Commodity

Nibbles: Seed video, Kew video, Indonesian cassava, Crop maps, Neglected crops, KEPHIS lab, Turkish genebank, Nepal rice, Polynesian sugarcane, Ancient beer, Garlic basics

Nice video celebrating seeds.
Nice old video about Kew Gardens.
Tracing the origins of Indonesian cassava. No, it wasn’t introduced by Kew, but yes, colonialism was involved.
Latest data on where crops are grown. Including cassava.
Self Help Africa director turns on to neglected crops. Including cassava.
New lab in Kenya for spreading clean crops around. Including cassava?
Türkiye’s genebank in the news. No cassava.
Nepalese rice gets a Welsh upgrade.
Collecting sugarcane in French Polynesia to (eventually) support local booze industry.
Long live the ancient booze bandwagon.
Garlic 101.

Vulnerability of U.S. new and industrial crop genetic resources. More germplasm (especially wild relatives) and breeders are needed in the US of castor bean, gumweed, guar, guayule, kenaf, roselle, safflower, sesame, sunn hemp, rubber dandelion and Vernonia.
Safeguarding Plant Genetic Resources in the U.S. But the conservation system itself has its challenges, due to climate change.
Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture. But climate change is not the only thing that agriculture (and possibly the conservation system too) needs to adapt to.
Efforts to cryopreserve shrimp (Penaeid) genetic resources and the potential for a shrimp germplasm bank in the United States. Sure, why not, let them eat shrimp.
Mother Tubers of Wild Potato Solanum jamesii can Make Shoots Five Times. Are enough populations of this thing in genebanks, I wonder? No, not compared to shrimps.
‘Hybrid’ US sheep breeder used endangered genetic material, faces jail. Yes, I know this is not peer-reviewed, but would you have left it out of this American round-up?

The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.

Public sector plant breeders are disappearing.
The Millet Man of India is still there though. And why he’s important.
A museum to public sector breeder Nazareno Strampelli appears in Italy.
Another couple of community genebanks appear in Ghana.
We can never have too many discussions on the importance of genebanks, so here’s another one. Not much on the community sort, though. Here’s another example: Ireland. Even the Arab States of Asia want one!
And a deep dive on crop wild relatives in genebanks to round things off.
A community saves illegal potatoes in Canada. Yeah, I know, there’s a lot to unpack there.
Maybe that humble illegal potato needs a geographic indication, like that superfood, açaí.
The Mayocoba bean as a superfood is a bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty of other pulses out there making waves.
The Michigan State kiwi could probably do with a geographic indication too, come to think of it. Cold-hardy and smooth-skinned? Super!
Ok, this is probably the last Nibbles before Christmas, so let’s celebrate with a drink: with bitters of course.