- Do community seed banks contribute to the social-ecological resilience of communities? A case-study from Western Guatemala. Yes, but they have to move with the times.
- Reconciling global priorities for conserving biodiversity habitat. Only about 20% of high value habitat is protected.
- Genome-wide selection and genetic improvement during modern maize breeding. Breeding in the US and China converged.
- Non-wood forest products in Europe – A quantitative overview. Value of berries, mushrooms etc. amounts to almost three quarters of the value of the wood harvest, ten times the usually estimate.
- Latitudinal gradient in dairy production with the introduction of farming in Atlantic Europe. Was there a taboo against fish?
- Recent Advances in Dual Purpose Rice and Wheat Research: a synthesis. It was worth focusing on straw in breeding, and still is.
- Mapping local patterns of childhood overweight and wasting in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2017. Hotspots in Indonesia, Thailand, southeastern China, Botswana, Cameroon and central Nigeria. Surely dietary diversity could help in those places?
- Is there a peaceful cohabitation between human and natural habitats? Assessing global patterns of species loss. Yes, there is, in very poor and very rich places. Would be interesting to mash up with the above.
- Back to the Wild: On a Quest for Donors Toward Salinity Tolerant Rice. Need to move beyond rufipogon.
- Insights into phylogeny, age and evolution of Allium (Amaryllidaceae) based on the whole plastome sequences. Monophyletic, amazingly, with 3 evolutionary lineages.
- Barley Landraces: Ecological heritage for edaphic stress adaptations and sustainable production. Use landraces as recipients, rather than donors. Before it’s too late.
- Ten simple rules for innovative dissemination of research. More in the breach, I suspect…
Nibbles: Taste edition
- The Stairway to Heaven of barley breeding for whiskey involves thinking about taste a bit more.
- Taste comes into maize breeding too.
- Jeremy talks taste with Margot Finn. Oh and there’s his latest newsletter.
- Farmerama podcasts on cereals in small-scale farming in the UK and beyond.
- Nothing small-scale about ancient farming in the Nile Valley.
- Make ancient Roman bread during lockdown. Then compare and contrast with the Egyptian kind?
- What did the Romans ever do for the rural economy of Britain anyway?
- Course on communicating the value of biodiversity. Wasn’t all the above enough?
Brainfood: French Neolithic, African forages, Sorghum inflorescences, Root morphology, Folium, Tillage, Sparing, Food localness, Indian diet diversity, Sourdough, Genomics costs, Breeding strategies
- Early Neolithic (ca. 5850-4500 cal BC) agricultural diffusion in the Western Mediterranean: An update of archaeobotanical data in SW France. Agriculture came to southern France from southern Italy around 5700 BC, initially focusing on hulled wheats, then transitioned to naked cereals as it moved inland.
- Improved feeding and forages at a crossroads: Farming systems approaches for sustainable livestock development in East Africa. Adoption of tropical forages at scale can make a big difference to livelihoods in East Africa, but will need careful consideration of agroecological and socioeconomic settings. My mother-in-law unavailable for comment.
- Comprehensive 3D phenotyping reveals continuous morphological variation across genetically diverse sorghum inflorescences. Fancy gadgets and maths show that botanical sorghum races overlap more in morphology than genetics.
- Using clear plastic CD cases as low‐cost mini‐rhizotrons to phenotype root traits. Now do roots.
- A 1000-year-old mystery solved: Unlocking the molecular structure for the medieval blue from Chrozophora tinctoria, also known as folium. 6′-hydroxy-4,4′-dimethoxy-1,1′-dimethyl-5′-{[3,4,5-trihydroxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)tetrahydro-2H-pyran-2-yl]oxy}-[3,3′-bipyridine]-2,2′,5,6(1H,1′H)-tetraone, if you must know.
- Generating a rule-based global gridded tillage dataset. The most amazing thing about this is that there are only 6 types of tillage.
- The global cropland-sparing potential of high-yield farming. We could give up 40% of current farmland if yields of 16 major crops were higher. Unclear what all those farmers would do. Or what kind of tillage they would use.
- Local food crop production can fulfil demand for less than one-third of the population. Still going to need global supply chains.
- Regional differences in agricultural and socioeconomic factors associated with farmer household dietary diversity in India. And national supply chains for that matter.
- Influences of Ingredients and Bakers on the Bacteria and Fungi in Sourdough Starters and Bread. Bakers are part of bread.
- Strategies for reducing per‐sample costs in target capture sequencing for phylogenomics and population genomics in plants. Down to $22 per sample, if you play your cards right.
- Evolutionary insights into plant breeding. When you’ve played those cards, target selective sweeps for introgression, among other things. Oh, and gene editing. Here, read these tweets from one of the authors.
Brainfood: Parkia rights, African Green Revolution, Fonio genome, Maize double, Soil erosion, Agave fructans, Rice pangenome, Napier evaluation, Flour quality, Diet diversity
- Intersecting and dynamic gender rights to néré, a food tree species in Burkina Faso. Women are not a homogeneous group.
- A bitter pill: smallholder responses to the new green revolution prescriptions in northern Ghana. Not a revolution, and not very green. More context here.
- Fonio millet genome unlocks African orphan crop diversity for agriculture in a changing climate. Not very domesticated: probably needs a green revolution, eh?
- The relevance of gene flow with wild relatives in understanding the domestication process. Maize domestication took a long time, involved introgression with 2 different wild relatives, and did not take place where it was previously thought.
- Diversity of Maize Landraces in Germplasm Collections from South America. And not a genome in sight.
- Global vulnerability of soil ecosystems to erosion. Soil erosion is increasing, and impacting areas of high soil biodiversity.
- The Sweet Taste of Adapting to the Desert: Fructan Metabolism in Agave Species. Not enough is know to fully exploit this remarkable adaptation.
- A platinum standard pan-genome resource that represents the population structure of Asian rice. Because Nipponbare was the wrong thing to sequence initially. Fonio next?
- Forage Performance and Detection of Marker Trait Associations with Potential for Napier Grass (Cenchrus purpureus) Improvement. Some of the 45 genotypes introduced by ILRI from EMBRAPA, Brazil do well in Ethiopia, and it’s not necessarily the elite material.
- Historical changes in the contents and compositions of fibre components and polar metabolites in white wheat flour. Some went up, some went down.
- Correlation between Agricultural Biodiversity, Dietary Diversity, Household Food Security and Associated Factors of Wasting among 6-59 Months old Children in Ambassel Woreda, North East Ethiopia. Mother’s education and dietary diversity are associated with better children’s health.
Nibbles: Tissue culture, Kenya pulses, Remote sensing, Planetary Computer, CIAT genebank, Faba bean, Cassava breeding, European re-wilding, Russian citrus, Green wine
- Special Issue “Role of Plant Tissue Culture in Agricultural Research and Production.” Deadline: 15 September. This year, I imagine.
- Kenya decolonizing it’s pulse sector.
- And it may be visible from space.
- Somebody mention space? Microsoft is way ahead of you.
- CIAT’s genebank working through lockdown, denies Phaseolus is colonial.
- How about soya then? That’s pretty colonial, surely? Ah, but faba is the new soya. Census takers unavailable for comment.
- Speaking of CIAT and its genebank, the rise and rise of cassava in Asia. And Nigeria? Let the neo-colonialism discourse begin.
- Re-wilding is not colonialism, is it?
- You can grow your lemons underground if it’s cold. Or just for the hell of it, frankly, because why not? Oh, yeah, there’s also breeding.
- Booze goes green. But not so green as to support genebanks.