Brainfood: NbS, Intercropping, Sparing, Mixtures, Intensification, Shifting cultivation, Mexican wild foods, Chinese NUS, Andean crops, South African indigenous foods, Uganda community seedbanks

Nibbles: Mugumu, Gates, Fixation, OSA, USDA, Panicum, Digitaria, Britgrub, Wheat, ICRISAT, Svalbard

  1. Blog post on the importance of the mugumu tree in Kikuyu culture.
  2. Alas, no sign of mugumu trees on the Kenyan farm visited by Bill Gates recently. But there were chickens, drought-tolerant maize and mobile phones…
  3. …and there may soon be crops engineered for nitrogen fixation too, if his foundation’s project with the University of Cambridge comes through.
  4. Speaking of maize, here’s a nice illustrated story of how the Organic Seed Alliance is helping farmers grow their own tortilla corn in the Pacific Northwest.
  5. To generalize and contextualize the above, read this USDA e-book on plant collections and climate change.
  6. Dr Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute just got a grant to study broomcorn millet domestication and dispersal in Central Asia. There may be lessons for present-day adaptation to climate change, says the blurb.
  7. There are probably lessons about adaptation to climate change also to be had from Kew’s work on fonio and other traditional crops in Guinea.
  8. I wonder if Kew boffins are also working on bere, perry and other endangered British foods though.
  9. It’s always nice to see someone first learn about genebanks, and how they can help with the whole climate change thing.
  10. Meanwhile, in India, ICRISAT gets a stamp, which however doesn’t look very much like India or ICRISAT to me. Plenty of broomcorn millet in its genebank, by the way.
  11. Plenty of seeds from the ICRISAT genebank in Svalbard, as Asmund Asdal will no doubt point out on 10 February.

Brainfood: Sulawesi Warty Pig, Neolithic violence, Early cotton, Livestock poop, Pontic millet, Bronze Age opium, Sami shamanism, Wild chickens

Nibbles: CIAT, AGG, Volcani, Restoration, Food diversity, Deforestation, Berries, Diverse systems

  1. I’ve been told I need to be more explicit in my Nibbling. So here’s a CCTV video on the Future Seeds genebank in Colombia. You know the one.
  2. The Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) in Horsham is announcing a new online seed catalogue. The genebank is also on Genesys.
  3. According to this article, the Israel Plant Gene Bank of the Volcani Center Agricultural Research Organization near Tel Aviv has some pretty cool wheats. I wonder if any of them are also in the AGG. The Volcani genebank is not on Genesys, alas. But some of its material is.
  4. The Director of Science of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and others say that we need lots more genebanks if we are to do all the ecosystem restoration that needs to be done around the world.
  5. Short & sweet blog post on the importance of food diversity from the policy officer at the Soil Association. Genebanks not mentioned though, alas.
  6. Vox has an article on a new European law aimed at preventing the sale of some agricultural commodities grown on recently cleared forest land. I guess the next step would be restoring those ecosystems. If only there were more genebanks…
  7. Some hero mapped the distribution of all the berries of North America, and made cool videos of the results.
  8. Report from Wageningen AU on “The need to enhance crop, livestock andaquatic genetic diversity in food systems.” Lots and lots on genebanks.
  9. So, what did you think? Do you prefer telegraphic, impressionistic Nibbles, or these lengthier, more explicit versions? Let me know in the comments.