Brainfood: EU landraces, EU GIs, Citizen fruit scientists, Nordic potatoes, Czech wheat, German wheat, Wild Brassica collecting, Chinese & European soybeans, Italian goats

Nibbles: CWR double, Banana threats, Banana collecting, Rice breeding, Cassava breeding, SADC livestock genebank, Community seedbank, Sunflower mapping, Restoration

  1. Why we need crop wild relatives.
  2. No, really, we need crop wild relatives.
  3. The banana is in trouble.
  4. Which is why we need to conserve banana wild relatives and landraces.
  5. Lots of wild relatives are conserved in the IRRI genebank mentioned in this Guardian article on breeding low glycemic index and high protein rice. Some of them may even have been used in this work. May look that up one day.
  6. I doubt that IITA used wild relatives in breeding these high quality cassava varieties, but there’s always a first time, and there may even be some in its genebank. I should probably look but I don’t have time for this rabbit hole today.
  7. And livestock get conserved in genebanks too, though not as much as crops. I’m really not sure how many livestock wild relatives are in the world’s genebanks, but my guess is not many.
  8. Farmers conserve crop (and livestock) diversity too, of course. And sometimes even their wild relatives.
  9. It’s amazing what can be done from space to figure out what farmers are growing. This is an example of sunflower in Ukraine, but one day we’ll even be able to locate crop wild relatives, I’m sure.
  10. To finish off, a reminder that we need conserved seed of wild species for more than just breeding: restoration too.

Brainfood: Diverse ecologists, Wild vs cultivated, Ecosystem services, Indigenous people, Mixtures, On-farm trees, Monitoring protected areas, Social media & protected areas, Wild harvesting, Land sparing vs sharing, Agroecology & plant health, Wild vs cultivated

Brainfood: Seed quantity, Seed quality, Seed testing, Seed sampling, Cryo review, Potato diversity, Coconut cryo, Apple genebanks, Pear vulnerability, Pear restoration, Celebrity conservation, Indigenous rematriation, Farmers’ Rights

Brainfood: Ag research ROI, CGIAR & climate change, Crop species diversity, Training plant breeders, AI & plant breeding, Wheat breeding review, Wheat landraces, CIMMYT wheat breeding, Wheat D genome, Forages pre-breeding, Impact of new varieties, Two long-term barley experiment, High protein peas, Watermelon super-pangenome, Resynthesizing mustard, Consumer preference and breeding