Information

June 26, 2007

Minneapolis seminars

If I were in Minneapolis, this is where I’d be.

June 25, 2007June 25, 2007

FAO promotes information standards

FAO is promoting standards for agricultural information.

June 22, 2007June 23, 2007

Microbial resources

FAO has a paper on agricultural microbial genetic resources.

June 22, 2007June 22, 2007

EC wants a biodiversity database

The European Commission wants a Biodiversity knowledge base. I wonder whether it wants ag in there.

June 22, 2007June 22, 2007

From a cold and wet Addis Ababa

I’m spending the week here for work and could not resist the temptation to do some advertising for Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation, one of the world’s premier genebanks. So check out their website. And read a bit about them in the news.

- China is building its germplasm collection at the National Frigid Zone Crop and Soybean Germplasm Resources Mid-term Bank in Harbin. Cool.
- Driscoll’s helped build China’s blueberry industry, then discovered that knowledge, infrastructure and genetics have a habit of escaping. Not so cool.
- Meanwhile, the Philippines wants its rice collection to hit 21,000 varieties by the end of the year. IRRI unavailable for comment.
- Italy is establishing a major global olive genebank. Unclear where it fits in with other major global olive genebanks, but some redundancy is good.
- FAO showcases Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, where crops, landscapes and traditional knowledge have survived together. Like olives in Italy, I guess.
- The mangelwurzel is making a comeback, because apparently forgotten root vegetables just need better publicity, and not a fancy GIAHS.
- Ohio growers are trying to save the pawpaw just as Americans are discovering it, partly because of better publicity.
- BeanGPT is bringing AI to breeding and farming beans. Maybe it can help the mangelwurzel and pawpaw too?
Published on September 23, 2026