Mainstream

Zac does CIP

My off-the cuff take on Episode 5 of Down to Earth with Zac Efron, featuring our hero’s visit to the CIP genebank.

How to run the Nepal genebank.
UK government advice on ABS.
Traditional vegetables in Madagascar get some help at last.
Traditional, sustainable oyster management. Unfortunately the people who knew about it are now in Oklahoma.
Eat like an (ancient) Egyptian.
Pakistan and China make a very big thing of exchanging some cotton germplasm.
Tracking crop evolution through paintings.

If you’ve got Netflix and half an hour, you might want to watch episode 5 of Down to Earth with Zac Efron, in which our hero visits the genebank of the International Potato Centre in Lima, Peru.

Coconut oil is the new palm oil? And not in a good way.
The cost of poor diets is considerable.
Maize plants call natural enemies for help against stemborers. And there’s variation in how well they do it, natch.
Fortune’s fortune: the colonization of tea. With added poison. And capitalism.
The Oxford Food Symposium is on, virtually. Registration is closed, but follow on the blog, social media etc.
Criticism of the Green Revolution approach to African agricultural development.
Forages, from genebanks to farmers, in one interactive infographic.
Saving Sangiovese through gene editing: the infographic. Not interactive, though, alas.
How FAO keeps track of progress on the SDGs.
How to not be a racist in the plant sciences.

Dr Sandy Knapp on botanical monographs. Solanum, of course.
Dr Joukje Buiteveld on fruit field genebanks in the Netherlands.
NordGen adopts GRIN-Global.
Hybrid pigeonpa in the Indian news.
All the tea in India. And Ireland?
The rise of craft chocolate.
And here’s the beverage trifecta: coffee in Ethiopia.
Seed collecting in Brazil for reforestation.
NBPGR does medicinals.
You wanna be a “germplasm acquisition coordinator“? I bet you do. But watch out…
Podcast on cattle domestication. Dr Hans Lenstra from Utrecht University in the hot seat.