- IAASTD ten years on. Not many people hurt.
- Interesting new ILRI podcast hits the airwaves.
- And here’s another new podcast: A History of Coffee. So far so pretty good.
- Meanwhile, CIP rounds up recent webinars on germplasm health.
- Fun visualizations on the seasonality of food.
- Speaking of visualizations, RAWGraphs is a pretty neat tool.
- North America used to have a native caffeinated beverage, the attractively named Ilex vomitoria.
- Maybe South Africa’s local wild foods have a better chance.
- Using USDA’s genebank database, GRIN.
- Not sure if this Korean-American farmer does (access USDA’s genebank database, do keep up), but probably.
- I wonder if any of these Australian wild foods will find their way into a genebank, just in case.
- Genebanks like the UK veggie one at Warwick.
Nibbles: Pacific coconuts, Fruit double, NUS, New maize
- Coconuts in test tubes in the Pacific.
- Fruit trees in a nutrition garden in India. And in a medieval town in Russia.
- Orphan crops in the diet in Africa.
- Armyworm resistant maize in the farmers’ fields in Africa.
Nibbles: Communications, Sewage, Citrus, Hemp
- Follow Luigi on Twitter.
- Follow Jeremy on Twitter. And subscribe to his newsletter: citrus and shit this week.
- Speaking of shit…
Nibbles: Macron magic, UK Strategic Priorities Fund, Macadamia, Tepary, Nordic spuds, Diversification, Carolina rice, Couscous, Wild tobacco, Yeast diversity, Da 5 Foods
- France pushes for agricultural development. Money to follow mouth?
- Meanwhile, Britain puts its money into its own food systems.
- The macadamia is not diverse enough. Who’d have thought it.
- Couscous gets protected. Phew, ’cause it’s right on the verge of extinction, isn’t it.
- I hope tepary beans don’t become the next macadamia.
- Reviving old potatoes the Nordic way.
- Malaysia told to look beyond oil palm. To tepary and macadamia, maybe?
- Speaking of diversification, how about Laotian rice in Appalachia?
- Chasing the wild tobacco. See what I did there?
- Yeast has been domesticated by bakers into two genetic groups: industrial and artisanal sourdough.
- A history of the world in entirely the wrong 5 foods.
Brainfood: COVID & seeds, Livestock integration, Farm diversity, Diet diversity, Genetic diversity, Cassava landraces, Wild coffee, Variety registration, Kava kastom, Neolithic Europe
- Viewpoint: COVID-19 and seed security response now and beyond. Think before you spread seeds around.
- Integrated crop-livestock system with system fertilization approach improves food production and resource-use efficiency in agricultural lands. Integrating livestock in soybean production is good for the amount of energy produced per unit of nutrient applied, if that’s what floats your boat.
- Holistic agricultural diversity index as a measure of agricultural diversity: A cross-sectional study of smallholder farmers in Lilongwe district of Malawi. An interesting way of measuring overall farm diversity. But is there a link with dietary diversity?
- Dietary diversity scores, nutrient intakes and biomarkers vitamin B12, folate and Hb in rural youth from the Pune Maternal Nutrition Study. Dietary diversity is linked to better micronutrient status. But is there a link with genetic diversity?
- Evaluating surrogates of genetic diversity for conservation planning. There’s nothing quite as good as neutral markers, alas.
- Phenotypic diversity assessment within a major ex situ collection of wild endemic coffees in Madagascar. Never mind the species or genetic diversity, look at the trait variability.
- Understanding cassava varietal preferences through pairwise ranking of gari‐eba and fufu prepared by local farmer–processors. Landraces are sometimes better than improved varieties.
- Do the importations of crop products affect the genetic diversity from landraces? A study case in garlic (Allium sativum L.). Apparently not, surprisingly enough.
- Overcoming barriers to the registration of new varieties. DUS needs genomics. But what about registering landraces? Do we need a completely separate system for that?
- Legal geographies of kava, kastom and indigenous knowledge: Next steps under the Nagoya Protocol. One approach implementing Nagoya at the community level. But is it scalable?
- New evidence on the earliest domesticated animals and possible small-scale husbandry in Atlantic NW Europe. There was a long period of contact between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers, resulting in a transitional farmer-herder stage.