- BBC Food Programme on crop diversity in India, with a little help from Bioversity’s Stefano Padulosi (whose name manages to be pronounced in three different ways in 20 minutes.
- How to measure photosynthesis on a grand scale.
- The origins of our diet. It’s the interactions, stupid.
- Barley as superfood. No, not the fermented kind.
- More diverse freshwaters give higher fish yields.
- European earthworm diversity mapped. No word on relationship with yields. Surprisingly difficult to see any correlation with agricultural intensification.
- It’s been a bad time for livestock (and therefore people) in Mongolia and in Ethiopia.
- Domesticating the wild mango that is not a mango but is almost as tasty.
- The weird world of the pure caffeine trade.
Brainfood: PVP in Africa, Tomato disease resistance, Open source seeds, Barley protein, Improving roots, Bambara groundnut, Indian kodo millet, Cacao diversity, Washington heirloom beans, Mato Grosso cassava, Balanites biotech, Intensive Europe
- Opportunities and Threats to Harmonisation of Plant Breeders’ Rights in Africa: ARIPO and SADC. While the intention of ARIPO and SADC is to create a single internal market for protected varieties in Africa, “the end result may look quite differently.”
- Evaluation of Resistance to Ralstonia solanacearum in Tomato Genetic Resources at Seedling Stage. Out of 285 varieties from 21 countries in the Korean genebank, 4 may be resistant to bacterial wilt.
- Following the Open-Source Trail Outside the Digital World: The Case of Open-Source Seeds. “…by not rejecting the idea of property, including intellectual property, but rather attempting to manage it differently, it creates its own enclosures.”
- Grain protein concentration and harvestable protein under future climate conditions. A study of 108 spring barley accessions. Higher CO2 and temperatures lead to higher protein concentrations but lower yields, so lower harvestable protein. The good news is that there’s variation in the response of varieties.
- How can we harness quantitative genetic variation in crop root systems for agricultural improvement? Apparently we still don’t have a mechanistic understanding of root growth, and we’ll need it if we’re going to improve function.
- Bambara Groundnut for Food Security in the Changing African Climate. It’s nutritious, it’s drought tolerant, and it can be intercropped. What’s not to like?
- Neutral and functional marker based genetic diversity in kodo millet (Paspalum scrobiculatum L.). Indian material falls into 4 groups, with Bihar being very diverse. African genepool and wild species should be useful in broadening base in India.
- Origin, Dispersal, and Current Global Distribution of Cacao Genetic Diversity. We’ve come to the limit of the usefulness of the Pound Collection.
- Exploring the role of local heirloom germplasm in expanding western Washington dry bean production. 24 bean varieties have been grown in the area for 20–130 years, representing a useful starting point for participatory plant breeding.
- Growing Cassava (Manihot esculenta) in Mato Grosso, Brazil: Genetic Diversity Conservation in Small–Scale Agriculture. Lots of diversity within communities, and differences among communities. Varieties with same name not necessarily genetically similar.
- Establishment of an in vitro propagation and transformation system of Balanites aegyptiaca. So?
- Mapping cropland-use intensity across Europe using MODIS NDVI time series. Four indicators show highest cropping intensity in Germany, Poland, and the eastern European Black Earth regions, and lowest in eastern Europe outside the Black Earth region. Interesting to mash this up with agricultural biodiversity? Like earthworms?
Call for articles: Valuing underutilised crops
We are looking for stories that analyse how underutilised crops have been revalued. We seek examples of communities that continued growing and processing them contrary to dominant trends. What were the successful strategies and the challenges to reviving the knowledge and the use of the underutilised crop? How did production, processing and preparation of food change? What role did markets, policy, research or local food and farmers’ movements play? What changes did this bring to rural and urban communities? What was the role of youth?
Nibbles: Switchgrass mixtures, Groundnut genomes, Bean genome, New wild tomato, CC Down Under, Aussie foods, Natural history collections, Wheat genebanks, Pompeii vineyards, Colombian exhibition, Portuguese collard, Istanbul bostan, Kenyan adaptation, Norwegian adaptation, Hybrid wheat, GMO bananas, Indian organic, Coconut generator
- If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
- The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
- As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
- New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
- Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
- And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
- Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
- CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
- Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
- Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
- Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
- The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
- Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
- Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
- Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
- The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
- Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
- Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
- Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.
Brainfood: Species shifts, Rewilding caution, Managing grassland, Natural control, Expansion, Rutin, Citrullus core, Open source seeds, Nagoya consequences, Tree diversity
- Altitudinal shifts of the native and introduced flora of California in the context of 20th-century warming. Introduced species are better at spreading upward than the native flora.
- Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation. Step away from the shiny new box.
- Threatened herbivorous insects maintained by long-term traditional management practices in semi-natural grasslands. Because they can’t compete with generalists better adapted to the new-fangled conditions.
- Agricultural landscape simplification reduces natural pest control: A quantitative synthesis. Aphid control 46% lower in simple landscapes with lots of cultivated land, compared to more diverse landscapes.
- Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security. Expansion could really help with food security, also in importing countries, but is likely to occur in biodiversity hotspots, which means the devil will be in the spatial detail.
- Quantitative analysis of rutin content using silkworm genetic resources. Wait, silkworm powder?
- Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Formation of a Core Collection of 1197 Citrullus Accessions. Microsatellites detect differences between American and E. Asian ecotypes and select diverse subset of 130 accessions from Chinese collection.
- Open Source Foodways: Agricultural Commons and Participatory Art. Seeds as art.
- Implications of the Nagoya Protocol for Genome Resource Banks Composed of Biomaterials from Rare and Endangered Species. There are many, some of them unforeseen.
- Functional Resilience against Climate-Driven Extinctions – Comparing the Functional Diversity of European and North American Tree Floras. Loss of species diversity may be decoupled from loss of functional diversity.