- Innovations for sustainable food systems: genebanks are in there but frankly I find the whole thing a bit problematic. Just gonna leave that there. Feel free to comment.
- Colin Khoury’s backstory. Also some CWR.
- The fight against pathogens. Of plants, settle down.
- Better Napier grass is good for everyone. Including the cows. But wait, “…[i]t doesn’t really matter which grass…”
- Phenome2020 recapped.
Nibbles: Columella, Thomas Bowrey, Dreamtime, Oz seedbank, Kenya sweetpotato, Dalla Ragione, Apple hunter, Cydonia, Caribbean nutmeg, Wheat synthetics, ICARDA forages, Land cover map
- Recreating Roman wine. It’s the tar, stupid.
- Decolonizing weed.
- Ancient Aboriginal foraging and cooking was quite something.
- The National Seed Bank at the Australian National Botanic Garden makes the news. See what I did there?
- So does sweetpotato in Kenya.
- Turning to art to find lost fruit varieties in Italy.
- Remembering Lee Calhoun of North American Fruit Explorers.
- Bringing back the quince. That’s the fruit trifecta.
- Might as well bring nutmeg back too.
- CIMMYT’s synthetic hexaploid wheat programme explained in a PowerPoint.
- Report on screening ICARDA’s wild forages.
- Nerd out with cool land cover map in Google Earth Engine. Mash up with above, for example?
Nibbles: Medieval Iceland, Lebanese wine, Yemeni coffee, Ghana cowpea, SeedShare, Roman hamburger
- Ag diversification was a thing even in medieval Iceland.
- Not to mention contemporary Lebanon.
- Dumping qat for coffee is the good news we all wanted to hear. Jeremy provides the context.
- Ghana gets some new cowpeas. I just think it’s cool that they made the news.
- The joys of seed saving: the backstory of SeedShare.
- Procuring a hamburger in ancient Rome. This is a great sub-Reddit, BTW.
Nibbles: Indian rice edition
- Odisha traditional rice varieties on display.
- Bringing back traditional rice varieties.
- Cricketer praises farmer for growing traditional rice varieties.
Nibbles: Trade & nutrition, Apple trifecta, Cider, Neolithic migrations, IIED double
- Getting trade to contribute to nutrition. Hard row to hoe.
- Elegiac introduction & postscript by Robert Macfarlane to a fabulous pean to wild Kazakhstan apples by the late, great Roger Deakin called East to Eden.
- And the connection between the above and “wild” apples in Scotland.
- An expensive poster showing how domesticated apple varieties relate to each other. I have to say I’m sorely tempted.
- Sorely tempted by this documentary on some cidermakers’ trip to Kazakhstan too.
- Nice to see my map of barley genebank accessions used in a blog post about mapping human DNA phylogenies.
- Your regular reminder that “PCLG is an international network of organisations coordinated by IIED that promotes learning on the linkages between people and biodiversity conservation” and that their newsletter is well worth subscribing too.
- And here are IIED’s best publications of 2019, including “Biodiversity loss is a development issue,” which is one of the great titles of our time, and not a bad paper either.