Brainfood: Sustainable diets, Resilient food system, IK in food systems double, Herbarium double, Ag research priorities, Fruits & vegetables, Cryopreservation, Diverse diets, Gene editing orphan crops, Ag revolution 4.0, Diversification, Monoculture, Agroecology, Regenerative ag, Plant health, Svalbard, Seed banking theory, Comms double

Nibbles: INIA, WorldVeg, CIMMYT, NACGRAB, USDA, FSF, RSSSAF, Maxted

  1. New(ish) website for the Peruvian national genebank.
  2. WorldVeg genebank reaches out to Southeast Asia.
  3. CIMMYT genebank reaches out at COP15.
  4. Nigerian national genebank gets advice.
  5. USDA’s genebank at the University of Georgia makes it into the local paper.
  6. Shout-out for community seedbanks in Mexico, or Fondos de Semillas Familiares actually. National genebank unavailable for comment.
  7. All well and good, but genebanks need a Resilient Seed Systems Shared Action Framework.
  8. And, of course, they are complementary to in situ/on farm conservation. How exactly does that work? Let Dr Nigel Maxted tell you. For an hour.

Liberating seeds — and climate matching tools

I hit “publish” too soon yesterday. If I had waited a couple of hours, I could have done a deeper dive into how Jeremy spent his holidays, by adding his just-dropped podcast on the “Let’s Liberate Diversity” Forum held in Budapest back in October to his last newsletter of 2022.

In the podcast, Jeremy muses on the new EU Organic Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2018/848), which finally allows the marketing of organic heterogeneous material (OHM), and interviews two beneficiaries of this welcome change in the law. Spoiler alert: Belgian beer is being re-Belgianized, and everybody seems very happy about it.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in doing the kind of climate matching Jeremy mentions in his third note, you could check out this website, though it only covers Europe. If you want global coverage, you might have to brush up on your R. ((Thanks, Julian.))

Nibbles: Diets, Millet seedbank, Healthy rice, Kazakh genebank, Decentralized seeds, Planet Local, White sage, White olive, Talangana collecting, Nature-based, Italian food, Citron, Indian quinoa, Crop expansion

  1. And…we’re back!
  2. Nice new infographics derived from that classic paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.”
  3. Video on a millet community seedbank in India.
  4. I hope all these healthy Indian rices are in seedbanks somewhere, community or otherwise.
  5. Kazakhstan is getting a new genebank, and I don’t mean a community one.
  6. yeah but genebanks are not enough: enter INCREASE.
  7. Wait, there’s a World Localization Day?
  8. Looks like white sage might need less localization and more seedbanks.
  9. I see your Mexican white sage and raise you the Calabrian white olive.
  10. The Telangana equivalent of white sage is probably safe, though, if this collecting programme is anything to go by.
  11. IFAD pushes nature-based farmers. White sage unavailable for comment.
  12. The localization narrative meets Italian food. And yes, spoiler alert, Italian food does exist. Despite the increasing homogeneity in global food supplies. And it doesn’t need white olives either.
  13. Let the hand-wringing about the Italian-ness (Italianity?) of citrons commence. But not until I’ve left the room.
  14. Ah, but is there such a thing as Indian food? I mean, if there’s quinoa in it. I look forward to the eventual quinoa community seedbanks.
  15. All those crops are not being locally grown for food anyway.
  16. Have a happy new globalizing, localizing year, everyone.