Mainstream

October 31, 2007

Bioversity DG tours Down Under

Emile Frison: continue investing in agrobiodiversity, Australia! Jeremy unavailable for comment.

October 28, 2007

Save our shrooms

Meanwhile, the Dutch fight backÂ to save other mushrooms.

October 28, 2007

Toadstools hunted in UK

Brits record waxcaps. World holds its breath.

October 27, 2007

Cloning equines

Cloned racing mules. Cloned racing mules?

October 27, 2007October 27, 2007

My friend Tony Jansen and his friend Jon put together this fun video on the Solomon Islands. It’s ostensibly about surfing, but there’s stuff in there about agricultural biodiversity too. I met Tony when he was working at Kastom Gaden Association, a great local NGO working on sustainable agriculture and nutrition issues. We worked together on the livelihoods assessment of the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal.

1. Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break.
2. Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver found his own, swapping the wheel for seed multiplication and turning five acres into a livelihood, proof that sometimes the missing link in a seed system is just someone willing to do the unglamorous middle bit well.
3. Which is, per Farming First, precisely Africa’s problem at scale: only 2.5% of smallholder seed in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from formal seed companies, so a few million more bus-driver-style multipliers wouldn’t hurt.
4. Meanwhile in the Balearics, the opposite direction of travel: the local seed bank is expanding to rescue tomatoes, onions and broad beans, and is looking for farmers willing to take them back.
5. Indigenous fruit trees in Malawi turn out to fight malnutrition and biodiversity loss at once. Happy coincidence?
6. Getting those trees into the ground well needs the same unglamorous groundwork as any good crop seed system: a Mongabay commentary argues that restoration campaigns skipping Indigenous and local seed knowledge are optimising for trees planted, not trees that survive.
7. And once you’ve got the saplings in the ground, you might want to monitor how they’re doing: enter Bruno, a pushcart rigged with mobile phones that can collect field data. And not just for breeders.
8. Finally, proof that not all genetic-resource hunting needs a genebank: Brussels brewers are getting people to comb the city for wild yeast, because the raw materials for a proper lambic turns is hanging around in urban trees.
Published on September 10, 2026

Category: Mainstream

Bioversity DG tours Down Under

Save our shrooms

Toadstools hunted in UK

Cloning equines

Surf’s up in Solomons