Mainstream

November 1, 2019November 5, 2019

Genebanks everywhere on NPR

Just realized that my last two stories involved gene banks. Shouldn't there be some sort of award for that?

— Dan Charles (@DanCharlesNow) October 31, 2019

I’m all for it, but judge for yourselves. Here are the two stories involved:

From Culinary Dud To Stud: How Dutch Plant Breeders Built Our Brussels Sprouts Boom. By looking into their genebanks, of course, to find less bitter varieties.
Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just 2 Bulls. That’s Not Good. But fortunately there’s heritage semen in the fridge.

October 30, 2019October 28, 2019

Nibbles: ISF & SDGs, Nutrition report, Plant blindness, Cowpea, Chefs, Ancient baking, Rotations, Blue maize, Forests & poverty, Food miles

International Seed Federation secretary-general in podcast on seeds and the SDGs.
Country nutrition profiles. Sobering.
Share your plant stories on Herbaria 3.0.
The secret history of the cowpea, from a chef: “Our peas were tiny little texts, and we didn’t even know it.”
Speaking of chefs…
More on that 4000-year-old baking yeast story.
The economics of rotations.
The economics of blue maize.
Mapping the evidence base for the link between forests and poverty alleviation.
Speaking of maps, here’s how food moves around the USA.

October 22, 2019October 29, 2019

Nibbles: How-to trifecta, Indigenous maps, ITPGRFA, SeedLinked, Tequila

The Center for Plant Conservation has Best Plant Conservation Practices to Support Species Survival in the Wild. With online forum goodness.
A little bit down-market, there’s What Are Seed Banks: A Complete Guide.
How Do We Preserve the Vanishing Foods of the Earth? Good question, and nice article, but there’s surely more to the answer than what it says.
Like indigenous people.
And the Plant Treaty. Here’s two provocative briefing papers on that from the African Centre for Biodiversity in the run-up to the Governing Body meeting in November.
Oh, and breeding. Even crowd-sourced breeding.
Let the tequila industry show you what to do, in fact.

October 21, 2019October 21, 2019

Let me count the ways…

How Do We Preserve the Vanishing Foods of the Earth? https://t.co/z5O68gtSVN

— AgroBioDiverse (@AgroBioDiverse) October 20, 2019

Click on the tweet, or here, to see some of my answers. Add yours in the comments below, if you’re not on Twitter.

October 17, 2019October 18, 2019

Nibbles: Diversification, Watermelon lecture, Global productivity gaps, Kenyan CWR, Indian rice diversity, Native American seeds, Cool newsletters

Value chains for baskets of products to diversify production and consumption.
Video lecture on watermelon domestication.
“…global agricultural productivity needs to increase at an average annual rate of 1.73 percent to sustainably produce food, feed, fiber, and bioenergy for 10 billion people in 2050.
Maybe crop wild relatives can help? Kenyan media thinks so. This is the project in question, though you wouldn’t know it from the article.
Somewhat one-sided account of ex situ rice conservation in India. People are looking into some of the claims…
The Native American Seeds Protection Act of 2019 explained. Fingers crossed.
Latest newsletters: the European PGRFA network & Genesys.