- Book alert: Biodiversity, Food and Nutrition — A New Agenda for Sustainable Food Systems.
- Thread alert: Monumental analysis of crop yield trends in the USA.
- Woke alert: WorldVeg ticks a lot of boxes with its work on a peppers core collection.
- Policy alert: Why haven’t farmers’ varieties found a place in national and global seed markets?
Spanish genebank reaches out
The INIA National Center for Plant Genetic Resources (CRF) is aware of the need to integrate in situ and ex situ conservation activities, as well as create synergies and concrete collaborations. Therefore, in the context of the activities of the First Action Plan of the National Program for the Sustainable Conservation and Use of Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Order APA/63/2019), INIA is implementing an initiative to incorporate farmers, their associations and relevant companies as associate members of the national ex situ collection network, so that they can collaborate in primary germplasm evaluation. CRF will make available to them germplasm to grow in the actual conditions of cultivation, so that these associate members can collaborate by providing different kinds of data: on yield, for example under low input conditions, on performance under adverse weather conditions, pests, diseases or weeds, as well as on organoleptic quality; this will support, in addition to its conservation on the farm, the use of diversity and the incorporation of new users. 1
Great initiative from CRF in Spain, will be keeping an eye on it.
Nibbles: Online courses, Colombian seeds, California grapes, Living lockdown
- Online courses on plant-related stuff.
- Beautiful catalog of Colombian heritage seeds.
- California mission grapes came from Peru, not Mexico.
- Taking care of living collections under coronavirus lockdown.
Nibbles: Olives, Figs, Columbian Exchange, Flour, landraces Newsletter, DOIs
- Is there any doubt that olives are important?
- Or figs, for that matter.
- Spanish botanical garden exhibit on Latin American plants that changed the European diet. Stunning.
- Old mills making a comeback.
- Latest issue of the Landraces newsletter from Farmer’s Pride. See also here for previous issues.
- Huge PDF on DOIs in genebanks.
Brainfood: Parkia rights, African Green Revolution, Fonio genome, Maize double, Soil erosion, Agave fructans, Rice pangenome, Napier evaluation, Flour quality, Diet diversity
- Intersecting and dynamic gender rights to néré, a food tree species in Burkina Faso. Women are not a homogeneous group.
- A bitter pill: smallholder responses to the new green revolution prescriptions in northern Ghana. Not a revolution, and not very green. More context here.
- Fonio millet genome unlocks African orphan crop diversity for agriculture in a changing climate. Not very domesticated: probably needs a green revolution, eh?
- The relevance of gene flow with wild relatives in understanding the domestication process. Maize domestication took a long time, involved introgression with 2 different wild relatives, and did not take place where it was previously thought.
- Diversity of Maize Landraces in Germplasm Collections from South America. And not a genome in sight.
- Global vulnerability of soil ecosystems to erosion. Soil erosion is increasing, and impacting areas of high soil biodiversity.
- The Sweet Taste of Adapting to the Desert: Fructan Metabolism in Agave Species. Not enough is know to fully exploit this remarkable adaptation.
- A platinum standard pan-genome resource that represents the population structure of Asian rice. Because Nipponbare was the wrong thing to sequence initially. Fonio next?
- Forage Performance and Detection of Marker Trait Associations with Potential for Napier Grass (Cenchrus purpureus) Improvement. Some of the 45 genotypes introduced by ILRI from EMBRAPA, Brazil do well in Ethiopia, and it’s not necessarily the elite material.
- Historical changes in the contents and compositions of fibre components and polar metabolites in white wheat flour. Some went up, some went down.
- Correlation between Agricultural Biodiversity, Dietary Diversity, Household Food Security and Associated Factors of Wasting among 6-59 Months old Children in Ambassel Woreda, North East Ethiopia. Mother’s education and dietary diversity are associated with better children’s health.