- Nice podcast on Prof. Alice Roberts’ book on domestication, Tamed.
- Remember yesterday’s Nibble on Mexico’s avocado security problem? Wait till they start growing these seedless ones. Or this one, for that matter.
- Is this jade bok choy the most famous botanically-themed work of art?
- Let them eat cactus.
- Plant breeding as a business: the book.
- You can use Bitcoin to buy Somali goats.
- Corn wasn’t king in the ancient American SW. Ruderals were.
Vavilov everywhere
A couple of weeks ago, the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR) held the IV International Vavilov Conference “N.I. Vavilov’s Ideas in the Modern World.” I don’t know if the presentations will go online at some point, but I do have a hardcopy of the abstracts volume and could send a scan if anyone is really interested I suppose. 1 I hope that that doesn’t turn out to be a hostage to fortune.
And let me take the opportunity of thanking the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society for making the contents of the N.I. Vavilov Centenary Symposium from 1990 freely available.
Where does the SDG indicator data come from?
Just a quick reminder that the new Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS) is now live on the FAO website, as recently predicted. This is the source for SDG indicators 2.5.1 and 2.5.2.
I’ve actually just come back from a meeting at FAO organized by the plant equivalent of DAD-IS, the World Information and Early Warning System (WIEWS) on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which funnels data into the plant part of indicator 2.5.1. More on that later.
Cool coconut diversity posters
And totally free. Thanks, Roland.
Nibbles: Orphan edition
- The Economist jumps on the genomics-for-orphan-crops bandwagon.
- But is phenomics more important?
- And seed systems, don’t forget seed systems…
- Some of those orphan crops may get an International Day, if India has anything to do with it.
- Immortelle is as orphan as they come, but maybe not in Croatia any more.
- Amaranthus never really went away, not in Mexico.
- Persimmon, meanwhile, is being adopted by the snack industry in the US. But the Japanese are way ahead.
- Some think yerba mate is not orphan enough.
- Is yam an orphan. It depends on what your definition of is is.
- Avocado is the opposite of orphaned in Mexico. It is spoiled rotten.
- Many orphan crops are women’s crops. Case in point: enset.
- Orphan is a relative term, and reversible.
- Exhibit B: sweet potato.
- People often take their orphan crops with them. Even in antiquity.
- Coconut is fast becoming an orphan in Tanzania.
- With 32 cultivars available to grow in Louisiana alone, nobody can say lettuce is an orphan.
- Mexico and Brazil collaborate on crop diversity conservation. Including orphan crops?
- One thing that is probably not a huge priority for orphan crops is their wild relatives. Just saying.
- Anyway, we’re going to need all the orphan crops we can get if James Cameron’s titanic vegetarian utopia is to come true.