Nibbles: Seeds, Climate models, Stonehenge’s food, Loosely clustered grapes
- Deeper insights into how farmers get their seeds could make seed aid more effective shock, with added video goodness.
- Big data for smallholder farmers; CIAT’s boss writes the history.
- Meat for the masses and dairy for the deities. What the builders of Stonehenge ate, and where.
- If you thought grapolo spargolo was a pseudonym of the Prosecco grape variety Glera, you’re in good company. But wrong. “[M]any English-language bloggers have simply copied and pasted the erroneous information from the Wiki entry”. For shame!
Brainfood: Forage diversity, Chinese cherry, Meta-diversity, Sunflower ecogeography, Lima bean domestication, Dog breeding, Goat ethnogenetics, Pigs vs chickens
- Complementary effects of species and genetic diversity on productivity and stability of sown grasslands. Species diversity good for total production, genetic diversity good for regular production throughout the year, regardless of water. And more, and more.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Patterns in Chinese Cherry (Prunus pseudocerasus Lindl) Landraces. Perhaps 2 domestication sites.
- Inter-individual variation promotes ecological success of populations and species: evidence from experimental and comparative studies. More diverse populations are less vulnerable to environmental changes, more stable in population size, less extinction prone, have better establishment success and larger ranges, especially under stress.
- Ecogeography and utility to plant breeding of the crop wild relatives of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.). Many close relatives of the crop in extreme environments.
- Domestication of small-seeded lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.) landraces in Mesoamerica: evidence from microsatellite markers. Two domestications events. Maybe.
- Trends in genetic diversity for all Kennel Club registered pedigree dog breeds. Popular sires have made for a lot of inbreeding, but this has been getting better of late.
- The N’Dama dilemma: ethnogenetics and small ruminant breed dynamics in the tsetse zone, The Gambia. Saving the name is not enough.
- The Pig and the Chicken in the Middle East: Modeling Human Subsistence Behavior in the Archaeological Record Using Historical and Animal Husbandry Data. Chickens replaced pigs in the first millennium Middle East because they were smaller and more efficient. Oh, and eggs.