- Spanish-language article about the effort to save Ukraine’s genebank.
- Report on “Reducing inequalities for food security and nutrition” from the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). They don’t say so explicitly, but genebanks can help with that.
- They can certainly help with breeding new olive varieties, which are much needed.
- Genebanks come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes an apple orchard is also a genebank.
- Sometimes rice farmers are genebanks.
- I wonder how many genebanks conserve trees with edible leaves. This book doesn’t say, alas.
- The Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) gets a boost. No word on whether it will start conserving edible trees.
Nibbles: CATIE genebank, Svalbard etc, Medicinal plant genebank, Coconut genebank
- Short, slightly random piece on the CATIE genebank.
- Equally short and equally random piece on genebanks in general, leading with CATIE, closing with Svalbard. I suppose one shouldn’t be looking at a gift horse in the mouth.
- A Ugandan field genebank is suffering from thefts. Maybe we shouldn’t call them banks.
- Jamaica wants a coconut genebank. Hope it has a strong fence.
Nibbles: Crop failure, Transformation, Malta genebank, Virginia fruits, Nigeria genebank, Bean breeding, Peasants’ rights
- Multiple simultaneous crop failures are going to get more common.
- All the more reason to transform food system, right?
- Which means funding genebanks properly, even on Malta.
- And saving what can still be saved. Like fruit trees in the US, yes, why not?
- But you have to know what to do with all that stuff in genebanks. Nigeria is showing a way to do that.
- One thing you can do is breed beans which take less time to cook. Win-win.
- While doing all that, let’s not forget peasants’ rights.
Nibbles: Milpa revival, Cretan olive, Lost apples, Moche meals, African agroecology, Global Tree Knowledge Platform, Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity
- Marketing the milpa.
- Marketing a traditional Cretan olive variety.
- Finding lost apples in New England. Now to market them.
- Taking new passion fruit varieties to market in Australia.
- Deconstructing Moche history, society and culture through compost and struggle meals. No sign of markets.
- Reviewing the state of agroecology in Africa. Does “economic diversification” count as marketing?
- The Global Tree Knowledge Platform must have stuff on marketing somewhere.
- The books series ISSUES IN AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY, now free to download, has lots on marketing.
Brainfood: Croplands, Satellite phenotyping, Farm size, Bt double, Scaling up, Opinion leaders, Gendered knowledge, OFSP, Ethiopia sorghum diversity, Banana bunchy top, Climate change & pathogens, Bean pathogens, Mixtures, Rewards
- CROPGRIDS: A global geo-referenced dataset of 173 crops circa 2020. It’s great to finally know where crops are grown. Thanks, satellites!
- Satellite imagery for high-throughput phenotyping in breeding plots. Ok, so now we could theoretically also say where landraces are grown around the world? Thanks, satellites!
- Likely decline in the number of farms globally by the middle of the century. Wait, you have to model this, you can’t figure it out from space? Thanks, satellites.
- Just agricultural science: The green revolution, biotechnologies, and marginalized farmers in Africa. Looks like you can’t predict the success of pest resistant Bt cowpea in Burkina Faso from space.
- Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India. Likewise Bt cotton in India. In both cases, fancy technology is not enough.
- Scaling Up Pro-Poor Agrobiodiversity Interventions as a Development Option. Turns out it’s not just a matter of transferring technology, satellite or otherwise. If only they had had this analytical framework when they thought of Bt crops.
- Male and stale? Questioning the role of “opinion leaders” in agricultural programs. Yes indeed, upscaling needs changes in behaviours and attitudes, and for that you need those social networks, but “key farmers” are overrated as drivers of change.
- Gendered Knowledge, Conservation Priorities and Actions: A Case Study of On-Farm Conservation of Small Millets Among Malayalar of Kolli Hills, South India. And here’s another example, if more were needed.
- Assessment of seed system interventions for biofortified orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) in Malawi. Not clear if this is another example, but I suspect it is. Can you tell OFSP from space?
- Inventory of on-farm sorghum landrace diversity and climate adaptation in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia: implications for sorghum breeding and conservation. No opinion leaders nor satellites were used in this work.
- Banana bunchy top disease in Africa: Predicting continent-wide disease risks by combining survey data and expert knowledge. Both opinion leaders and satellites were used in this work. Well, not really but I couldn’t resist it.
- Climate change impacts on plant pathogens, food security and paths forward. Doesn’t cover banana bunchy top but I’m sure the main conclusion that better modelling and monitoring are needed applies. Using satellites, no doubt.
- Understanding farmer knowledge and site factors in relation to soil-borne pests and pathogens to support agroecological intensification of smallholder bean production systems. Sure, better modelling and monitoring are great, but in the end you have to bring it down to earth.
- Crop Diversity Experiment: towards a mechanistic understanding of the benefits of species diversity in annual crop systems. Diversification of arable crop systems through mixtures need not be bad for yields. I wonder if you can see crop mixtures from space.
- Bending the curve of biodiversity loss requires rewarding farmers economically for conservation management. This does not cover crop biodiversity, but I guess the above does, to a degree. If there were money on the table, you probably wouldn’t need social networks, let alone opinion leaders.