- 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.
Nibbles: Benchmarking, Unintended consequences, Kenyan seeds, WFP, China genebank, Evolutionary plant breeding, Citrus, Maize, Lotus silk, Azolla, Spanish genebank
- How committed are 350 food companies to food system transformation? Well, take a wild guess…
- Mind you, transformation is tricky.
- A climate-smart seed system for Kenya? Would be transformative for sure.
- Great that WFP got the Nobel Peace Prize, but they’re only part of the food system picture.
- Another part is genebanks, as China recognizes.
- One way to use all that material in genebanks is through evolutionary plant breeding.
- Citrus: How it started. How it’s going. Meme alert.
- Maize was taken back to Mexico from South America in ancient times. And those early farmers really knew how to process it for maximum benefit, something we’re forgetting.
- A deep dive into lotus silk.
- An even deeper dive into Azolla-covered paddies.
- Esteban Hernández of the Andalusian genebank gets his 15 minutes.
Brainfood: Perennial staples, Mainstreaming NUS, African veggies, Domestication, Gut microbiota, Yam domestication, Breeding strategies, Breeding history, Coffee diversity, Social networks, Vanuatu diets, Milpa, Decolonizing ABS, Restoration, Soil biodiversity double, Bambara groundnut seeds
- Perennial Staple Crops: Yields, Distribution, and Nutrition in the Global Food System. Most perennial staple crops are not as well known or widely grown as annual staple crops, but maybe should be.
- Determining appropriate interventions to mainstream nutritious orphan crops into African food systems. Look to the supply of seeds.
- Diversity and conservation of traditional African vegetables: Priorities for action. Focus on conserving diversity West Tropical Africa and southern Cameroon. And then look to the supply of seeds everywhere, presumably.
- The origins of agriculture: Intentions and consequences. Domestication happened pretty much all by itself, through co-evolution.
- The role of the microbiota in human genetic adaptation. Co-evolution happened with the gut microbiota as well as with plants.
- Genome analyses reveal the hybrid origin of the staple crop white Guinea yam (Dioscorea rotundata). Unclear if people were involved.
- Crop adaptation to climate change as a consequence of long‑term breeding. Better to focus on the slow but steady accumulation of small effects. By people, presumably.
- Trends of genetic changes uncovered by Env- and Eigen-GWAS in wheat and barley. Maybe you don’t even need to measure the results of those small effects.
- Genetic Diversity of Coffea arabica. We need to catalogue all germplasm collections, together with their marker profiles, and make material and data easily available. Easier said than done.
- Farmers’ social networks and the diffusion of modern crop varieties in India. Caste affects adoption of new varieties.
- From garden to store: local perspectives of changing food and nutrition security in a Pacific Island country. Those that have access to stores, and therefore enough food, don’t have a well balanced diet, and those that don’t have store have a better balanced diet but occasionally not enough food. No word on modern varieties.
- The role of the milpa in food and nutritional security in households of Ocotal Texizapan, Veracruz, Mexico. Who needs stores?
- Dilemmas of protection: decolonising the regulation of genetic resources as cultural heritage. But are the above natural or cultural resources?
- A meta-analysis contrasting active versus passive restoration practices in dryland agricultural ecosystems. Just add water.
- Soil biodiversity enhances the persistence of legumes under climate change. If you want to keep legumes, and thus diversity, in your vegetation under climate change, better maintain soil biodiversity. Or add water, presumably.
- Soil microbial legacy drives crop diversity advantage: linking ecological plant‐soil feedback with agricultural intercropping. Same as above, but for intercropping.
- Effect of high temperature drying on seed longevity of Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea) accessions. Initial drying at 45°C/35% RH for 8 days before moving to a more conventional 17°C/15% RH can be good for some accessions, but which?
Brainfood: Behaviour change, Banana evolution, Clonal conservation, Pea evolution, Fe fortification, Diet data, Cassava potential, Creole breeds, Water buffalo evolution, Bison and CWR
- A systematic review of conservation efforts using non-monetary, non-regulatory incentives to promote voluntary behaviour change. Mix it up, and get personal.
- Chromosome reciprocal translocations have accompanied subspecies evolution in bananas. Some subspecies of M. acuminata were more involved in cultivar development than others.
- Challenges and Prospects for the Conservation of Crop Genetic Resources in Field Genebanks, in In Vitro Collections and/or in Liquid Nitrogen. Everything that can be, should be in cryo.
- Population genetic structure and classification of cultivated and wild pea (Pisum sp.) based on morphological traits and SSR markers. The species are real, the subspecies maybe less so.
- Iron Absorption from Iron-Biofortified Sweetpotato Is Higher Than Regular Sweetpotato in Malawian Women while Iron Absorption from Regular and Iron-Biofortified Potatoes Is High in Peruvian Women. More than just calories.
- Survey data on income, food security, and dietary behavior among women and children from households of differing socio-economic status in urban and peri-urban areas of Nairobi, Kenya. Lots of data to play around with, including on dietary diversity. But not on biofortification, I don’t think.
- “Rambo root” to the rescue: How a simple, low‐cost solution can lead to multiple sustainable development gains. Grow it on degraded land. After biofortifying it, natch.
- Genetic Diversity and Structure of Iberoamerican Livestock Breeds. Creole breeds are hanging in there, especially in marginal areas. Maybe they could be fed on cassava?
- Whole genome analysis of water buffalo and global cattle breeds highlights convergent signatures of domestication. The same mutations occurred independently and were then selected for in water buffalo and cattle.
- Bison, anthropogenic fire, and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America. Bison favoured the growth of crop wild relatives in the prairies. No word on any attempt to domesticate the brutes, but the above should provide some guidance.
- Archaeogenomics of a ~2,100-year-old Egyptian leaf provides a new timestamp on date palm domestication. Dates showed introgression from wild relatives way back. No evidence of bison involvement.
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.