We’re in the second day of the First International Multi-stakeholder Symposium on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture: Technical Consultation on in situ conservation and on-farm management of PGRFA. If you missed the first day, you can get videos of all the papers on the symposium website, but be there this afternoon for the roundtable, please.
Nibbles: Superfoods, Value chains book, North American ag origins, Origins of beer, Community seed banks, Seed diversity
- What’s the next global “superfood”? Most likely it’s the next local “superfood”. Jeremy interviews economist Trent Blare.
- And here’s a book that expands on that podcast.
- Speaking of podcasts, here’s one that dissects the Eastern Agricultural Complex, at least in the last 20 mins. The rest is informative and fun too, though. Spoiler alert: it’s the food storage. Any superfoods in there though?
- Always fun to read about the history of beer.
- Project on community genebanks launched by government genebank.
- Seeds of all sizes and shapes in genebanks.
Brainfood: On farm, Barahnaja, Vegetable landraces, Okra core, Carrot breeding, Soybean breeding, Afghan wheat, Phytochemistry, Cassava diversity, Dietary diversity double, Pollination trade
- On-Farm Crop Diversity for Advancing Food Security and Nutrition. Lots of solid context, plus fun and unusual boxes on fe’i bananas, African greens and Vietnam seed clubs.
- Mainstreaming Barahnaja cultivation for food and nutritional security in the Himalayan region. Could be another box in the above.
- Vegetable Landraces: The “Gene Banks” for Traditional Farmers and Future Breeding Programs. Unusual way to put it, but you can see what they mean.
- The World Vegetable Center Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) Core Collection as a Source for Flooding Stress Tolerance Traits for Breeding. It’s the longer vegetative phase that possibly helps with flooding tolerance.
- Strategies to Identify and Introgress Production and Quality Traits from Genetic Resources to Elite Carrot Cultivars. But maybe it’s not core collections that you need.
- Genomic dissection of widely planted soybean cultivars leads to a new breeding strategy of crops in the post-genomic era. Here’s another core collection, this time of popular cultivars rather than landraces, as a basis for a strategy called Potalaization which seems to amount to starting your breeding programme with a wide genetic base.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis of Triticum aestivum L. Landrace Panel from Afghanistan. You could select a core collections based on ecogeography. Mainly.
- Spatial and evolutionary predictability of phytochemical diversity. Interestingly, the same goes for phytochemical diversity in Swiss grasslands.
- DNA fingerprinting reveals varietal composition of Vietnamese cassava germplasm (Manihot esculenta Crantz) from farmers’ field and genebank collections. From 1570 clones to 31 unique genotypes. No need for a core collection then.
- Dietary diversity of rural Indonesian households declines over time with agricultural production diversity even as incomes rise. Indonesians need to go back to growing more vegetables. See some of the previous papers for examples. You’re welcome.
- The interplay between food market access and farm household dietary diversity in low and middle income countries: A systematic review of literature. Or their market access could be improved, though it’s unclear whether that would improve their diets.
- Virtual pollination trade uncovers global dependence on biodiversity of developing countries.
Many diets depend on other people’s pollinators, though.
Nibbles: PGRFA book, PGRFA use, PGRFA database
- New book on conserving crop diversity.
- New data on genetic gains in banana breeding.
- New European database for organic seeds. And more on organic ag in Europe.
Nibbles: Pastoralism, Chinese seeds, Livestock genetics comic
- What pastoralists know.
- What a Chinese organic farmer knows.
- What kids should know.