- Fogcatcher ale? Oh I think so!
- Greenpeace guides donors on ecological farming. Booklet on the preservation of historical monuments to follow.
- Slow Food launches olive oil presidium. Presidium?
- The ancient Greeks had wine for breakfast. Explains a lot.
- Livestock size changes through the ages.
- The sainted Lawrence Haddad on that biofortified pearl millet story from yesterday. Remember that variety can be traced back to a genebank. But not only millet.
- Zambians told to look to their neglected traditional crops. By their government. Which is surely complicit in their neglect. Maybe biofortify them first?
- Collecting tomato wild relatives.
- July drought stops pine trees growing in the SW US.
- Building a global genebank system. And again.
- Saving the PNG coconut collection from Bogia disease. We need a Svalbard for coconuts is what we need.
- Industrial crops and food security in sub-Saharan Africa: mainly complementary, but…
Nibbles: Biofortification, NUS, Wakehurst Place, Cheesy map, Seeds2Zim, Food bibliography, Eucalypt genome, Oregano in the US, CFC, Rotations, Malaria drugs, Quinoa in Colorado, Pacific pineapple, Rhubarb event, Mango festival, Araucaria, American chestnut, Potato casserole, Coffee breeding, Tulips galore, George Harrison Shull, Seed saving, Chinese agriculture, European agroforestry, Eat This Podcast
- Webinar on biofortification, today.
- Book on Asian underutilized plant species, which we somehow missed when it came out in 2014. Unless it didn’t.
- The Millennium Seed Bank isn’t just great in and of itself, it also sits in a wonderful garden: the man who has been keeping that going for the past decade has just retired. Best wishes!
- A map of French cheese. Internet surrenders.
- North Jersey donates organic seeds to Zimbabwe. In related news, they also sending coals to Newcastle.
- Online bibliography of food history. There goes the morning.
- All hail the eucalyptuzzzzz genome.
- The unintended consequences of WW2: oregano.
- Follow the construction of the Crops for the Future Centre HQ. Over 10 episodes, mind, so gird your loins.
- Breaking down crop rotation.
- Malaria drugs through the ages. Make mine a G&T.
- Yes, how is quinoa doing in Colorado?
- New pineapples for the Pacific. They’ll probably end up canned.
- Good news: Clumber Park has a Rhubarb Weekend. Bad news: we missed it. Ditto the Goa Mango Festival.
- Mapping every monkey puzzle tree in Britain. Well, someone has to.
- Transgenic chestnuts taking over New York State. You can bet someone’s going to map them.
- The US potato renaissance we all knew was happening finally hits the headlines.
- The latest on coffee improvement, including news from the CATIE collections.
- Tulipmania: The video.
- The father of hybrid corn.
- Would he have approved of saving seeds? I suspect yes.
- Chinese agriculture adds a few (thousand) years.
- Europe has agroforestry too, and lots of it.
- Think I missed something? Check if Jeremy caught it in his Tasty Morsels.
Nibbles: Chontaduro, Pandanus, African seeds, Bangladesh veggie seeds, Black locust, Agroecology, Food security research, Deforestation, Ancient Caribbean
- Colombia plants a bunch of peach palms. Hope they had some genetic diversity in there.
- Crop wild relative can tell you where diamonds are.
- Africa might need better seeds.
- Bangladesh certainly does.
- The black locust made America. The tree, not the insect.
- Another pean to agrobiodiversity.
- Towards a Research Agenda for Global Food and Nutrition Security: meeting at Expo 2015 organized by the EU. It’s today, though, and this is the first we hear of it. Sorry. Will genebanks even get mentioned? Well, if this tweet is from that meeting, it seems not.
- Cutting down forest bad for more than trees. How many crop and livestock wild relatives endangered by deforestation?
- Cubans ate cultivated plants a thousand years earlier than thought.
Nibbles: CWR gaps, Genebanks vid, Landrace cuisine, Perennial rice, High-tech evaluation, Egyptian cure, Weird tuber, Aroids news, Tibet transition, Worms & development, Hybrid artemisia, Sea potato, Grape microbes, Seed book, Seychelles parks, Brosimum hype, Kenya & bamboo, Tea & CC, Extinction and CC, Nutrition paradox
- CIAT crop wild relatives team announces 3 new papers on gaps in ex situ collections: potato, sweet potato & pigeonpea. Take a break, people, please.
- And CIAT genebank features in nice video on why we need genebanks. So also the IRRI genebank, which is relevant to the next Nibble. We do joined-up nibbling here.
- Fine dining with Filipino rice landraces. Go Manny!
- None of those rice landraces are perennial. Yet. If they ever are, it’ll be due to a wild relative.
- Fusarium head blight resistance in wheat dissected using a synchrotron. Avengers assemble!
- Oxyrhynchus papyrus identifies hangover cure. Or so the Daily Mail says, so, you know…
- Oh wow, the Mail is definitely on a botanical roll, now they’re all over a Kardashian-shaped tuber.
- New Edible Aroids Newsletter. Nothing Kim-shaped about these tubers.
- Wheat and barley replaced millet in E Tibet around 2000 BC after cooling period. This going into reverse now, I wonder?
- Some biodiversity you don’t want, trust me.
- Speaking of unwelcome biodiversity, there’s a new hope in the fight against malaria: hybrid artemisia.
- More on that potato that the Dutch are growing in sea water. Like they have a choice.
- Microbes are part of terroir.
- Q&A with The Triumph of Seeds author.
- The coco-de-mer is a pretty triumphant seed.
- You say ramòn nut, I say Maya nut.
- Kenya needs bamboo. Says the International Network for Bamboo & Rattan. Wow, two active crop networks in today’s Nibbles.
- Yesterday it was arabica that was in trouble, today tea. Damn you, climate change.
- They’re the lucky ones: they may be in trouble, but they’re not going extinct…
- More production does not automatically mean less stunting. Damn you, real world.
Nibbles: SDGs, Seed book, Magic millets, Medieval diets, Obsessive botanist, Cocoa melting gene, Double sake, Simcock, CIMMYT double, Popular breeder, Georgian wine odyssey, Cinnamon vid, Yam bean factsheet, Jackfruit bandwagon, Prairie berries
- Agriculture and the SDGs in one nice infographic thingy.
- Seeds: The Book.
- Seeds like millets?
- Those medievals really knew how to eat.
- An obsessive botanist? Whatever next.
- Deconstructing chocolate, one gene at a time.
- Sake 101. And for a more in-depth look…
- Joseph Simcox, self-described “Internationally Renowned World Food Plant Resource Authority” takes you “on a World Adventure to learn about little known edible plants!” On Facebook.
- A journey into the heart of CIMMYT. They’ll even screen your maize for you.
- The people’s breeder.
- Tracing wine to its source: Georgia.
- Harvesting cinnamon. With video goodness.
- FAO unleashes its mighty comms machine on another poor neglected crop: yam bean. Not many people hurt.
- Watch out jackfruit, you’re probably next.
- Or maybe saskatoon berries (Amelanchier alnifolia).