Medicinal plants

Nibbles: Joanne Labate, Gebisa Ejeta, David Spooner, Strawberry 101, Mad honey, First figs, Agrobiodiversity maps, School project, Takesgiving, Private investment

USDA vegetable crop curator tells it like it is.
$5 million to find more Striga resistance genes in sorghum.
Wild potato herbarium specimens find good home.
How two New World strawberries got together in the Old World and then spread all over the world.
Hallucinogenic honey: what could possibly go wrong?
First farmers gave a fig.
The other of all agrobiodiversity map mashups.
Cool school project on crop diversity in Europe.
In other news, “Columbusing” is a thing.
Private sector investment in conservation: Turning “small and new” into “big and familiar.”

FoodTank does crop wild relatives.
“The inveterate collector who understand the poetics of diversity had left behind a new plant unknown to science.”
That “inveterate collector” would probably approve of this.
A VERY tasty grass.
Chew on that spinifex while burning this stuff for the full botanical multi-sensory experience..
Pacific people told to cultivate their gardens for health and nutrition. And climate change adaptation.
Progress on Farmers’ Rights. Incremental, but still.
The unsung heroes of germplasm distribution get together.
Reviving the fortunes of NY hops through fancy breeding.
Too much plant protein is going to animals, so let’s give them insects instead.
Because animals are bad for equality anyway.

Today’s new genome is pearl millet. The most climate-smart of crops? Now, to process it more easily.
Finger millet is not too bad either.
Agriculture was good for human diversity, at least in Papua New Guinea. Elsewhere, maybe not so much.
Julio Hancco Mamani grows 400 potato varieties up in the Andes (but how did it all start?). And Rahibai Soma Popere “15 varieties of rice, nine varieties of pigeon pea and sixty varieties of vegetables, besides many oil seeds” in Maharashtra.
“West Bengal government encourages cultivation of extinct rice varieties.” Wait, what?
Presumably not extinct like silphium.
India’s first nutrition atlas will maybe tells us where more Rahibai Soma Poperes are most needed.
Future Food includes seeds.
Cleaning up bananas.
Would love to have been on the “Brazilian Cassava Learning Journey.” Tanzania next?
The bitter side of sugar.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden damaged by Irma.
Research on vegetables really pays off, vegetable researchers say.
Brazilian bean catalog launched.
Certifying coffee seeds.
Pot next?
Closely followed by Navajo tea.

“It is like archaeology to me. When you save an ancient seed it is like saving a sculpture. It represents the culture, tradition and history. Different types have different traits and intense flavours, like tomatoes years ago for example.”
Vietnamese specialty rices direct from the genebank. Totally unrelated to this NY Times video-essay on Hmong rice farming.
Time for tea.
Making coffee good again. Jeremy explores fair trade and Fair Trade. Do tea now, please, Cherfas.
‘Shrooms got magic horizontally, man.
Why do circus peanuts taste of bananas?
Bringing back the mouse bean. Which may or may not taste of bananas.
Cool maize book to round off the Native American crops trifecta.
Oh no, here’s another one. Pinning down maize domestication.
Funky ICARDA agroclimatological app.
REALLY old Italian wine. And something to go with it.
ICRISAT has a genebank in Zimbabwe too.
Plant Treaty transfers hit a milestone.
Policy brief on policy briefs. Homework: do a killer policy brief on any of the above.

Pinning down transposable elements across the whole maize genome.
Wine and weed in Lebanon. Not as mellow as it sounds.
Yields and Land Use in Agriculture: The Website.
The effect of all those yields times 12,000 years on C sequestration is about as much as that of deforestation.
Ancient Roman 1% responsible for introducing the citron and lemon to the Mediterranean.
Flowering duration and pod numbers are they keys to heat tolerance in peas.
94% of US dairy cows are Holsteins. How boring is that?