- Living Links Connecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Small-Scale Farmers and Agricultural Biodiversity. Want to address a whole bunch of SDGs at once? Here’s a tip…
- Archaeology for Sustainable Agriculture. Sustainability is not forever.
- A Congo Basin ethnographic analogue of pre-Columbian Amazonian raised fields shows the ephemeral legacy of organic matter management. Another example of the above?
- Genebank Phenomics: A Strategic Approach to Enhance Value and Utilization of Crop Germplasm. A lot of useful phenotyping can be done fast and cheap, and genebanks should do it.
- LeafMachine: Using machine learning to automate leaf trait extraction from digitized herbarium specimens. This might help with the above.
- Affordable Phenotyping of Winter Wheat under Field and Controlled Conditions for Drought Tolerance. This certainly could. Basically a supermarket cart with a drone mounted on top of it.
- Plant Breeding Capacity in U.S. Public Institutions. It’s in trouble.
- Redomesticating Almond to Meet Emerging Food Safety Needs. Turning to peach, wild and cultivated, to reduce immunoreactivity and control aflatoxin and Salmonella. Somebody say public breeding is in trouble?
- Genetic variability among Ethiopian sorghum landrace accessions for major agro-morphological traits and anthracnose resistance. From 360 accessions to 10. Let’s hope at least the public sector can get hold of them.
- Review: Genetic and genomic selection as a methane mitigation strategy in dairy cattle. Gotta measure emissions on individual animals.
- Genome sequence and comparative analysis of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in northern Eurasia. Two domestications, affecting at least a dozen genes. No word on methane.
- Genomes on Canvas: Artist’s Perspective on Evolution of Plant-Based Foods. Crowdsourcing historical images to trace crop evolution.
Visualizing the use of crop diversity
A couple of nice infographics for you today. Here’s one on forage genetic resources conservation and use, courtesy of the CGIAR Research Programme on Livestock. Click on the numbers to see the interactive elements.
And here, from Euroseeds, is an explanation of how gene editing could save beloved beloved grape varieties from fungal pests without (hopefully) changing their taste or wine-making features. This one is not interactive, though, so download the PDF to see it properly.
And yes, attentive readers will have noticed that both were included in Nibbles yesterday, but I thought they deserved re-upping, as the cool kids say.
Nibbles: Coconut & biodiversity, Nutrition, Maize volatiles, Tea history, OFS online, AGRA, Forage breeding, Grapevine editing, SDG indicators, Black Lives Matter
- Coconut oil is the new palm oil? And not in a good way.
- The cost of poor diets is considerable.
- Maize plants call natural enemies for help against stemborers. And there’s variation in how well they do it, natch.
- Fortune’s fortune: the colonization of tea. With added poison. And capitalism.
- The Oxford Food Symposium is on, virtually. Registration is closed, but follow on the blog, social media etc.
- Criticism of the Green Revolution approach to African agricultural development.
- Forages, from genebanks to farmers, in one interactive infographic.
- Saving Sangiovese through gene editing: the infographic. Not interactive, though, alas.
- How FAO keeps track of progress on the SDGs.
- How to not be a racist in the plant sciences.
Nibbles: NHM, CGN, NordGen, ICRISAT, Chai, Cacao, Coffee, Amazon, Indian aromatics, Spying, Talking cattle
- Dr Sandy Knapp on botanical monographs. Solanum, of course.
- Dr Joukje Buiteveld on fruit field genebanks in the Netherlands.
- NordGen adopts GRIN-Global.
- Hybrid pigeonpa in the Indian news.
- All the tea in India. And Ireland?
- The rise of craft chocolate.
- And here’s the beverage trifecta: coffee in Ethiopia.
- Seed collecting in Brazil for reforestation.
- NBPGR does medicinals.
- You wanna be a “germplasm acquisition coordinator“? I bet you do. But watch out…
- Podcast on cattle domestication. Dr Hans Lenstra from Utrecht University in the hot seat.
Nibbles: High edition
- South Africa looks to legalize weed.
- Quick gallop through the chemistry of food. Weed brownies not covered.
- Is your salad this diverse? Weed not included.