Nibbles: Future Seeds, Irish Seed Savers, ICRAF genebank, Cherry blossoms, Coffee futures, Eat This Newsletter

  1. More on how Future Seeds fits into the global system of genebanks. And more still.
  2. You can immerse yourself in the Irish Seed Savers genebank.
  3. Do you want chips with your tree genebank?
  4. There’s a sort of cherry blossom genebank in the Smithsonian Gardens.
  5. The Economist fails to mention genebanks in its piece on how to save coffee from climate change. Here’s an EU project that’s using coffee diversity for adaptation.
  6. Jeremy’s latest newsletter looks at everything from the denazification of cattle to yams. But not genebanks. Subscribe anyway!

Brainfood: Green Revolution narratives, Soybean diversity, Wild barley diversity, Maize and bean breeding, Rice breeding, Apple pedigrees, Trees and diets, ICRISAT genebank, IITA genebank, GHUs, CGIAR policy, Diverse farming, De novo domestication

Turkey Red from Ukraine feeds America, and the world

As we ponder the possible effects of war on food security, a piece in Modern Farmer reminds us that Ukraine contributes to the world’s wheat crop more than just its annual harvest.

“If you’ve ever eaten a slice of bread, you can thank Ukraine. That’s not an exaggeration. The flavorful grains that transformed the North American prairies during the nineteenth century into a continental breadbasket were varieties native to Ukraine’s famed Black Earth districts of Crimea and Galicia [what is now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine].”

It has to do with the “Turkish type” hard red winter wheats that German Mennonite farmers, originally invited into the Russian empire by Catherine the Great, took with them to the US from the Crimea when things got tricky for them in the late 1800s.

Dr Tom Payne, formerly the head of the wheat genebank at CIMMYT, tells me that such varieties as Kharkov, Kherson and Kubanka were the foundation for Great Plains modern wheats, with Kharkov being the “check” against which new varieties have been compared for more than 50 years.

A few years ago, Jeremy told the story of Red Fife on his podcast. A foundational variety for Canadian wheat farming, that too can perhaps trace its ultimate origin to Ukraine.

One legend states that a load of wheat grown in Ukraine was on a ship in the Glasgow harbour. A friend of Farmer Fife dropped his hat into the red-coloured wheat, collecting a few seeds in the hatband, which he then shipped off to Farmer Fife. The wheat grew. The family cow managed to eat all the wheat heads except for one, which Mrs Fife salvaged. This was the beginning of Red Fife wheat in Canada.

Lately, some American and Canadian farmers, millers and bakers have been going back to older heritage varieties such as Turkey Red and Red Fife; and now, alas, these are making their way back home, though sadly not as one would have wished:

Janie’s Mill, which grinds grains from Janie’s Farm in central Illinois, sent customers a note about being the “direct beneficiaries of countless generations of Ukrainian wheat farmers.” In service of that direct connection, the mill is sending profits from sales of Turkey Red grains and flour to World Central Kitchen, which has been providing hot meals in the region to feed the more than two million refugees that have fled Ukraine since the attack began in February.

Brainfood: Ukrainian edition

Brainfood: Spatial data, Extinction risk, Improved lentils, Lentil collection, Ohia germination, Shea genomics, Wild olive, Cacao climate refugia, Cacao sacred groves, Italian winter squash, Nigerian yams, Bambara groundnut diversity