- “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.
Brainfood: Sustainability index, Beet wild relative, Participatory goats, Sarma, Wild wheat & drought, Ahipa conservation, Saving genebanks, Chinese cattle, Bolivia & CC, Seed systems, Cereal residues
- Sustainability assessment of agricultural systems: The validity of expert opinion and robustness of a multi-criteria analysis. Experts know their stuff.
- Genetic diversity of Patellifolia patellaris from the Iberian Peninsula, a crop wild relative of cultivated beets. 271 individuals, 10 sites, maybe 3 genetic groupings?
- Production system and participatory identification of breeding objective traits for indigenous goat breeds of Uganda. Resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses are the priority.
- Plant diversity for sarma in Turkey: nature, garden and traditional cuisine in the modernity. 73, including 3 endemics.
- Identification of ecogeographical gaps in the Spanish Aegilops collections with potential tolerance to drought and salinity. Evaluation avant la lettre.
- Trends and drivers of on-farm conservation of the root legume ahipa (Pachyrhizus ahipa) in Bolivia over the period 1994/96–2012. Price is too low.
- The Vulnerability of Plant Genetic Resources Conserved Ex Situ. The problem: “…genebanks around the world are generally under stress, largely from inadequate public investment, weakened political support, and insufficient stakeholder engagement.” The solution: privatization, commodification, consolidation, prioritization, communication.
- Species composition and environmental adaptation of indigenous Chinese cattle. Taurine-indicine cline N-S, with traces of banteng, gayal and yak.
- Climate change and crop diversity: farmers’ perceptions and adaptation on the Bolivian Altiplano. Maintaining multiple varieties still done, despite not seen as climate adaptation.
- A Risk Assessment Framework for Seed Degeneration: Informing an Integrated Seed Health Strategy for Vegetatively Propagated Crops. Actually not seed, but rather what to do about pathogen build-up in vegetative planting material. Turns out farmers can be quite good at producing clean material if they can choose healthy plants.
- New criteria for the molecular identification of cereal grains associated with archaeological artefacts. Alkylresorcinols, basically.
Nibbles: Weird genebank, Wheat history, NJ blueberries, Xoloitzcuintle, Cemetery prairie, Tenure, Sunflower at USDA, Potato breeding book, Cullinary diversity, Genomics & breeding, Migration report
- There’s a genebank for algae and protozoans.
- How Turkey Red Wheat from Ukraine built Kansas.
- Taming the wild blueberry.
- History of the ugliest dog breed in the world.
- The prairie lives on among the dead.
- Speaking of which: land tenure and conservation.
- Conserving and breeding sunflowers in the US.
- Making potato breeding great again.
- M.S. Swaminathan recommends millets.
- Computing our way to food security.
- Food insecurity and migration.
Brainfood: Mycorrhizal diversity, Olive diversity, Teak diversity, Core software diversity, Cost-benefit, Frosty rye, CGIAR future, Portuguese beans, Improvement networks, Food sovereignty
- Historical biome distribution and recent human disturbance shape the diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Proximity to tropical grasslands during the last glacial maximum makes for a large potential species pool, remoteness from human disturbance for the presence of a high percentage of that pool.
- The First Molecular Identification of an Olive Collection Applying Standard Simple Sequence Repeats and Novel Expressed Sequence Tag Markers. 59 genotypes among 370 trees.
- Worldwide translocation of teak—origin of landraces and present genetic base. The dryer part of the natural range has not really been used in plantations.
- GenoCore: A simple and fast algorithm for core subset selection from large genotype datasets. Better than MSTRAT, Core Hunter, and random sampling.
- Global economic trade-offs between wild nature and tropical agriculture. We can go ahead and cut down the Atlantic Forest. Wait, what?
- Exploring new alleles for frost tolerance in winter rye. Basically one allele, actually.
- Reforming the research policy and impact culture in the CGIAR: Integrating science and systemic capacity development. Let CGIAR be CGIAR.
- Improving global integration of crop research. Taking this to the next level. Which sounded a lot like the International Treaty’s Global Information System on PGRFA. Also, see above.
- Establishing the Bases for Introducing the Unexplored Portuguese Common Bean Germplasm into the Breeding World. 37 accessions had 100% of the diversity of 175 accessions, which were mainly hybrids between the two main genepools. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.
- Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale. Janzen-Connell were right, it’s natural enemies that explain the tropical-temperate diversity pattern. With video goodness.
- Local food sovereignty for global food security? Highlighting interplay challenges. “…scaling up of food sovereignty will not necessarily lead to wider sustainability and food security outcomes.”
Nibbles: Seed saving, Craft saving, Talking sweet potatoes, Breeding eggplants, Cat domestication, Cary on Svalbard, US apple book, US strawberries, Forages newsletter, Banana double
- 94% is the new 75%. Here’s some of the survivors.
- But how many crafts have we lost?
- Win a prize for communicating about sweet potatoes.
- Pre-breeding eggplants using their wild relatives.
- Two waves of cat domestication.
- Svalbard double.
- 350 buck’s worth of apple history.
- 10 cent’s worth of strawberry history.
- Latest newsletter from those nice forages genetic resources conservation folks.
- Bananas good and bad news.