- Do they know it’s Christmas? Stocking-filling books for do-gooders.
- Wonder if any of them talk about using markets to deliver nutritious food.
- The surprising secrets of baobabs, among other plants. I thought we knew all there was to know about baobabs, what with all those factsheets.
- The Global Nutrition Report in 12 sound-bites. No sign of baobabs.
- Russians in a tizzy about their buckwheat. If only they’d had a factsheet.
- Everybody in a tizzy about European olive oil. Maybe they should try the American stuff?
- “When skunk was created the people doing it had no idea they were altering the ratios of CBD and THC — they just kept breeding the plants that gave the strongest high and threw the rest away.” Ouch. But fear not, help is at hand.
- Restoring wild turkey populations is screwing up its subspecific structure, pissing off taxonomists no end.
- Bolivians do not appreciate cheap Peruvian quinoa. Hipsters unavailable for comment.
- No, LA’s wild quinoa is not going to put too much of a dent in global food shortages, nor interest many hipsters, but it’s a fun story. Too bad wasn’t mashed up with the US crop wild relatives prize-winning paper.
- Cool crop domestication infographics.
- Plant geneticists are from Mars.
Brainfood: American pigs, Chinese cherries, Sustainable olive oil, Striga diversity, Low Cd durum, Amaranthus in Africa, Ramie core, Campania beans, Forage breeding overview
- Genetic characterization of local Criollo pig breeds from the Americas using microsatellite markers. 17 populations from 11 countries derive from 11 ancestral populations, with geographic clustering in some places but not in others.
- Physicochemical characterisation of four cherry species (Prunus spp.) grown in China. They’re all different.
- Extra-virgin olive oil production sustainability in northern Italy: a preliminary study. Not quite there yet.
- Genetic diversity of East and West African Striga hermonthica populations and virulence effects on a contrasting set of sorghum cultivars. Most of the variation in the parasite is within populations, but the most virulent populations are from Sudan.
- Assessing diversity in Triticum durum cultivars and breeding lines for high versus low cadmium content in seeds using the CAPS marker usw47. Durum accumulates toxic Cd more than other cereals, but some varieties are better than others, and there are DNA markers to tell you which they are.
- The Potential for Utilizing the Seed Crop Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) in East Africa as an Alternative Crop to Support Food Security and Climate Change Mitigation. There is some.
- Development of a core collection for ramie by heuristic search based on SSR markers. 22 accessions is all you need to represent 108. Which doesn’t seem particularly useful given the total collection is over 2000.
- Morphological and genetic diversity among and within common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) landraces from the Campania region (Southern Italy). There is a bit, some of it even in agronomic traits.
- Forage Breeding for Changing Environments and Production Systems: an Overview. Summary of 4th International Symposium of Forage Breeding. If you want to include all trending topics in one study, apply genomic selection to breeding for persistence.
Nibbles: Cannabis, Brachiaria, Grasslands, Oryza, Taxonomy resources, Artocarpus, Quercus, Zea, MAS, GBIF
- “Something researchers are looking at is which cultivars, or strains, of hemp are best for the various uses — fiber, oil, nutrition, etc.” Love that etc.
- Speaking about grass: Brachiaria goes home, to wild acclaim.
- Did someone say wild? Wild grass needs help!
- Rice is a grass. Oh my yes.
- How to keep up to date with taxonomic research online.
- Pacific Regional Breadfruit Initiative gets an award.
- You can also make flour from acorns.
- And maize: what’s a grit?
- Greenpeace touts MAS.
- Next thing you know they’ll be singing the praises of Big Data. Yeah, maybe not.
Nibbles: Wonder Bread, Cassava sex, Languages and biodiversity, Wild Musa, Bronze Age musings, New Indian rice varieties, Improved breeds in Kenya, GMOs in China, Organic vision, Foreign food, Publicity, Nutrition advice & indicators, Ethiopian seed banks, Zimbabwe millet, Agroforestry, MSB legume collection, Demon paywalls, CIMMYT seed, Tempting apple
- The industrial sliced loaf as racist fantasy.
- Bill Gates talks dirty. About cassava, settle down.
- Where the wild things are is where the languages are, but why? And where are they endangered?
- This new Indian wild banana is probably a bit endangered.
- The past may be a foreign country, but they got Street View there too.
- Blockbuster rice in India. (But how energy-efficient is it?)
- And potentially blockbuster livestock breeds in Kenya.
- China goes GMO. Which of these?
- Maybe they should read this vision for organic farming? You know, just for completeness?
- Have a food adventure! Just perhaps not in China.
- FAO and National Geographic have a food security adventure together. For more stuff like this, no doubt…
- Eat more plants, and ditch the junk food. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Ok, for the more complicated, nerdy approach, there’s always fancy indicators.
- Ethiopia’s community seed banks.
- I bet there are some in Zimbabwe…
- African Development Bank makes a bet on agroforestry. Maybe health is why? There’s more that one reason…
- Gotta be strategic with your legume collecting.
- Want conservation science to translate into impact? Don’t publish behind a paywall.
- CIMMYT earns its keep.
- Build a better apple, and you won’t be able to keep the journalists away.
Nibbles: ILRI@40, CIAT cleanup, Breadfruit factsheets, Spice book, Senegalese e-goats, Natural history collections, Seed supplies, Bean breeding, Institution building, Eat This Podcast, Phenotyping, Indian eggplant, GMO Terminator
- ILRI celebrates 40 years with a major conference.
- Keeping the CIAT germplasm collection nice and clean.
- New variety information sheets from the Breadfruit Institute.
- Review of Gary Nabhan’s new book, Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey.
- Buying goats online.
- What would you do with one billion historical biodiversity data points?
- The tools of the seed-saver‘s trade.
- How to stress your beans, and why.
- A place for conservation organizations to hang out and share. You have to register, but this looks interesting.
- Jeremy has a second Twitter home.
- All 115 plant image analysis software solutions…
- Hyderabad’s brinjal obsession.
- A GMO terminator technology?