The International Potato Center (CIP) has announced the launch of two databases. One is on its potato and sweetpotato genebank holdings, and the other on advanced potato varieties and clones. Will their usability and content satisfy Jeremy? Do they satisfy you? Check them out and let us know what you think, we promise to pass the message on.
Irish Seed Savers Association relaunches website
They’re on our list of seed sources, but of course we don’t check each of those all that often, so thanks to our friend Danny for pointing out that the Irish Seed Savers Association has launched a funky new web site. Go, enjoy, help them out.
Finding Vavilov. Not.
A user gets stranded in Genebank Database Hell looking for Vavilov’s collections in Tunisia. Not for the fainthearted.
Nibbles: CWR protected, Aquaculture, Super potato, Maize domestication, Climate in Africa, Zimbabwe, Pepper, Chinese genebank
- Indian tiger park protects crop wild relatives and other useful plants. h/t Danny.
- CAPRi News highlights a book about Asian Aquaculture Successes.
- Precision breeding creates super potato. Yeah, if you want an industrial feedstock, not food.
- Maize moved from hand to hand, not with moving farmers. And that means … ?
- An African view of climate change. Complex.
- Zimbabwe’s advice on climate change: “Plant more sorghum, less maize“. Simple.
- Survival farming in Zimbabwe. Hard.
- Small farmers growing Piper pepper in Vietnam
- China has set up its first national seed bank as part of the country’s efforts to protect biodiversity. I’ve been there, says Jeremy, and it is stunning.
Bent Skovmand remembered
A Facebook post by Dag Endresen of NordGen alerted me to the recent publication of the biography of Bent Skovmand, entitled The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest. Bent Skovmand (1945-2007), a student of Norman Borlaug, was a very influential figure in the world of conservation and use of crop genetic resources in general, and of wheat in particular. The director of the Nordic Gene Bank (now NordGen) when he died, the books he kept in his office are touchingly maintained at NordGen’s Alnarp headquarters as a separate collection. I’ll be trying to get hold of the book.