- China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
- US doubles down on cover crops…
- …and pulses. No word on ginger.
- How Campbell’s doubled down on tomato breeding. But never released the seeds.
- Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
- Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
- Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
- Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
- A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
- How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
- A paean to the mango.
- Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
- It kind of already is in the Andes.
Nibbles: Seed saving edition
- Seed saving in The Guardian.
- Seed saving in Nigeria.
- More seed saving needed in Zimbabwe.
- Save seeds instead of growing GMO crops? The “debate” continues…
- Is seed saving among the best-bet government interventions to fix our diets? Find out.
- Seed saving on rsmag.com, whatever that is.
- Will the new Oxford nature recovery centre look into seed saving, I wonder?
- Saving baobab seeds in Burkina Faso.
- We need joined-up food system thinking. Starting with seed saving?
Nibbles: Maize landraces, Indian plantain, Indigenous conservation, Slow Food, Design a tomato, Saffron in Vermont
- A Mexican entrepreneur and a Pawnee Keeper of the Seed try to save maize landraces in their different ways.
- Indian farmer tries to save plantain varieties.
- Indigenous conservation will save conservation.
- Alice Walters cannot save the food system. But why not let her try?
- None of the above of them would understand the concept of designing a perfect tomato.
- Saffron is the perfect spice.
Brainfood: Genetic diversity, Pointy maize, Diversification, Hybrid yeast, African yam bean, Urbanization, Wild tomato ecogeography, Wild banana seeds, Seed systems, Phytosanitary, Rematriation, Cowpea development, ABS
- The crucial role of genome-wide genetic variation in conservation. Don’t fetishise functional variation.
- The Ancient Varieties of Mountain Maize: The Inheritance of the Pointed Character and Its Effect on the Natural Drying Process. Case in point?
- Diversification for enhanced food systems resilience. Do fetishise diversification.
- Restoring fertility in yeast hybrids: Breeding and quantitative genetics of beneficial traits. Well, that’s one way to diversify. Mules next?
- Predictive genotype-phenotype relations using genetic diversity in African yam bean (Sphenostylis stenocarpa (Hochst. ex. A. Rich) Harms). From 93 IITA accessions to a handful of good ones for the fetishes of seed and/or tuber yield.
- Genetic resources management, seed production constraints and trade performance of orphan crops in Southern Africa: A case of Cowpea. Could maybe fetishise cowpea a little more?
- Urbanization and agrobiodiversity: Leveraging a key nexus for sustainable development. What’s the opposite of fetishising? Demonising? Ok, don’t demonise urbanisation then. Gosh I hope I’m using these words correctly…
- Edaphoclimatic Descriptors of Wild Tomato Species (Solanum Sect. Lycopersicon) and Closely Related Species (Solanum Sect. Juglandifolia and Sect. Lycopersicoides) in South America. We may be in danger of fetishising ecogeography.
- Banana seed genetic resources for food security: Status, constraints, and future priorities. Half of banana wild relatives are not in genebanks at all. Not that we want to fetishise crop wild relatives, but that seems a lot.
- Regulating Seeds—A Challenging Task. How do we avoid fetishising neither formal nor informal seed systems?
- The phytosanitary risks posed by seeds for sowing trade networks. The case for robust phytosanitary measures in global forage seed trade networks. No need to fetishise them though.
- The value of agrobiodiversity: an analysis of consumers preference for tomatoes. Consumers fetishise heirloom tomatoes to the tune of an additional €0.90 per kilo.
- Dynamic guardianship of potato landraces by Andean communities and the genebank of the International Potato Center. Communities don’t fetishise rematriated landraces, but that doesn’t matter.
- Facing the Harsh Reality of Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Legislation. The dangers of fetishising ABS. Or is it demonising?
Nibbles: GenResBridge, Food for All, CIAT genebank, Seed for the Future, Vavilov book, Seeing Pastoralism, S Sudan floods, Sustainable diets, Elon Musk, CePaCT, NZ genebank, Wild potato, Peyote
- Europe gets a genetic resources strategy at last. Rejoice.
- Book on how international organizations could, should, would transform agriculture.
- Meanwhile, in Cali…
- BBVA and El Celler de Can Roca collaborate on forgotten foods documentary, Seeds for the Future.
- A novel about Vavilov? Well, why not.
- Exhibition on pastoralism.
- Visual essay on floods in South Sudan.
- Why not throw money at food security though? I mean, just see above, right?
- Beyond the EAT-Lancet diet. S. Sudan unavailable for comment.
- The SPC genebank curator waxes lyrical.
- Not far away, New Zealand cryopreserves some of its native plants.
- The latest on the Four Corners potato. I hope it’s in cryo…
- …and that it doesn’t go the way of the peyote.