Funding

Nibbles: Give a man a chicken, Pollinator selection, Bananapocalypse redux, Red kiwi, ICARDA genebank, Dark comms, Food design, Traditional diets, Revitalizing villages, Peruvian diversity, Moving botany

Which should come first, the chicken or the cash? MIL unavailable for comment.
Pollinators are mini plant breeders.
Save the Cavendish! No, wait…
There’s a red kiwi coming. Eventually. No, not left-wing New Zealanders.
ICARDA decentralizes its genebank. But we knew that.
GFAR webinars on communicating research.
Designing food. What could possibly go wrong?
Decolonize it instead.
Ecotourism in Portugal. No word on whether decolonized food involved.
Kickstarter on documenting food crops in Peru, decolonized or not.
Tracing the colonization and (hopefully) decolonization of economic botany products. Fascinating idea.

Agroforestry Species Switchboard gets upgrade.
Arabica sequenzzzzzzz…
“But what is the point of collecting and preserving this genetic diversity as seed, if it should remain in perpetuity in a seed bank?”
Citrus untangled.
52 million year old tomatillo fossil already had Inflated Calyx Syndrome.
Faba bean wild relative found, kinda sorta.
It’s the economics, stupid.
African rice in the New World. Mash up with peanuts?
National Program 301: Plant Genetic Resources, Genomics, and Genetic Improvement. Action Plan 2018-2022.
Communities that catch more diverse fish species are more resilient shock.
Database of what works in conservation. Not of crop and livestock diversity, though, alas.

genebank-ladies

A very unrandom selection of participants at the latest Annual Genebanks Meeting of the CGIAR, which took place at the Australian Grains Genebank in Horsham and AgriBio, La Trobe University, Melbourne last week, and is the reason for our silence lately. Dr Sally Norton, our host, and the director of the AGG, responsible for over 100,000 accessions, is sitting down, second from left. Thanks, Sally. And thanks to Mellissa Wood on Facebook for the photo.

Sorry about slow blogging lately. Life caught up with us. Slowly getting back in the saddle…
ISIS benefitting from agricultural production as much as oil.
Why we should drop “statistically significant.”
Irish folk medicine being used. Again. Or still.
Back to the future of farms, medieval edition: it’s the faldage, stupid.
Botanical art in history.
Applying zoo methods to plant conservation. Maybe should be the other way too?
The future of dates is in the US?
History of the Honeycrisp apple, for all you Red Delicious haters out there.
Ancient stash found. Down to seeds and stems.
Keep warm with some nice Latin American drinks.
Or beer made from old yeast from a shipwreck.