In her new piece in Barista, Hanna Neuschwander really makes up for not mentioning CATIE’s genebank by name in her Coffee in the New Millennium. I take it all back.
Brainfood: Species shifts, Rewilding caution, Managing grassland, Natural control, Expansion, Rutin, Citrullus core, Open source seeds, Nagoya consequences, Tree diversity
- Altitudinal shifts of the native and introduced flora of California in the context of 20th-century warming. Introduced species are better at spreading upward than the native flora.
- Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation. Step away from the shiny new box.
- Threatened herbivorous insects maintained by long-term traditional management practices in semi-natural grasslands. Because they can’t compete with generalists better adapted to the new-fangled conditions.
- Agricultural landscape simplification reduces natural pest control: A quantitative synthesis. Aphid control 46% lower in simple landscapes with lots of cultivated land, compared to more diverse landscapes.
- Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security. Expansion could really help with food security, also in importing countries, but is likely to occur in biodiversity hotspots, which means the devil will be in the spatial detail.
- Quantitative analysis of rutin content using silkworm genetic resources. Wait, silkworm powder?
- Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Formation of a Core Collection of 1197 Citrullus Accessions. Microsatellites detect differences between American and E. Asian ecotypes and select diverse subset of 130 accessions from Chinese collection.
- Open Source Foodways: Agricultural Commons and Participatory Art. Seeds as art.
- Implications of the Nagoya Protocol for Genome Resource Banks Composed of Biomaterials from Rare and Endangered Species. There are many, some of them unforeseen.
- Functional Resilience against Climate-Driven Extinctions – Comparing the Functional Diversity of European and North American Tree Floras. Loss of species diversity may be decoupled from loss of functional diversity.
Nibbles: Cover crops, Viet coconut, Water maps, Mao’s mango, Tudor bread, Belgian gardening, IRRI fingerprints, Stay green barley, Miniature donkey
- Uncovering cover crops, the NY Times way.
- Uncovering coconut cultivation in Vietnam, the Roland Bourdeix way.
- Where to expect water shortages, and irrigation. Crying for a mashup.
- When a mango is not just a mango.
- Bread, and much else, according to the Tudors.
- A Belgian plantsman is revolutionizing gardening. No, really.
- How genomics will revolutionize rice breeding. No, really.
- How to get deeper barley roots for drought tolerance? Look to sorghum.
- And today’s miniature livestock is…a donkey.
The hipster future of coffee starts with a genebank
I started a post a few days ago with a quote suggesting that all that commercial farmers are interested in is yield. So let’s balance that today with this:
Geisha in undoubtedly a luxury, but in one important way, it deserves the hype. It is the first coffee to be grown commercially just because it tastes good.
We blogged about the journey of the remarkable coffee landrace called Geisha (or Gesha) a few years ago: from Ethiopia’s forests to the CATIE genebank in Costa Rica to the Peterson family farm in Panama to all over the world, or, more specifically, a hipster coffee shop in Taiwan. But Hanna Neuschwander‘s Coffee in the New Millennium tells the story at much greater length, not to mention with much greater skill. For example, I wish I had thought to describe hillside coffee plantations, with their neat, undulating rows of bushes, as “living corduroy.”
The piece ends with a neat juxtaposition between World Coffee Research’s monumental International Multi-location Variety Trials and the more geographically focussed, but no less ambitious, in its own way, effort by the Peterson family. They’re looking for a new Geisha among hundreds of other Ethiopian landraces they are now testing on their Panamanian farm. I only have one bone to pick with Ms Neuschwander: why not fully acknowledge the role of the genebank at CATIE in all this, rather than just referring, anonymously, to “a research facility in Costa Rica”?
Nibbles: Spinifex industry, Tsiperifery pepper, Pacific taro, Coffee double, Guadeloupe genebanks, Cucumber history, Gourmet maize, Peruvian cuisine, Heirloom rice
- Spinifex fibres for ultra-thin condoms, with indigenous approval.
- Piper borbonense getting its 15 minutes.
- Cook Islands shares taros with Samoa. Fingers crossed they’re TLB resistant.
- A couple of videos you may only be able to get on Facebook, or at least I can’t find other sources: Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and INRA/CIRAD’s banana and yam collections in Guadeloupe.
- Speaking of coffee, drink it while you can. And yes, it’s China’s fault.
- The cucumber in England through the ages.
- Gourmet maize in Oaxaca right now.
- All kinds of gourmet food in Peru right now too.
- Ok, ok, a Filipina chef on gourmet heirloom rice too.