Category: Mainstream

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Nibbles: Gulf garden, Lettuce evaluation, Jordanian olive, Kenyan seeds, Hybrid animals, FAOSTAT news

  1. Qatari botanic garden is providing training in food security, and more. Good for them.
  2. The European Evaluation Network’s lettuce boffins have themselves a meeting. Pretty amazing this made it to FreshPlaza, and with that headline.
  3. The Jordan Times pretty much mangles what is a perfectly nice, though inevitably nuanced, story about the genetic depth of Jordan’s olives.
  4. In Kenya’s seed system, whatever is not forbidden in proposed new legislation…may not be enough.
  5. Conservation through hybridization.
  6. FAOSTAT now has a bit that gives you access to national agricultural census data. Which sounds quite important but give us a few days to check it.
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Trade and germplasm

Want to know why New Zealand has a huge collection of temperate forage diversity in its Margot Forde Forage Germplasm Centre, part of AgResearch Ltd? Just check out its exports on the OEC website.

I learned about the OEC’s snazzy visualisations of economic data via their addictive daily game Tradle, which invites you to guess the country based on its exports.

I think we should do a version where you guess the country based on its genebank holdings, but that’s another story.

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Nibbles: Access to seeds indeces, Rare plants genebank, Maize and climate change, Bogota market

  1. So there’s an African Seed Access Index whose relationship with the Access to Seeds Index is unclear.
  2. The Pacific Northwest has a genebank called the Miller Seed Vault whose relationship with the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado is quite clear.
  3. The relationship between climate change and changes in crop distributions is becoming clearer, and more worrying.
  4. What is the relationship between huge markets such as Samper Mendoza in Bogota and plant conservation?