- The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
- Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
- Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
- Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
- Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
- The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
- The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
- New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
- A Facebook post from the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum on Faith Fyles, botanist and botanical artist, and the first woman assistant botanist in the federal Department of Agriculture (1911), leads to a treasure trove of interesting stuff.
- In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.
Brainfood: Landrace threats, Heritage areas, Bean erosion, Rice restoration, Cassava redundancy, Commercialization, Peanut network, Podolian cattle
- Towards a practical threat assessment methodology for crop landraces. Basically red listing for landraces.
- Preserving traditional systems: Identification of agricultural heritage areas based on agro-biodiversity. First places to apply the above?
- Genetic erosion within the Fabada dry bean market class revealed by high-throughput genotyping. Would have been nice to apply the above before doing this study.
- Restoration of the traditional high-altitude rice variety Dumbja in Bhutan. Highlights one of the problems with monitoring threats to landraces, i.e. how to define the landrace.
- Identifying genetically redundant accessions in the world’s largest cassava collection. About half of over 5000 genebank accessions were unique. Easier to recognize cassava landraces I guess.
- Agricultural commercialisation among women smallholder farmers in Nigeria: Implication for food security. Will commercialization help preserve some landraces but threaten others?
- The groundnut improvement network for Africa (GINA) germplasm collection: a unique genetic resource for breeding and gene discovery. Over a thousand accessions that will be just fine.
- An Appropriate Genetic Approach to Endangered Podolian Grey Cattle in the Context of Preserving Biodiversity and Sustainable Conservation of Genetic Resources. The livestock people monitor threat to breeds all the time, it seems.
Brainfood: Software edition
- NBPGR-PDS: A Precision Tool for Plant Germplasm Collecting. Fancy software can manage germplasm collecting info in the field.
- The role of genotypic and climatic variation at the range edge: A case study in winegrapes. Fancy software and analysis can predict how different grape varietals could expand in distribution under climate change.
- ClimMob: Software to support experimental citizen science in agriculture. Fancy software can help plan, manage and analyze large-scale, farmer-led germplasm evaluation trails.
- Herbarium specimen label transcription reimagined with large language models: Capabilities, productivity, and risks. Fancy software can transcribe herbarium labels.
- OliVaR: Improving olive variety recognition using deep neural networks. Fancy software can recognize olives.
- Reconstructing historic and modern potato late blight outbreaks using text analytics. Fancy software can track a pest epidemic.
- Evaluating responses by ChatGPT to farmers’ questions on irrigated lowland rice cultivation in Nigeria. Fancy software can be better than extension workers.
- Simulating pollen flow and field sampling constraints helps revise seed sampling recommendations for conserving genetic diversity. Fancy software and analysis can suggest changes to seed sampling strategies to take into account limited pollen flow.
Nibbles: Cider exhibit, Dog domestication, Nordic rye, Orkney barley, Tunisian wheat, IPR in Kenya, Future Seeds, Seed & herbarium resources
- The Museum of Cider has an exhibition on “A Variety of Cultures.”
- Nice podcast rounding up the latest on dog domestication.
- Useful summary of the history of rye in the Nordic countries since it replaced barley in the Medieval period.
- They didn’t give up barley in the Outer Hebrides.
- The Tunisian farmer goes back to wheat landraces (I think).
- The Kenyan farmers who want to exchange landraces.
- El Colombiano visits Future Seeds, evokes The Walking Dead.
- Seed saving resources from the California Seed Bank and the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.
Nibbles: Cheese microbes, OSSI, Mung bean, Sustainable ag, Agroecology, Collard greens, African orphan crops, Olive diversity, Mezcal threats, German perry, Spanish tomatoes, N fixation
- A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
- The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
- The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
- But then goes all serious with talk of trillions of dollars in benefits from sustainable food systems. Diversity not mentioned, alas, though, so one wonders about the point of the previous pieces.
- Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
- Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
- More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to. Seriously though, some crops do need more research, if only so they can be grown somewhere else.
- There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
- The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
- Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
- This piece about tomato diversity in Spain is worth reading for many reasons (heroic seed saving yada yada), but especially for the deadpan take on the Guardia Civil at the end.
- Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.