Nibbles: Gulf garden, Lettuce evaluation, Jordanian olive, Kenyan seeds, Hybrid animals, FAOSTAT news

  1. Qatari botanic garden is providing training in food security, and more. Good for them.
  2. The European Evaluation Network’s lettuce boffins have themselves a meeting. Pretty amazing this made it to FreshPlaza, and with that headline.
  3. The Jordan Times pretty much mangles what is a perfectly nice, though inevitably nuanced, story about the genetic depth of Jordan’s olives.
  4. In Kenya’s seed system, whatever is not forbidden in proposed new legislation…may not be enough.
  5. Conservation through hybridization.
  6. FAOSTAT now has a bit that gives you access to national agricultural census data. Which sounds quite important but give us a few days to check it.

Brainfood: First farmers, First dogs, First olives, Food sharing, Seed longevity, Seed germination, Conservation & climate change, Urban gardens, Seed movement, Machine learning, Web crawling, Imaging spectroscopy

Nibbles: Access to seeds indeces, Rare plants genebank, Maize and climate change, Bogota market

  1. So there’s an African Seed Access Index whose relationship with the Access to Seeds Index is unclear.
  2. The Pacific Northwest has a genebank called the Miller Seed Vault whose relationship with the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado is quite clear.
  3. The relationship between climate change and changes in crop distributions is becoming clearer, and more worrying.
  4. What is the relationship between huge markets such as Samper Mendoza in Bogota and plant conservation?

A new organic, heterogeneous era dawns in Europe

What I forgot to do when I mentioned the Seeds4All Newsletter recently is link to their new “brochure outlining the regulatory steps to be taken in order to market OHM-labelled varieties.”

OHM?

2022 is a special year, as it will start with the entry into force of the new European Regulation on organic production, introducing the possibility of marketing seeds of ‘organic heterogeneous material’ (OHM) without any obligation to be registered in official catalogues.

We believe that this new legislation is a real advance for cultivated biodiversity and could reinforce the sustainability of organic agriculture by allowing the marketing of a greater quantity and diversity of truly organic seeds.

For these regulatory advances to be effective, it is necessary though that field operators seize them and commit to the marketing, reproduction and use of seed of organic heterogeneous material.

Bet there was a bit of resistance to that. You can download the brochure from the Seed4All website. Have fun.

Brainfood: Trade double, Organic farming, Food vs non-food, Wild plants, Wheat yields, CWR in S Africa, Gene editing, European seed law, Farm diversity