- Actions in global nutrition initiatives to promote sustainable healthy diets. Focus more on food choice.
- Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system using expanded characteristics for assessing healthfulness of foods. I suppose this might help with making good choices. Maybe.
- Nature-dependent people: Mapping human direct use of nature for basic needs across the tropics. 1.2 billion people in tropical countries are kinda forced to choose nature.
- Small farms and development in sub-Saharan Africa: Farming for food, for income or for lack of better options? Not really a choice: it depends on population density, farm size, market access and agroecological potential.
- The future of farming: Who will produce our food? Whoever chooses to run small, diverse farms. Maybe.
- Building a framework towards climate-smart agriculture in the Yangambi landscape, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Not much choice for these farmers.
- Varietal Threat Index for Monitoring Crop Diversity on Farms in Five Agro-Ecological Regions in India. How to measure the diversity farmers choose to grow, and lose.
- Widespread vulnerability of flowering plant seed production to pollinator declines. A third of flowering plants have no choice and would not set seeds without pollinators…
- Honeybee pollination benefits could inform solar park business cases, planning decisions and environmental sustainability targets. …so choose to put beehives in solar parks.
- Agricultural intensification erodes taxonomic and functional diversity in Mediterranean olive groves by filtering out rare species. Choose management practices wisely to maintain biodiversity in olive groves.
- Policy implications of willingness to pay for sustainable development of a world agricultural heritage site: The role of stakeholders’ sustainable intelligence, support, and behavioral intention. Why people might choose to pay for biodiversity-friendly management practices and crop diversity.
- Traditional Fermented Beverages of Mexico: A Biocultural Unseen Foodscape. So much choice…
Brainfood: Coconut cloning, Apricot diversity, European ag double, Diet seasonality, Farm size, Ethiopian seeds, Biocultural diversity, Aquatic food, Grasslands, Pollinator mixtures
- Development of the first axillary in vitro shoot multiplication protocol for coconut palms. Cloning the tree of life, really fast.
- Frequent germplasm exchanges drive the high genetic diversity of Chinese-cultivated common apricot germplasm. Looking forward to the same being said about coconut.
- Crop diversity effects on temporal agricultural production stability across European regions. The effects are good.
- Are agricultural sustainability and resilience complementary notions? Evidence from the North European agriculture. They are indeed, but what about stability though?
- Seasonal variability of women’s dietary diversity and food provisioning: a cohort study in rural Burkina Faso. Do Europe now.
- The “Sweet Spot” in the Middle: Why Do Mid-Scale Farms Adopt Diversification Practices at Higher Rates? Spoiler alert: it’s got less to do with farm size than with access to resources and markets. At least for Californian lettuce farmers.
- Politics of seeds in Ethiopia’s agricultural transformation: pathways to seed system development. The Ethiopian seed system needs diversification just as much as Californian lettuce farmers.
- Biocultural Diversity for Food System Transformation Under Global Environmental Change. What we all need is biocultural diversity.
- Harnessing the diversity of small-scale actors is key to the future of aquatic food systems. Yes, all of us, whether in mountains or by the sea.
- Combatting global grassland degradation. It may be stretching a point, but biocultural diversity may also be a useful lens through which to look at grassland restoration and sustainable management. But then I would say that.
- Supporting wild pollinators in agricultural landscapes through targeted legume mixtures. Yeah, let’s not forget the pollinators while we’re at it.
Brainfood: Pollinators double, C4 grasses, Pre-breeding, Lupins resources, New wild coffees, Refugee deforestation, Tuber niches, Sampling strategy, Infection risk, Levant Bronze & Iron Age
- A global-scale expert assessment of drivers and risks associated with pollinator decline. “Key findings: 1) risks to human well-being from pollinator decline are higher in the Global South; 2) there is a clear lack of knowledge about pollinator decline in Africa; 3) loss of managed pollinators (e.g. honey bees) is only a serious risk to people in North America.” That’s according to the main author Dr Lynn Dicks on Twitter.
- Agrochemicals interact synergistically to increase bee mortality. Stress on pollinators is more than the sum of its parts.
- Evolutionary innovations driving abiotic stress tolerance in C4 grasses and cereals. Major C4 crops need more stress.
- Deep scoping: a breeding strategy to preserve, reintroduce and exploit genetic variation. You may not need a separate pre-breeding programme to introduce new diversity into your breeding programme without wrecking it.
- Genomic resources for lupins are coming of age. Maybe we could have a pre-breeding programme now?
- Six new species of coffee (Coffea) from northern Madagascar. Including 4 really narrow endemics. I wonder what they taste like. Start evaluation and pre-breeding?
- Refugee camps and deforestation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Much, much less of an impact that you’d think.
- Suitability of root, tuber, and banana crops in Central Africa can be favoured under future climates. More than you’d have thought.
- Proportional sampling strategy often captures more genetic diversity when population sizes vary. Sample more than you normally would from bigger populations of rare wild species.
- Plant pathogen infection risk tracks global crop yields under climate change. Where yields go up, fungal/oomycete infection risk goes up; where yields go down, so does infection risk. Assemblages will change especially in temperate regions.
- Developments in Subsistence Practices from the Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age in the Southern Levant. From pigs, wild animals and emmer to zebu, camelids, and free-threshing wheats.
Nibbles: Apple diversity, Quinoa diversity, Potato diversity, Indian coconut, Mead recipe
- The need to diversify apple breeding.
- Unlikely pean to the world quinoa core collection. I believe we may have blogged about it.
- And the Commonwealth Potato Collection rounds off today’s trifecta of cool genebanks.
- Kerala’s coconut problems only start with root wilt. Aren’t there coconut collections that could be used to solve them? Well of course there are.
- Recreating bochet, a medieval mead, sounds really hard, but worth it. Someone want to start a mead collection?
Nibbles: ISSS, SeedWorld, Farmers Pride, GRIN-U, Indian rematriation, NZ potatoes, European farming
- 13th Triennial Meeting of the International Society for Seed Science: Note in particular Dr Chris Ojiewo of ICRISAT on “Seed systems supporting legume crop improvement.”
- Latest SeedWorld: Note in particular the article on QPM (quality protein maize) from CIMMYT (go to p 53).
- NordGen’s Write-up of the Farmers’ Pride conference “Ensuring Diversity for Food and Agriculture”: Note in particular Dr Maria Bönisch on the first official network for crop wild relatives in Europe.
- GRIN-U — Training resources for plant genetic resources conservation: Note in particular the genebank tours.
- The John Innes Centre genebank sends some wheat back to India. The Benin Bronzes next?
- Taewa, the Maori potato, gets a nice write-up. No word on returning it to somewhere in South America.
- Young researchers helping European farmers diversify. How about by using Indian wheat and Maori potatoes?