- The Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research breaks down this week’s Fifteenth Regular Session of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture for ya.
- Kew looking for a crop person! I wonder if the successful candidate is in Rome today.
- Mauricio Bellon on why smallholder farmers need crop diversity to adapt to climate change. He’s in Rome.
- Multi-Parent Advanced Generation Inter Cross (MAGIC) deconstructed. Compare and contrast with above.
- The SDGs in one cool interactive infographic. But where’s nutrition?
- Where is overhunting for bushmeat occurring? Gotta get your nutrition where you can…
- Want to invest in a biofortified crop like iron beans? Here’s how to work out where you should do it. Interesting to cross-reference with that bushmeat thing above?
- Ancient Greek tree preservation order.
- Ethiopian forest dwellers protect wild coffee. No preservation orders needed.
- Tracking honey. Follow the money.
- Could say the same about nutmeg.
- Meat stew with garden eggs. Sounds yummie. Not much used in Kenya these days any more, alas.
- Delving into Armenian Ottoman foods. Because we can. No sign of garden eggs.
Nibbles: South Sudan livestock, Zanzibar spices, Sustainable fisheries, Wheat heat, Cape Town gardens, Saving chocolate, Camel cheese, Khaaaaaaan!
- South Sudan crisis affecting its livestock too.
- Sugar, spice, and everything nice in Zanzibar.
- The secret to sustainable fisheries: recycling waste.
- Wheat going to be hit by heat.
- The history of growing food in Cape Town.
- More from the University of Reading’s cacao quarantine facility. With video goodness.
- You can get Austrian camel cheese at the Jaipur Literary Festival.
- Khan Academy does biodiversity.
Brainfood: Safflower diversity, Afghan wheat diversity, Cassava diversity, SP drought tolerance, Olive diversity, Community genebanks, Organic yield meta-analysis, On farm success, Standardizing phenotyping, Wild collecting
- Assessment of Genetic Diversity and Population Structure in a Global Reference Collection of 531 Accessions of Carthamus tinctorius L. (Safflower) Using AFLP Markers. Bayesian analysis of genetic diversity of global (43 countries) collection held in India reveals 19 geographic groups, with most diversity in the Near East and Iran–Afghanistan regions.
- Molecular evaluation of orphan Afghan common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) landraces collected by Dr. Kihara using single nucleotide polymorphic markers. Analysis (Bayesian, natch) of genetic diversity of over 400 wheat landraces collected 1950-1970 and conserved at the Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Japan reveals agroecological patterning and hotspot in Badakhshan province.
- Sources of pest resistance in cassava. Analysis of 89 trials over 25 years involving the CIAT cassava collection identifies 129 landraces with high resistance to thrips, 33 to green mites and 19 to whiteflies.
- Screening sweetpotato genotypes for tolerance to drought stress. Days to permanent wilting point (DPWP) points to 8 promising clones in Kenya.
- Olive domestication and diversification in the Mediterranean Basin. About 400 wild and cultivated accessions divide up into W, central and E groups and show evidence of admixture among them and local domestication events.
- The Multiple Functions and Services of Community Seedbanks. More than just conservation.
- Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap. More data and fancier maths finds a lower organic yield gap (20%), which is halved by multi-cropping and crop rotations.
- Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on farm conservation projects? All you need is two graphs.
- Finding Our Way through Phenotypes. “We urge all biologists, data managers, and clinicians to actively support the development, evaluation, refinement, and adoption of methodologies, tools, syntaxes, and standards for capturing and computing over phenotypic data and to collaborate in bringing about a coordinated approach.” Amen.
- Wild food in Europe: A synthesis of knowledge and data of terrestrial wild food as an ecosystem service. 65 million people collect, and at least 100 million consume, wild food. But only 81 plants? Thought it would be more. But even so, quite an ecosystem service.
Nibbles: American goats, Ancient dogs, Colorado sheep, Beer vs Wine, Vitis breeding, Southern cooking, Pennsylvania farming, Cherokee seeds
- A distinctly US flavour to Nibbles today, for some reason.
- A map of every goat in the US. Texas is the goat hotspot.
- Not there with dogs yet, but at least we now know when they arrived.
- How about sheep, though?
- Interestingly, there are more wineries than breweries in Texas.
- Saving the winegrape, molecule by molecule. Including in Texas?
- Saving Southern cooking, seed by seed. You remember that peanut thing from yesterday?
- But Pennsylvania cooking?
- How about Cherokee cooking?
The tempting value of Andean roots and tubers
Following a NY Times expose, here’s been much ado in the twittersphere about maca. But that’s not the only Andean tuber with a smuggling problem. Including to Italy, though?