Nibbles

Nibbles: Maize landraces, Indian plantain, Indigenous conservation, Slow Food, Design a tomato, Saffron in Vermont

A Mexican entrepreneur and a Pawnee Keeper of the Seed try to save maize landraces in their different ways.
Indian farmer tries to save plantain varieties.
Indigenous conservation will save conservation.
Alice Walters cannot save the food system. But why not let her try?
None of the above of them would understand the concept of designing a perfect tomato.
Saffron is the perfect spice.

Europe gets a genetic resources strategy at last. Rejoice.
Book on how international organizations could, should, would transform agriculture.
Meanwhile, in Cali…
BBVA and El Celler de Can Roca collaborate on forgotten foods documentary, Seeds for the Future.
A novel about Vavilov? Well, why not.
Exhibition on pastoralism.
Visual essay on floods in South Sudan.
Why not throw money at food security though? I mean, just see above, right?
Beyond the EAT-Lancet diet. S. Sudan unavailable for comment.
The SPC genebank curator waxes lyrical.
Not far away, New Zealand cryopreserves some of its native plants.
The latest on the Four Corners potato. I hope it’s in cryo…
…and that it doesn’t go the way of the peyote.

Q&A with an archaeobotanist looking into the domestication history of maize and gourds.
Q&A with the curators of the University of California, Riverside Citrus Variety Collection.
Q&A on the shea tree genome.
CIP’s potato cryobank. There’s probably a Q&A somewhere too.
Snippets of a review of an interesting-sounding book about the almost-forgotten Pignolo grape.
Snippets of the Indigenous ecological knowledge used by traditional agriculturalists in India.
A more systematic approach to documenting and protecting Indigenous ecological knowledge from Australia.

China makes progress in its agrobiodiversity census.
Osage orange history deconstructed: “horse high, hog tight, and bull strong.”
Maize history deconstructed.
Using AI to assess the vulnerability of plant species. Vulnerability of landraces next?
Not sure about landraces, but maybe pasturelands?
Mapping food systems to save them.

Organic Seed Growers Conference, February 4–11, 2022. Don’t miss it.
Mapping biodiversity from space. Agrobiodiversity next? I wish.
How to cite Indigenous knowledge. Including in germplasm databases? I wish.
An old Czech barley variety from an Austrian genebank makes a comeback in craft brewing. I dunno though, I need to look into this a bit more.
Demonizing livestock is unjust. But will probably continue.