- Viewpoint: COVID-19 and seed security response now and beyond. Think before you spread seeds around.
- Integrated crop-livestock system with system fertilization approach improves food production and resource-use efficiency in agricultural lands. Integrating livestock in soybean production is good for the amount of energy produced per unit of nutrient applied, if that’s what floats your boat.
- Holistic agricultural diversity index as a measure of agricultural diversity: A cross-sectional study of smallholder farmers in Lilongwe district of Malawi. An interesting way of measuring overall farm diversity. But is there a link with dietary diversity?
- Dietary diversity scores, nutrient intakes and biomarkers vitamin B12, folate and Hb in rural youth from the Pune Maternal Nutrition Study. Dietary diversity is linked to better micronutrient status. But is there a link with genetic diversity?
- Evaluating surrogates of genetic diversity for conservation planning. There’s nothing quite as good as neutral markers, alas.
- Phenotypic diversity assessment within a major ex situ collection of wild endemic coffees in Madagascar. Never mind the species or genetic diversity, look at the trait variability.
- Understanding cassava varietal preferences through pairwise ranking of gari‐eba and fufu prepared by local farmer–processors. Landraces are sometimes better than improved varieties.
- Do the importations of crop products affect the genetic diversity from landraces? A study case in garlic (Allium sativum L.). Apparently not, surprisingly enough.
- Overcoming barriers to the registration of new varieties. DUS needs genomics. But what about registering landraces? Do we need a completely separate system for that?
- Legal geographies of kava, kastom and indigenous knowledge: Next steps under the Nagoya Protocol. One approach implementing Nagoya at the community level. But is it scalable?
- New evidence on the earliest domesticated animals and possible small-scale husbandry in Atlantic NW Europe. There was a long period of contact between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers, resulting in a transitional farmer-herder stage.
Nibbles: Climate ready, Commoners, Beer, Banana collecting, Roman food, Indian corn
- Demoing new varieties in Mali.
- Old ways of doing things in the New Forest.
- Nice roundup of beer in ancient history.
- Profile of supercool banana guy Gabriel Sachter-Smith.
- Eat like a Roman.
- Eat like a (multiracial) Southerner.
Brainfood: Covid, Tropical trees, Tree GR, Brazil nut, Fair research, ICARDA, FIGS, Landraces, Evolutionary breeding, Range edges, Central Asia, Mixtures, Taro origins, Nigerian abattoirs, Aquaculture policy
- From biomedical to politico-economic crisis: the food system in times of Covid-19. How to build back better? Food sovereignty, peasant agriculture, territorial markets and agroecology.
- Food for thought: The underutilized potential of tropical tree‐sourced foods for 21st century sustainable food systems. How to realize that potential? Lots of ideas here, including: “Investment in the conservation of tree genetic resources and the development of formal seed delivery systems.”
- Priorities, challenges and opportunities for supplying tree genetic resources. Invest in what bits of conservation and seed delivery systems, though? Read this and find out.
- Genetic threats to the Forest Giants of the Amazon: Habitat degradation effects on the socio‐economically important Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa). After reading the above, maybe apply to this?
- From texts to enacting practices: defining fair and equitable research principles for plant genetic resources in West Africa. How to make sure everyone understands words the same way? Theater. Of course, darling.
- Safeguarding a global seed heritage from Syria to Svalbard. It took a (global) village.
- Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS): Polishing a rough diamond. Natural selection is not enough. Links both to above and below, but you knew that.
- Göte Turesson’s research legacy to Hereditas: from the ecotype concept in plants to the analysis of landraces’ diversity in crops. “Understanding … landrace diversification assists also on breeding new cultivars sustainably since it provides insights regarding crop evolution across stress-prone environments, and for finding genebank accessions and other germplasm whose allelic diversity may be missing in today’s breeding programs.”
- Yield, yield stability and farmers’ preferences of evolutionary populations of bread wheat: A dynamic solution to climate change. Maybe the problem is with today’s breeding programs?
- What Do We Really Know About Adaptation at Range Edges? Peripherality does not predict degree of adaptation.
- The Central Asiatic region of cultivated plants. 800 species, no less.
- Biodiversity enhances the multitrophic control of arthropod herbivory. Plants lose less biomass to arthropods in mixtures, as compared to monocultures.
- Evolutionary origins of taro (Colocasia esculenta) in Southeast Asia. Not PNG after all, according to chloroplast DNA.
- Abattoirs – A Hidden Centre for Livestock Genetic Resources Loss in Nigeria. Because they slaughter pregnant animals. Did not see that one coming, frankly.
- More than fish: Policy coherence and benefit sharing as necessary conditions for equitable aquaculture development. Regional policies need to be domesticated.
Nibbles: F2F, Jute, IITA, ICARDA, ILRI, Grazing
- USDA throws shade on EU’s Farm to Fork strategy. I see trouble in its future.
- Turns out jute has a future.
- Is CRISPR the banana’s future?
- How Svalbard gave ICARDA’s genebank a future.
- Ensuring the future of Ethiopia’s livestock through forage seeds.
- The future of Europe’s meadows is livestock. No word on forage seed or Farm to Fork.
Domesticating the podcast
Want to review the state of knowledge on domestication of chickens, sheep and cattle in less than half an hour? Yes? Well then, Jeremy has a podcast for you. It’s an interview with Olivier Hanotte, who teaches livestock genetics at the University of Nottingham.
The beautiful chicken pic is from a book by photographers Moreno Monti and Matteo Tranchellini.
There’s also a stunning book on the diversity of African cattle from ILRI, where Dr Hanotte also has a position.