- 3000 peas go to Svalbard.
- Bananas 101, courtesy of Prof. Pat Heslop-Harrison.
- Video goodness on Neolithic Greece from the aptly named Flint Dibble.
- Plants to dye for. With. Sorry. Dye with.
- Brands climb awkwardly on the biodiversity bandwagon. Genebanks look on, enviously.
Nibbles: Robin Graham RIP, Fred Bliss award, Seed production, Chile spuds, Indian goats, Ancient bread, Horner Bier, Cheap food, Vigna, Singing dog, Fungal diversity
- Remembering Robin Graham, prophet of biofortification.
- Honouring plant breeder supreme Fred Blisss.
- Need to produce seed of all those new varieties that breeders come up with.
- And save the stuff they will replace: The Economist does the potatoes of Chiloé.
- Hey, it’s not just about the crops: conserving goats on farm in India.
- The experimental archaeology of bread thrives under corona. And if you were intrigued by the potato detoxification reference, find the details on Bill Schindler’s website. And not only bread and potatoes, also beer…
- Like Mozart’s oat beer? Which was apparently killed off by lager back in Austria but is now available in Denver.
- Food shouldn’t be cheap, it should be affordable, and not only for those who consume it. Ancient Egyptian bread will be exempted.
- No way Kenyan coffee can be described as cheap. h/t Jeremy’s newsletter: have you subscribed yet?
- I don’t know how cheap mungbean is in Myanmar, but it seems to be very valuable.
- The PNG singing dog is not extinct in the wild after all? Priceless.
- Combination of key and photo guide to the identification of European fungi. Worth its weight in truffles. Source.
Animated maize
Did you actually click on that really cool GIF from Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and Dolores Piperno illustrating a paper on the post-domestication movement of maize that we linked to in Brainfood on Monday? No?
You’re really missing out…
Somebody do Panicum miliaceum now.
No, wait, we have that too.
Brainfood: Seeds & corona, Bleeding finance, Maiz de humedo, High altitude maize, Open data, Seed swapping, Wheat core, Banana epigenetics, Soil biodiversity, Ethiopian mustard diversity, Ryegrass GWAS, Peanut antioxidants, CWR conservation, VRR
- Seed security response during COVID-19: building on evidence and orienting to the future. First and foremost, support farmers save their seeds.
- Blended finance for agriculture: exploring the constraints and possibilities of combining financial instruments for sustainable transitions. How about supporting farmers save their seeds?
- Dynamic conservation of genetic resources: Rematriation of the maize landrace Jala. Genebanks helping farmers save their seeds.
- Molecular Parallelism Underlies Convergent Highland Adaptation of Maize Landraces. Early farmers saving their maize seeds in the Mexican highlands eventually helped out farmers in the Andean highlands. With GIF goodness.
- Open access to genetic sequence data maximizes value to scientists, farmers, and society. How will it help farmers save their seeds?
- Applying Knowledge of Southern Seed Savers to Community-Based Agricultural Biodiversity Conservation Practice. The people saving and swapping seeds in the Ozarks respond to films, need how-to manuals, and could be a tad more diverse. I suspect this is not just true in Arkansas.
- Characterization of wheat germplasm conserved in the Indian National Genebank and establishment of a composite core collection. Farmers trying to save their seeds rejoice.
- Heritable epigenetic diversity for conservation and utilization of epigenetic germplasm resources of clonal East African Highland banana (EAHB) accessions. Hey, it’s not just seeds. Methylation patterns follow geography but not morphology in a genetically uniform group of vegetatively propagated cultivars.
- Blind spots in global soil biodiversity and ecosystem function research. Not now, soil biodiversity, I’m too busy dealing with seeds.
- Narrow genetic base shapes population structure and linkage disequilibrium in an industrial oilseed crop, Brassica carinata A. Braun. Landraces of Ethiopian mustard and improved lines cluster in separate groups, but overall diversity is low. Not enough seeds saved, perhaps?
- High-Throughput Genome-Wide Genotyping To Optimize the Use of Natural Genetic Resources in the Grassland Species Perennial Ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.). Only possible because of saved seeds.
- Presence of resveratrol in wild Arachis species adds new value to this overlooked genetic resource. I hope we’ve saved enough seeds.
- Main Challenges and Actions Needed to Improve Conservation and Sustainable Use of Our Crop Wild Relatives. It’s quite difficult — and insufficient — to save the seeds of wild species, but we should do it nevertheless.
- Influence of diversity and intensification level on vulnerability, resilience and robustness of agricultural systems. Why we should all save seeds.
Nibbles: Canary collections, Integrating fish, Indigenous seeds, Dan Charles articles, Stats, FAO booklet
- Collections of banana and mangoes in the Canary Islands.
- No word about catfish with those bananas.
- Interview with the wonderful Rowen White, Seedkeeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne.
- NPR series on agricultural land, courtesy of the no less, though differently, wonderful Dan Charles.
- Harvard lectures on statistical analysis of social sciences data.
- FAO tells us “How the world’s food security depends on biodiversity“.