- AI doesn’t recognize tropical agriculture very well.
- So presumably it can’t easily be used in assessing climate change impacts in agricultural heritage systems? FAO has some ideas on how to do it.
- Maybe rice heritage systems can be used to make cheese.
- I bet Andean blueberry (Vaccinium floribundum) goes great with rice cheese.
- But if not, heritage apples will probably do.
- The Hungarian genebank is hoping to inject heritage grains into non-heritage agricultural systems. AI and FAO unavailable for comment.
- Maybe AI can help with the mystery of this old seed collection at the Natural History Museum, London.
JSTOR in a pickle with Jeremy
From Jeremy’s latest newsletter. To which of course you should subscribe. You’ll see he mentions Charles Darwin right up front, which allows me to link to a new course based on teaching materials created by Darwin’s Cambridge menor, Prof. John Stevens Henslow.
Plant of the Month from JSTOR is the cucumber. As usual for this series, there’s a ton of fascinating information and links, from the compilation of cats confronted by cucumbers to their inspiration of one of Charles Darwin’s lesser-known books.
Why, though, cool as a cucumber? In some sense it seems obvious that the cucumber is simply well-flavoured wateriness most available during summer’s heat. Could it, really, have prevented sweating? And while people swear by the beneficial effects of a good, thick slice on the eyes as a rejuvenator, reducer of puffiness, etc., etc., there doesn’t seem to be any good evidence that a cucumber is better than, say, a used tea bag or wet cotton wool. JSTOR doesn’t even mention the practice.
Allow me, please, a quibble. JSTOR’s caption for its first image … is “Two dill cucumbers. Watercolour painting by a Chinese artist”. Fair enough, that is how it is labelled at its source. But surely a cucumber on the vine cannot be a dill cucumber until it has been brined and fermented, with dill.
And if that’s not confusing enough, try a deep dive into cucurbit names, an episode from 2016.
Nibbles: Online seeds, Yam breeding, Rice genebanks, Indian commmunity seed banks, Sikkim banana, Cassava disease, ICARDA genebank, Tajikistan women
- The perils of dematerialization play out in India.
- Is YamHub dematerialization?
- Rice genebanks in Bangladesh and at IRRI are pretty solid.
- There’s a pretty solid platform for India’s community seed banks.
- I hope Nagaland’s wild bananas end up in genebanks.
- Cassava’s diversity is in multiple genebanks, and that’s a good thing, CBSD and all.
- ICARDA’s genebank back in the Syrian news, though in a good way for once.
- Tajikistan’s women farmers are bringing back crops with not a worry about dematerialization. Or genebanks, it seems.
A home for genebank training at last?
Long-time readers will know that I regularly try to roundup training opportunities in crop diversity conservation, basically because nobody else does it. Well, maybe I can stop doing that now.
Yes, it’s true, the Crop Trust has launched a Genebank Academy, which aggregates information on online training courses. Have they missed some? Let me know.
And completeness compels me to add that there is also a Landscape Academy. Though unfortunately none of the courses seem to feature genebanks. But then, I’m not sure that any of the genebank courses featured landscapes.
LATER: Ok, but where to put the course Seed Systems, Crop Conservation and Genetic Diversity in December 2026?
Crowdsourcing crop diversity, and information
A couple of crowd-sourcing initiatives caught my eye.
First, the good people at the COUSIN project want to expand genebank collections of wild relatives of wheat, barley, lettuce, brassica, and peas in Europe. And they have a pretty good idea where the collecting needs to be done. Think you can help? Check out the call for proposals.
And from a bit further south comes a plea on LinkedIn from Chris Jones of the ILRI genebank. He needs help getting stuff out of the genebank rather than into it.
As part of the ‘low-methane forages’ project, funded by the Gates Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund, we have been screening the methane emission intensity of a range of forage accessions, in vitro, from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) genebank. The aim is to screen approximately 10% of the accessions held in our genebank and, to date, we have assessed 155 herbaceous legumes towards this goal, including several of our lablab accessions. From these, we have identified two accessions of interest. The methane emission intensity of accession #14447 was 27.7 ml/g total digestible dry matter (TDDM), 43% lower than the highest ten legumes measured so far, and methane emission intensity of accession #14458 was 33.8 ml/g TDDM, 30% lower. So, assuming that similar differences in methane emission intensity are realised in vivo (and that is no guarantee), the preferred candidate seems obvious. However, in our field plots #14458 produced 60% more biomass than #14447, which was an ‘average’ yielder. This higher level of production should be attractive to farmers who currently struggle to incorporate much in the way of legumes in their feed rations. So, which one would you prioritise?
I’ve added the links to the Genesys entries for the accessions in questions for people who want a bit more data to base their decision on. You can provide your input on Chris’ post, or right here and I promise to pass it on.