- Handy primer on the effects of climate change and biodiversity on food security, courtesy of the House of Lords.
- Crop wild relatives could help with all three.
- Trouble brewing for rice. House of Lords nodding wisely.
- The trouble that brewed for wheat wasn’t quite as advertised. Spoiler alert: the price spike had to do with China buying up all it could. So is rice next then?
- No trouble brewing for yams now that they’re getting sequenced.
- Nor for peanuts in the Gambia, for different reasons.
- Sounds like everything is hunky dory for the Tuscan grape too.
- Good to see SADC is on the job.
- It may be too late for some trees though.
Nibbles: Asian yams, Coconut survey, Belarus genebank, Jordan genebank, Tepary beans breeding, Dante’s wine
- Nice Twitter thread on Asian yams (and incidentally sweet potato and taro).
- Surveying and collecting coconuts in PNG. What will they do with those nuts?
- Belarus genebank gets a high-level visit. Can’t help wondering if the Ukraine genebank being in the news is behind this somehow.
- Jordan to get a(nother) genebank. Apparently.
- Tepary beans to get their 15 minutes of fame.
- Medieval Italian wine was biodynamic.
Brainfood: Canadian berries, Durian, Watermelon domestication, Wild cacao, New Chinese fruit, Animal pollinators, Food impacts
- Berries as a case study for crop wild relative conservation, use, and public engagement in Canada. Berries could be an agrobiodiversity conservation flagship, at least in Canada. If only other types of crops, and countries, were that easy.
- The king of fruits. There’s a dark side to durian that’s thankfully not there with berries.
- Genome sequencing of up to 6,000-yr-old Citrullus seeds reveals use of a bitter-fleshed species prior to watermelon domestication. Neolithic Libyans used wild watermelons for their seeds, not flesh.
- Comparison of bioactive components and flavor volatiles of diverse cocoa genotypes of Theobroma grandiflorum, Theobroma bicolor, Theobroma subincanum and Theobroma cacao. Could use the wild relatives for tastier chocolate. Another potential flagship, surely.
- Akebia: A Potential New Fruit Crop in China. I’d totally try it. And not just because it’s called both “wild banana” and “chocolate vine.”
- Animal pollination increases stability of crop yield across spatial scales. Not just higher yields, greater yield stability too. Important for some of the above, and many other fruits.
- Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products. More nutritious foods tend to be more environmentally friendly too. But how many of these products include the above? I mean fruits, not pollinators.
Brainfood: Sweet potato in Polynesia, Land use in Jamaica, Himalayan Neolithic, Early modern Spanish ag, E Asian Neolithic double
- Sweet Potato on Rapa Nui: Insights from a Monographic Study of the Genus Ipomoea. Seeds could just maybe have got there by floating, but more likely sweet potato was introduced to Easter Island by people from other parts of Polynesia, perhaps not by the first arrivals though.
- The legacy of 1300 years of land use in Jamaica. European colonization led to deforestation. And no doubt the spread of sweet potato, but that’s another story. The constant is cassava.
- Prehistoric agricultural decision making in the western Himalayas: ecological and social variables. Large, socially diverse prehistoric sites had more diverse agriculture. At these high altitude anyway. The constant is barley.
- Early Austronesians Cultivated Rice and Millet Together: Tracing Taiwan’s First Neolithic Crops. That would be japonica rice and foxtail millet, which were brought to Taiwan from the SE coast of China.
- Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World’s Most Enduring Mega-State. Meanwhile, back in China, the adoption of agriculture drives state formation.
- A 16th-century biodiversity and crop inventory. 60 crop and livestock species, which doesn’t sound like enough. Alas, no sweet potato or rice, but some Setaria millet.
Nibbles: Forgotten crops special issue, Coffee fingerprinting, Three Sisters, Food gardening, Magic mushrooming, Genebanks in Ukraine, Colombia, Australia, China
- Forthcoming special issue of Plants, People, Planet on forgotten crops. Get your paper in about how they’re under-represented in genebanks.
- Or about how they need to be DNA fingerprinted, like the USDA is doing for coffee.
- I wonder if there is a forgotten crops version of the Three Sisters. Answers on a postcard, please.
- Forget about genebanks, grow those forgotten crops in your garden. Rebelliously.
- Forget about forgotten crops, how about forgotten mushrooms?
- Lest we forget the Ukrainian genebank.
- No way to forget the Future Seeds genebank.
- Australians are not being allowed to forget about genebanks, plant and animal. With video goodness. There’s hope yet.
- Meanwhile, in China…