Funding

Nibbles: SeedLinked, Heritage Seed Library, HarvestPlus, Enset, EBI, Saharan/Sahelian flora, Pollen, Food & climate, Food prices, Moonraker, Svalbard eats, Devex does seeds, CGRFA ABS survey

SeedLinked: an app to source cool vegetable seeds. And more.
Want to become a variety champion for the Heritage Seed Library? Where’s the app though?
A compendium of evidence on the efficacy of biofortification from HarvestPlus. Jeremy surely available for comment?
Kew celebrates efficacy of enset conservation in Ethiopia.
Not sure if the Ethiopia Biodiversity Institute is in on that celebration.
Some of Ethiopia is Sahelian, no? Anyway, here’s a nice piece on the forgotten, but important plants from that neck of the woods.
We should all celebrate pollen banking much more.
Celebrity chef worried about the effect of climate change on food.
Including food prices. I dunno, maybe pollen banking will help.
Or maybe even a lunar repository.
Speaking of food prices, I bet this Svalbard restaurant is not cheap. Maybe there’s a nice view of the Seed Vault though. Who needs the moon?
The latest Devex newsletter has lots of stuff on food prices and prizes and (non-lunar) seed vaults.
Do you use any of the above for research and development? The FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture would like to hear from you.

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 Yes, I know this is not peer-reviewed, but would you have left it out of this American round-up?

A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
But then goes all serious with talk of trillions of dollars in benefits from sustainable food systems. Diversity not mentioned, alas, though, so one wonders about the point of the previous pieces.
Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to. Seriously though, some crops do need more research, if only so they can be grown somewhere else.
There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
This piece about tomato diversity in Spain is worth reading for many reasons (heroic seed saving yada yada), but especially for the deadpan take on the Guardia Civil at the end.
Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a new National Strategic Germplasm and Cultivar Collection Assessment and Utilization Plan. Quite the tour de force. Now to get it funded.
Yes, there’s now a community of practice on millets. Joined!
The Seed System Lab at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences has lots of interesting resources on its new website.
The latest on the Kenyan genebank’s sorghum work.
Why wouldn’t Scotland have a crab apple genebank?
Why Jimmy Red maize is worth saving, despite its faults.
Yak cheese? Yes, please.
And nice pics of Indian mangoes to close.