- Handy primer on the effects of climate change and biodiversity on food security, courtesy of the House of Lords.
- Crop wild relatives could help with all three.
- Trouble brewing for rice. House of Lords nodding wisely.
- The trouble that brewed for wheat wasn’t quite as advertised. Spoiler alert: the price spike had to do with China buying up all it could. So is rice next then?
- No trouble brewing for yams now that they’re getting sequenced.
- Nor for peanuts in the Gambia, for different reasons.
- Sounds like everything is hunky dory for the Tuscan grape too.
- Good to see SADC is on the job.
- It may be too late for some trees though.
Nibbles: Asian yams, Coconut survey, Belarus genebank, Jordan genebank, Tepary beans breeding, Dante’s wine
- Nice Twitter thread on Asian yams (and incidentally sweet potato and taro).
- Surveying and collecting coconuts in PNG. What will they do with those nuts?
- Belarus genebank gets a high-level visit. Can’t help wondering if the Ukraine genebank being in the news is behind this somehow.
- Jordan to get a(nother) genebank. Apparently.
- Tepary beans to get their 15 minutes of fame.
- Medieval Italian wine was biodynamic.
Nibbles: Wheat diplomacy, Bean improvement, Ghana genebank, Algeria genebank, CIP genebank
- Yeah what we all need right now is to politicize wheat.
- Tepary bean to the rescue of common bean. Politicize that!
- Ghana’s genebank getting some use.
- Algeria gets a genebank. Hope it gets used.
- Pretty sure the CIP genebank is getting used. Find out how on Facebook Live today.
Nibbles: Forgotten crops special issue, Coffee fingerprinting, Three Sisters, Food gardening, Magic mushrooming, Genebanks in Ukraine, Colombia, Australia, China
- Forthcoming special issue of Plants, People, Planet on forgotten crops. Get your paper in about how they’re under-represented in genebanks.
- Or about how they need to be DNA fingerprinted, like the USDA is doing for coffee.
- I wonder if there is a forgotten crops version of the Three Sisters. Answers on a postcard, please.
- Forget about genebanks, grow those forgotten crops in your garden. Rebelliously.
- Forget about forgotten crops, how about forgotten mushrooms?
- Lest we forget the Ukrainian genebank.
- No way to forget the Future Seeds genebank.
- Australians are not being allowed to forget about genebanks, plant and animal. With video goodness. There’s hope yet.
- Meanwhile, in China…
Nibbles: CGIAR impacts, Innovative varieties, Sweet potato in PNG, Mexican food viz, Mango diversity, Lactase persistence, Tree planting, Indigenous sea gardens
- Average returns on agricultural R&D investment is 100%, says CGIAR.
- I wonder how many from this list of the most innovative plant varieties of 2020 can trace back to some CGIAR product. Or genebank.
- Which sweet potato varieties do consumers actually like in PNG?
- Cool visualizations of the relationships between Mexican crops and foods.
- One village, 100 mangoes. Visualize that.
- Don’t blame high food prices on war. Entirely, anyway.
- Lactase persistence is not due to the benefits of drinking milk. Entirely, anyway.
- A whole bunch of tools to help select trees to plant in Europe. The entirely correct URL for the climate matching tool is this one though.
- Why worry about any of that when you can have sea gardens, though?