Brainfood: Identifying accessions, Evaluating yeasts, Using CWR, Wild grapes, Bushmeat and nutrition, Rice evaluation, Tomato characterization, Sugarcane CWR, Nordic livestock, Conservation optimization, Moringa development, Albanian olives

Nibbles: Genebank data, Edible smut, Edible bugs, Healthful bluberries, Mining Indian food, Funny spuds pix, Old grape pits, Old einkorn stash, Phylogeny & conservation double, Rhizobacteria, Rapid phenotyping, Plata periurban ag, BRICs in Africa, Chinese terraces, SMTA

Apples in the snow

You may have heard about the difficult weather hitting the northeast of the United States. That includes Geneva, in New York State, which is home to the US national apple and grape genebank. Well, thanks to Thomas Chao, who’s in charge of those collections, you can now have a see what a field collection of apple looks like under a metre of snow. Here’s the core collections.

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And this is a view of the general collection.

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Thomas says these apples should be fine, though he’s a bit worried about some of the grapes. Fingers crossed.

People take genebanks for granted. But they take a lot of looking after, and they can be so vulnerable it is scary.

Nibbles: Citrus greening, Deforestation, OFSP, Sugarbeet breeding, Poverty & conservation, Indian tribals, Eat This Podcast, Musalit, Solomon Island bananas, Potato somaclonal variation, Genebank data management, WorldVeg DG search