Policy

Nibbles: Coffee rust, Wheat blast, Livestock yield gap, Livestock adaptation, Extension, Med diet, Organic < conventional, Douglas fir breeding, Best moustache in cryo, Fortifying rice

Coffee rust is doing a number on livelihoods in Central America.
Wheat blast could do the same in South America.
ILRI DG on smallholder livestock producers: one-third don’t have the conditions in which to be viable, one-third can go either way and one–third can be successful. I suppose all of them are going to need adaptation options.
Not to mention extension services.
Meanwhile, bureaucrats busy protecting the Mediterranean diet.
The inevitable productivity penalty of organic.”
Douglas fir ready for its genomic closeup.
Cryopreservation update, with video goodness.
Lots of ways to skin the malnutrition cat: zinc and rice.

Food? We don’t need no stinking food.
Bean breeder begs to differ.
Where we could do with more food.
Nobody’s talking about mitigation any more. Oh yes they are.
Land shparing is the answer.
ICRAF decides to gather evidence for the benefits of agroforestry for nutrition.
More on those open source seeds. Which I hope nobody will counterfeit.
Florida needs new grapefruits, whether open source or not.
Naked neck chickens look weird, but they may be really heat resistant, so get over it. Ghana has.
Canadian grad students summarize nutrition research in a pithy sentence. Sound familiar?

GIS geeks sort out land cover at last.
Role of vegetables in combating malnutrition in Africa. Author offers pdf of paper.
Ancient native American middens just keep on giving.
Raspberry colour good predictor of various fruit post-harvest characteristics. Good short-cut for breeders.
Getting to the root of citrus greening. Scary disease.
Freaky stuff about using frog eggs to figure out the genetics of grapevine’s susceptibility to another scary disease.
Video of our friend Dr Nigel Maxted on Jordan’s socioeconomically important plants.
Physician, heal thyself. Indian tells USAID to take care of its own food insecurity.
How to create subsidies that promote biodiversity, in a model, which is probably highly unrealistic.
Very realistic notes from a seed and voucher fair in Malawi.
And anecdotes on the benefits of bean diversity in Uganda.

Farming cobia off Panama. Look it up.
Gene editing is the future. But is it GM?
More on the CIMMYT genebank from the Australian press. Get a room already.
Fancy machine can tell fancy Yemeni coffee from lesser stuff. No, not DNA. Producers of lesser stuff unavailable for comment.
Some of them may end up being photographed by National Geographic though.
Before being forced off their land.
Different sort of land grab in the Gran Chaco. Pity those poor wild Arachis. And here’s a meta-analysis of the drivers of the problem.
Feeling left out, herders get fancy photos too.
“The data indicates a broad distribution of this clone from Spain to Russia and Scotland to Cypress.” Good grief. Potato blight, if you’re still interested.
From household survey data to food security assessment: The software.
The bubbleberry is increasingly a thing.

Nature has new Plants journal. With blog.
More from the randomized trials backlash frontlines.
World Bank sets up internal task force on climate smart agriculture. Oh good.
No word on whether spiritual values on agenda.
Hacking the school lunch.
Indian flour mills winding down. Implications for crop diversity unknown.
Big Australian writeup of CIMMYT genebank.
Big CIP writeup of CIP genebank. And other collections, to be fair.
It’s the regeneration, stupid.
Gardens save plants.
Sustainable diets defined to within an inch of their lives. Common factor is less animal products. But, as Susan McMillan of ILRI points out, for whom, and where?
Traditional Maori use of weird fungus.