- Draft technical guidelines from FAO on conserving crop wild relatives at national level.
- Small farms are beautiful.
- Finding the climate adaptation needle in the genomic haystack. Hint: supercomputers needed. DivSeek alerted?
- Emma Cooper asks: “…have you got a favourite ‘forgotten’ edible plant that you’d like to champion?”
- James Wong talks about that kind of thing too, and much else garden-related besides, on his new website.
- Rejoice, Google Earth Pro is now free!
- Wageningen UR course on Food For All.
- UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is offering ten $10,000 postgraduate Food and Farming Journalism Fellowships. ‘Nuff said.
- Speaking of fellowships: the 2015 call for Bioversity’s Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship is open.
- Possible new Cannabis species from Australia: watch them do the DNA work and spoil it. Gap analysis, anyone? … As you were, didn’t need DNA after all.
Brainfood: Organic convergence, Wine yeast diversity, Cassava genome, Potato wild relatives, PREDICTS predicts, Seed cryo, Community seedbanks, Maize OPV evolution, Conservation conflict, Biofortification
- Organic and Non-Organic Farming: Is Convergence Possible? Yes, but conversion is more likely.
- The vintage effect overcomes the terroir effect: a three years survey on the wine yeast biodiversity in Franciacorta and Oltrepò Pavese, two Northern Italian vine-growing areas. Year more important than place as determinant of yeast diversity.
- Cassava genome from a wild ancestor to cultivated varieties. The genes that have been selected are the ones you’d think. And here’s the thing actually being used.
- Taxonomy and Genetic Differentiation among Wild and Cultivated Germplasm of Solanum sect. Petota. The genes that have been selected are the ones you’d think. Oh, and the taxonomy is fine.
- The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts. Could prove useful. But it doesn’t look like the data is available yet.
- C-2001: Survival of short-lived desiccation tolerant seeds during long-term storage in liquid nitrogen: Implications for the management and conservation of plant germplasm collections. It’s not always great.
- Ensuring food security in the small islands of Maluku: A community genebank approach. Won’t be easy.
- Evaluation of Evolution and Diversity of Maize Open-Pollinated Varieties Cultivated under Contrasted Environmental and Farmers’ Selection Pressures: A Phenotypical Approach. Maize OPVs changed a bit in farmers’ fields over 3 years, but not in how they looked.
- Conservation planning in agricultural landscapes: hotspots of conflict between agriculture and nature. Threatened mammals and cropland areas where yield gap is highest are, not surprisingly, mostly found together in sub-Saharan Africa. I wonder if the same could be said for threatened crop wild relatives?
- Biofortification for Selecting and Developing Crop Cultivars Denser in Iron and Zinc. Current strategy is QTL detection followed by MAS, but much more downstream work on processing, extension and acceptance needed.
Nibbles: Potatoes, Saffron, Mammoths, Yield variation, African CWR, Indian cattle
- China needs potatoes. And McDonalds.
- And Afghanistan needs saffron.
- Mammoths killed by people, not asteroids.
- A third of yield variability due to climate.
- Conserving crop wild relatives in southern Africa.
- “The fascination for exotic cattle breeds has been the bane of Indian dairy industry.”
Nibbles: Tonga, Seeds, Fusarium wilt, Fungal beer, Cover crops, Gates Foundation
- Tonga joins the ITPGRFA. About time too. I started talking to them about it 10 years ago.
- What exactly does it mean to be “amped” about seeds? And do they have to be organic? And do these Filipino ones qualify?
- Enough with the banana scare stories already!
- Go on, nominate someone for the World Food Prize.
- Mushroom beer? Yeah, ok.
- USDA waxes nerdy about cover crops.
- Gateses’ Big Bet for African agriculture. Move along, nothing to see here.
Nibbles: CGRFA, Kew crop job, CC and PGRFA, MAGIC, SDGs, Bushmeat, Biofortification, Protecting trees, Wild coffee, Money honey, Nutmeg story, Colonial cooking, Armenian food
- The Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research breaks down this week’s Fifteenth Regular Session of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture for ya.
- Kew looking for a crop person! I wonder if the successful candidate is in Rome today.
- Mauricio Bellon on why smallholder farmers need crop diversity to adapt to climate change. He’s in Rome.
- Multi-Parent Advanced Generation Inter Cross (MAGIC) deconstructed. Compare and contrast with above.
- The SDGs in one cool interactive infographic. But where’s nutrition?
- Where is overhunting for bushmeat occurring? Gotta get your nutrition where you can…
- Want to invest in a biofortified crop like iron beans? Here’s how to work out where you should do it. Interesting to cross-reference with that bushmeat thing above?
- Ancient Greek tree preservation order.
- Ethiopian forest dwellers protect wild coffee. No preservation orders needed.
- Tracking honey. Follow the money.
- Could say the same about nutmeg.
- Meat stew with garden eggs. Sounds yummie. Not much used in Kenya these days any more, alas.
- Delving into Armenian Ottoman foods. Because we can. No sign of garden eggs.