Brainfood: Landrace threats, Heritage areas, Bean erosion, Rice restoration, Cassava redundancy, Commercialization, Peanut network, Podolian cattle

Nibbles: Cider exhibit, Dog domestication, Nordic rye, Orkney barley, Tunisian wheat, IPR in Kenya, Future Seeds, Seed & herbarium resources

  1. The Museum of Cider has an exhibition on “A Variety of Cultures.”
  2. Nice podcast rounding up the latest on dog domestication.
  3. Useful summary of the history of rye in the Nordic countries since it replaced barley in the Medieval period.
  4. They didn’t give up barley in the Outer Hebrides.
  5. The Tunisian farmer goes back to wheat landraces (I think).
  6. The Kenyan farmers who want to exchange landraces.
  7. El Colombiano visits Future Seeds, evokes The Walking Dead.
  8. Seed saving resources from the California Seed Bank and the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nibbles: Cheese microbes, OSSI, Mung bean, Sustainable ag, Agroecology, Collard greens, African orphan crops, Olive diversity, Mezcal threats, German perry, Spanish tomatoes, N fixation

  1. A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
  2. The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
  3. The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
  4. But then goes all serious with talk of trillions of dollars in benefits from sustainable food systems. Diversity not mentioned, alas, though, so one wonders about the point of the previous pieces.
  5. Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
  6. Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
  7. More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to. Seriously though, some crops do need more research, if only so they can be grown somewhere else.
  8. There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
  9. The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
  10. Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
  11. This piece about tomato diversity in Spain is worth reading for many reasons (heroic seed saving yada yada), but especially for the deadpan take on the Guardia Civil at the end.
  12. Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.

Brainfood: Breeding edition

Nibbles: Public breeding, Millet Man, Strampelli museum, Ghana community seedbanks, genebank trifecta, CWR, Illegal Canadian potatoes, Açaí GI, Mayocoba bean, Spartan Actinidia, Bitters

  1. Public sector plant breeders are disappearing.
  2. The Millet Man of India is still there though. And why he’s important.
  3. A museum to public sector breeder Nazareno Strampelli appears in Italy.
  4. Another couple of community genebanks appear in Ghana.
  5. We can never have too many discussions on the importance of genebanks, so here’s another one. Not much on the community sort, though. Here’s another example: Ireland. Even the Arab States of Asia want one!
  6. And a deep dive on crop wild relatives in genebanks to round things off.
  7. A community saves illegal potatoes in Canada. Yeah, I know, there’s a lot to unpack there.
  8. Maybe that humble illegal potato needs a geographic indication, like that superfood, açaí.
  9. The Mayocoba bean as a superfood is a bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty of other pulses out there making waves.
  10. The Michigan State kiwi could probably do with a geographic indication too, come to think of it. Cold-hardy and smooth-skinned? Super!
  11. Ok, this is probably the last Nibbles before Christmas, so let’s celebrate with a drink: with bitters of course.