- The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
- Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
- Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
- Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
- Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
- The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
- The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
- New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
- In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.
Brainfood: Landrace threats, Heritage areas, Bean erosion, Rice restoration, Cassava redundancy, Commercialization, Peanut network, Podolian cattle
- Towards a practical threat assessment methodology for crop landraces. Basically red listing for landraces.
- Preserving traditional systems: Identification of agricultural heritage areas based on agro-biodiversity. First places to apply the above?
- Genetic erosion within the Fabada dry bean market class revealed by high-throughput genotyping. Would have been nice to apply the above before doing this study.
- Restoration of the traditional high-altitude rice variety Dumbja in Bhutan. Highlights one of the problems with monitoring threats to landraces, i.e. how to define the landrace.
- Identifying genetically redundant accessions in the world’s largest cassava collection. About half of over 5000 genebank accessions were unique. Easier to recognize cassava landraces I guess.
- Agricultural commercialisation among women smallholder farmers in Nigeria: Implication for food security. Will commercialization help preserve some landraces but threaten others?
- The groundnut improvement network for Africa (GINA) germplasm collection: a unique genetic resource for breeding and gene discovery. Over a thousand accessions that will be just fine.
- An Appropriate Genetic Approach to Endangered Podolian Grey Cattle in the Context of Preserving Biodiversity and Sustainable Conservation of Genetic Resources. The livestock people monitor threat to breeds all the time, it seems.
Brainfood: Software edition
- NBPGR-PDS: A Precision Tool for Plant Germplasm Collecting. Fancy software can manage germplasm collecting info in the field.
- The role of genotypic and climatic variation at the range edge: A case study in winegrapes. Fancy software and analysis can predict how different grape varietals could expand in distribution under climate change.
- ClimMob: Software to support experimental citizen science in agriculture. Fancy software can help plan, manage and analyze large-scale, farmer-led germplasm evaluation trails.
- Herbarium specimen label transcription reimagined with large language models: Capabilities, productivity, and risks. Fancy software can transcribe herbarium labels.
- OliVaR: Improving olive variety recognition using deep neural networks. Fancy software can recognize olives.
- Reconstructing historic and modern potato late blight outbreaks using text analytics. Fancy software can track a pest epidemic.
- Evaluating responses by ChatGPT to farmers’ questions on irrigated lowland rice cultivation in Nigeria. Fancy software can be better than extension workers.
- Simulating pollen flow and field sampling constraints helps revise seed sampling recommendations for conserving genetic diversity. Fancy software and analysis can suggest changes to seed sampling strategies to take into account limited pollen flow.
Nibbles: Cider exhibit, Dog domestication, Nordic rye, Orkney barley, Tunisian wheat, IPR in Kenya, Future Seeds, Seed & herbarium resources
- The Museum of Cider has an exhibition on “A Variety of Cultures.”
- Nice podcast rounding up the latest on dog domestication.
- Useful summary of the history of rye in the Nordic countries since it replaced barley in the Medieval period.
- They didn’t give up barley in the Outer Hebrides.
- The Tunisian farmer goes back to wheat landraces (I think).
- The Kenyan farmers who want to exchange landraces.
- El Colombiano visits Future Seeds, evokes The Walking Dead.
- Seed saving resources from the California Seed Bank and the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.
Brainfood: Archaeology edition
- Early human selection of crops’ wild progenitors explains the acquisitive physiology of modern cultivars. The high leaf nitrogen, photosynthesis, conductance and transpiration of crops was already there in their wild relatives, the first farmers just happened to domesticate greedy plants.
- The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe. When the first farmers arrived in northern Europe armed with their greedy plants, they learned a lot about food from the local hunter-fisher-gatherers, and vice-versa, but without much interbreeding. Jeremy interviews one of the authors on his podcast.
- Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe. There was extensive interbreeding between farmers and the local transitional foragers/herders before with the expansion of pastoralist groups into Europe from the Eurasian steppes around 3300 BC.
- Isotopes prove advanced, integral crop production, and stockbreeding strategies nourished Trypillia mega-populations. The earliest European mega-settlements, in Ukraine and Moldova, from around 4000 BCE, integrated greedy crops and generous domesticated livestock.
- Inference of Admixture Origins in Indigenous African Cattle. Following introduction from the Near East, domesticated cattle got admixed with a North African extinct aurochs before spreading throughout Africa.
- Flax for seed or fibre use? Flax capsules from ancient Egyptian sites (3rd millennium BC to second century AD) compared with modern flax genebank accessions. Fibre first.
- Revealing the secrets of a 2900-year-old clay brick, discovering a time capsule of ancient DNA. DNA from 34 plant groups were detected inside an old brick when it happened to break.
- Making wine in earthenware vessels: a comparative approach to Roman vinification. Comparison with modern counterparts shows that Roman clay jars for storing wine were integral to the process. No word on whether there was any ancient DNA in the clay.
- Breadfruit in the Pacific Islands, its domestication and origins of cultivars grown in East Polynesia and Micronesia. Spoiler alert: they came from Polynesian Outlier Islands.