- Nice video celebrating seeds.
- Nice old video about Kew Gardens.
- Tracing the origins of Indonesian cassava. No, it wasn’t introduced by Kew, but yes, colonialism was involved.
- Latest data on where crops are grown. Including cassava.
- Self Help Africa director turns on to neglected crops. Including cassava.
- New lab in Kenya for spreading clean crops around. Including cassava?
- Türkiye’s genebank in the news. No cassava.
- Nepalese rice gets a Welsh upgrade.
- Collecting sugarcane in French Polynesia to (eventually) support local booze industry.
- Long live the ancient booze bandwagon.
- Garlic 101.
Brainfood: Food shift, Food footprint, Periodic Table of Food, Nutritious food, Diverse food, Food seed kits, Food meta-metrics
- Food matters: Dietary shifts increase the feasibility of 1.5°C pathways in line with the Paris Agreement. Go flexitarian.
- Biodiversity footprints of 151 popular dishes from around the world. Go flexitarian?
- Periodic Table of Food Initiative for generating biomolecular knowledge of edible biodiversity. Unclear if flexitarians have the best molecules.
- Environmentally protective diets may come with trade-offs for micronutrient adequacy. More sustainable may mean less nutritious. Flexitarians unavailable for comment.
- Market engagement, crop diversity, dietary diversity, and food security: evidence from small-scale agricultural households in Uganda. Market access and crop diversification are both good for dietary diversity and food security. The ultimate flexitarianism.
- Sustainability of one-time seed distributions: a long-term follow-up of vegetable seed kits in Tanzania. Now watch flexitarians demand an even playing field.
- Developing holistic assessments of food and agricultural systems: A meta‑framework for metrics users. One framework to rule all of the above.
Nibbles: Cider exhibit, Dog domestication, Nordic rye, Orkney barley, Tunisian wheat, IPR in Kenya, Future Seeds, Seed & herbarium resources
- The Museum of Cider has an exhibition on “A Variety of Cultures.”
- Nice podcast rounding up the latest on dog domestication.
- Useful summary of the history of rye in the Nordic countries since it replaced barley in the Medieval period.
- They didn’t give up barley in the Outer Hebrides.
- The Tunisian farmer goes back to wheat landraces (I think).
- The Kenyan farmers who want to exchange landraces.
- El Colombiano visits Future Seeds, evokes The Walking Dead.
- Seed saving resources from the California Seed Bank and the herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley.
Brainfood: CGIAR impacts, Alternative ag, Landscape simplicity, Biocultural diversity, PPP, Bioversity & food security, Landrace legislation, Coffee ABS, Useful plants
- The economic impact of CGIAR-related crop technologies on agricultural productivity in developing countries, 1961–2020. In 2020, modern varieties bred by CGIAR or developed by other institutions using CGIAR germplasm were sown on about 190 M ha, about 26% of the total harvested area of these crops in developing countries, and 43% of the total area sown with modern varieties for these crops in developing countries. Yes, cool, but…
- Farming practices to enhance biodiversity across biomes: a systematic review. Less intensive practices generally enhance biodiversity.
- Effects of landscape simplicity on crop yield: A reanalysis of a global database. Simplifying landscapes is associated with lower rates of pollination, pest control and other ecosystem services, and lower crop yields.
- Biocultural diversity and crop improvement. Crop improvement can enhance crop diversity, but doesn’t always.
- Collaboration between Private and Public Genebanks in Conserving and Using Plant Genetic Resources. Vegetable breeding companies can contribute to the conservation of crop diversity by public genebanks, but it takes work on both sides.
- Eight arguments why biodiversity is important to safeguard food security. It’s not “stop hunger first, then worry about diversity afterward”. Or it shouldn’t be.
- Landrace legislation in the world: status and perspectives with emphasis in EU system. Policy can support the conservation and use of landraces. Or not. It’s a choice.
- Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol: Implications and Compliance Strategies for the Global Coffee Community. Maybe they should consider the Plant Treaty approach?
- The global distribution of plants used by humans. 35,687 of them, and their richness is negatively correlated with protected areas.
Nibbles: Cheese microbes, OSSI, Mung bean, Sustainable ag, Agroecology, Collard greens, African orphan crops, Olive diversity, Mezcal threats, German perry, Spanish tomatoes, N fixation
- A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
- The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
- The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
- But then goes all serious with talk of trillions of dollars in benefits from sustainable food systems. Diversity not mentioned, alas, though, so one wonders about the point of the previous pieces.
- Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
- Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
- More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to. Seriously though, some crops do need more research, if only so they can be grown somewhere else.
- There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
- The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
- Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
- This piece about tomato diversity in Spain is worth reading for many reasons (heroic seed saving yada yada), but especially for the deadpan take on the Guardia Civil at the end.
- Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.