Nibbles: Ancient grains, Small millets, Wheat, Kelp genebank, Mongolian breeds, Pumpkin seeds, Bioversity & CIAT, Tree history, Cool maps, Business & biodiversity

  1. Make Me Care About…ancient grains.
  2. Not enough? Here’s more.
  3. Wait, does wheat count?
  4. Make Me Care About…kelp.
  5. Make Me Care About…rare livestock breeds. In Mongolia. Jeremy unavailable for comment.
  6. Make Me Care About…pumpkins.
  7. Make Me Care About…Bioversity International…and its Alliance with CIAT.
  8. Make Me Care About…old writing about trees.
  9. Make Me Care About…the World.
  10. Make the Private Sector Care About…biodiversity, nature and landscape restoration.

Brainfood: Diversification, Nepal agrobiodiversity, Agroecology double, Agroforestry, Seeds of deforestation, Millets models

Brainfood: Traits & environment, Acacia growth, Local extinction risk, Lebanese CWR priorities, Malawi CWR payments, Bread wheat origins, Wild lettuce, Ethiopian forages, Editing forages

Nibbles: Food tree, Wild chocolate, Cacao, Cassava in Africa, Indigenous ABS, Abbasid food, Valuing trees

  1. Gastropod episode on The Fruit that Could Save the World. Any guesses what that might be?
  2. Atlas Obscura podcast on an apparently now famous wild-harvested chocolate from Bolivia. But how wild is it really?
  3. BBC podcast on cacao for balance.
  4. Forbes touts an African cassava revolution. What, no podcast?
  5. Very interesting piece from the ever reliable Modern Farmer on how a small seed company called Fedco Seeds designated a bunch of maize landraces as “indigenously stewarded,” and are paying 10% of what they make from the sale of their seeds to a pooled Indigenous fund which goes to support a local, multi-tribal project called Nibezun. A sort of mini-MLS? Definitely worth a podcast. Any takers?
  6. A long but rewarding article in New Lines Magazine describes medieval cookbooks from the Abbasid caliphate. The recipes make up for the somewhat stilted podcast.
  7. BGCI publication on how the Morton Arboretum works out whether it should be growing a particular population or species of tree. The trick is to quantify 5 types of “value”: environmental, evolutionary, genetic diversity, horticultural, conservation. Though one could also consider hostorical/cultural, educational and economic value as well. I suspect in the end it comes down to whether it looks nice in an available gap. If I were to do a podcast on this, I’d test it out with the tree in the first of these Nibbles.

Brainfood: Human diversity, Wild rye, Caribbean cassava, Three Sisters, Old beer, Old apples, Feral crops, Crop resynthesis