Nibbles: VACS, FAO forgotten foods, African roots, Hopi corn, Adivasis rice, Sustainable farming, Llama history, Vicuña sweaters, Portuguese cattle, Mexico genebank, NZ genebank, Bat pollination, Eat This Newsletter, WEF

  1. More on the US push for opportunity crops.
  2. Oh look there’s a whole compendium on African opportunity crops from FAO.
  3. Many of them are roots and tubers.
  4. For the Hopi, maize is an opportunity crop.
  5. For the Adivasis, it’s rice.
  6. And more along the same lines from Odisha.
  7. Llamas were an opportunity for lots of people down the ages.
  8. …and still are, for some.
  9. Portugal eschews llamas for an ancient cattle breed.
  10. I bet Mexico’s genebank offers some amazing opportunities.
  11. And New Zealand’s too.
  12. Let’s not forget bats. Yes, bats.
  13. Jeremy’s latest newsletter tackles turmeric, pepper and sweet potatoes, among other things.
  14. And the best way to frame all of the above is that the World Economic Forum wants governments to ban people from growing their own food because that causes climate change.

Nibbles: Cider exhibit, Dog domestication, Nordic rye, Orkney barley, Tunisian wheat, IPR in Kenya, Future Seeds, Seed & herbarium resources

  1. The Museum of Cider has an exhibition on “A Variety of Cultures.”
  2. Nice podcast rounding up the latest on dog domestication.
  3. Useful summary of the history of rye in the Nordic countries since it replaced barley in the Medieval period.
  4. They didn’t give up barley in the Outer Hebrides.
  5. The Tunisian farmer goes back to wheat landraces (I think).
  6. The Kenyan farmers who want to exchange landraces.
  7. El Colombiano visits Future Seeds, evokes The Walking Dead.
  8. Seed saving resources from the California Seed Bank and the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nibbles: CAAS genebank, VACS, Opportunity crops, Ross-Ibarra, Canary sweetpotatoes, Land Institute crowdsourcing, BBC seed podcast

  1. The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences genebank fills some gaps.
  2. I wonder if any of those new accessions are “opportunity crops.”
  3. Because they are sorely needed, for example in Africa.
  4. Which is not to say working on staples like maize isn’t cool. Just ask Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra.
  5. Working on sweet potato can also be, well, sweet. Case in point: gorgeous book on the varieties of the Canaries.
  6. There’s an opportunity to help the Land Institute with its research on perennial crops.
  7. And yes, seeds are indeed alive. Just ask CAAS.

Eat this maize podcast

Jeremy’s latest podcast is out, and it’s a doozie. Plus it saves me adding it to the next Brainfood, which is coming soon, don’t worry people.

Modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize. But there was a problem. A lot of the later genetic work to understand the transformation of teosinte into maize found remnants of different types of teosinte.

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and his colleagues have sorted out the story, which is now more complicated, better understood, and offers some hope for future maize breeding. Their paper was published last week in Science.

Nibbles: China seeds, Dixie apples, USDA genebanks, ASU dates, IPR, IFG grapes, Pick-a-mix, Coffee ESG, French heirlooms, Belgian brewing, Tanzanian sorghum, Horse-bread, Roots & tubers, Guyana cassava, SDG indicators

  1. China announces a slew of seed-related measures.
  2. A slew of seeds kept apples diverse in the US South, but not so much any more.
  3. Fortunately there’s a slew of apples, among many other things, in the USDA genebank system.
  4. Dates too, probably, but this article is actually about the (complementary?) collection at Arizona State University.
  5. A slew of intellectual protections has been good for seed companies. But consumers?
  6. IFG no doubts benefits mightily from intellectual property protection of its grape varieties. The diversity of which you can peruse on this nice website.
  7. Speaking of nice websites, this one helps farmers pick-a-mix of crops. Intercropping is diversity too.
  8. How the coffee industry is trying to cope with a slew of sustainability rules. Yeah, sometimes IP protection is not enough.
  9. But who owns heritage varieties?
  10. Including heritage varieties of Belgian malting barley and other cereals.
  11. Speaking of malting, they use sorghum in Tanzania.
  12. It’s unclear what heritage varieties went into making horse-bread, but I’d like to taste the stuff.
  13. But who needs bread (or beer?) anyway? There’s a slew of root and tuber crops in Africa and elsewhere just waiting to solve hunger…
  14. …as Guyana knows well.
  15. Wanna keep track of (most of) the above? FAO has you (sorta) covered via a slew of indicators.