- Nice video celebrating seeds.
- Nice old video about Kew Gardens.
- Tracing the origins of Indonesian cassava. No, it wasn’t introduced by Kew, but yes, colonialism was involved.
- Latest data on where crops are grown. Including cassava.
- Self Help Africa director turns on to neglected crops. Including cassava.
- New lab in Kenya for spreading clean crops around. Including cassava?
- Türkiye’s genebank in the news. No cassava.
- Nepalese rice gets a Welsh upgrade.
- Collecting sugarcane in French Polynesia to (eventually) support local booze industry.
- Long live the ancient booze bandwagon.
- Garlic 101.
Brainfood: Food shift, Food footprint, Periodic Table of Food, Nutritious food, Diverse food, Food seed kits, Food meta-metrics
- Food matters: Dietary shifts increase the feasibility of 1.5°C pathways in line with the Paris Agreement. Go flexitarian.
- Biodiversity footprints of 151 popular dishes from around the world. Go flexitarian?
- Periodic Table of Food Initiative for generating biomolecular knowledge of edible biodiversity. Unclear if flexitarians have the best molecules.
- Environmentally protective diets may come with trade-offs for micronutrient adequacy. More sustainable may mean less nutritious. Flexitarians unavailable for comment.
- Market engagement, crop diversity, dietary diversity, and food security: evidence from small-scale agricultural households in Uganda. Market access and crop diversification are both good for dietary diversity and food security. The ultimate flexitarianism.
- Sustainability of one-time seed distributions: a long-term follow-up of vegetable seed kits in Tanzania. Now watch flexitarians demand an even playing field.
- Developing holistic assessments of food and agricultural systems: A meta‑framework for metrics users. One framework to rule all of the above.
Brainfood: US edition
- Vulnerability of U.S. new and industrial crop genetic resources. More germplasm (especially wild relatives) and breeders are needed in the US of castor bean, gumweed, guar, guayule, kenaf, roselle, safflower, sesame, sunn hemp, rubber dandelion and Vernonia.
- Safeguarding Plant Genetic Resources in the U.S. But the conservation system itself has its challenges, due to climate change.
- Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture. But climate change is not the only thing that agriculture (and possibly the conservation system too) needs to adapt to.
- Efforts to cryopreserve shrimp (Penaeid) genetic resources and the potential for a shrimp germplasm bank in the United States. Sure, why not, let them eat shrimp.
- Mother Tubers of Wild Potato Solanum jamesii can Make Shoots Five Times. Are enough populations of this thing in genebanks, I wonder? No, not compared to shrimps.
- ‘Hybrid’ US sheep breeder used endangered genetic material, faces jail. Yes, I know this is not peer-reviewed, but would you have left it out of this American round-up?
Nibbles: Indian millets, Indian rice, Neolithic bread, Andean potatoes, UAE genebank, Niger onions, Lentil domestication, Italian rice, Sea cucumber
- The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
- Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
- Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
- Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
- Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
- The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
- The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
- New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
- In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.
Brainfood: Landrace threats, Heritage areas, Bean erosion, Rice restoration, Cassava redundancy, Commercialization, Peanut network, Podolian cattle
- Towards a practical threat assessment methodology for crop landraces. Basically red listing for landraces.
- Preserving traditional systems: Identification of agricultural heritage areas based on agro-biodiversity. First places to apply the above?
- Genetic erosion within the Fabada dry bean market class revealed by high-throughput genotyping. Would have been nice to apply the above before doing this study.
- Restoration of the traditional high-altitude rice variety Dumbja in Bhutan. Highlights one of the problems with monitoring threats to landraces, i.e. how to define the landrace.
- Identifying genetically redundant accessions in the world’s largest cassava collection. About half of over 5000 genebank accessions were unique. Easier to recognize cassava landraces I guess.
- Agricultural commercialisation among women smallholder farmers in Nigeria: Implication for food security. Will commercialization help preserve some landraces but threaten others?
- The groundnut improvement network for Africa (GINA) germplasm collection: a unique genetic resource for breeding and gene discovery. Over a thousand accessions that will be just fine.
- An Appropriate Genetic Approach to Endangered Podolian Grey Cattle in the Context of Preserving Biodiversity and Sustainable Conservation of Genetic Resources. The livestock people monitor threat to breeds all the time, it seems.