Nibbles: Indian millets, Indian rice, Neolithic bread, Andean potatoes, UAE genebank, Niger onions, Lentil domestication, Italian rice, Faith Fyles, Sea cucumber

  1. The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
  2. Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
  3. Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
  4. Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
  5. Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
  6. The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
  7. The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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

Nibbles: Cider exhibit, Dog domestication, Nordic rye, Orkney barley, Tunisian wheat, IPR in Kenya, Future Seeds, Seed & herbarium resources

  1. The Museum of Cider has an exhibition on “A Variety of Cultures.”
  2. Nice podcast rounding up the latest on dog domestication.
  3. Useful summary of the history of rye in the Nordic countries since it replaced barley in the Medieval period.
  4. They didn’t give up barley in the Outer Hebrides.
  5. The Tunisian farmer goes back to wheat landraces (I think).
  6. The Kenyan farmers who want to exchange landraces.
  7. El Colombiano visits Future Seeds, evokes The Walking Dead.
  8. Seed saving resources from the California Seed Bank and the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.

Brainfood: Archaeology edition

In memory of Rainer Schultze-Kraft

Reproduced from Tropical Grasslands-Forrajes Tropicales with permission.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Rainer Schultze-Kraft, a friend, colleague and mentor, whose experience and in depth understanding of tropical forages made him an outstanding forage scientist. Rainer dedicated his career to tropical forage research and development, working at CIAT and University of Hohenheim. He was an avid germplasm collector and added almost 10,000 forage accessions to global collections. He was one of the original team to work on the tropical forages interactive selection tool to support use of forages and one of the founders of the journal, acting as managing editor and guiding the journal through the early years. His passing leaves a big gap in the tropical forages community that will be hard to fill and he will be sorely missed by his friends and colleagues.

There is also an obituary on the website of the Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT.