- Diversifying the UK Agrifood System: A Role for Neglected and Underutilised Crops. It’s really hard to pick potential NUS winners. So why even try? Support them all!
- Can markets for nature conservation be successful? An integrated assessment of a product label for biodiversity practices in Germany. Labelling agricultural products can support biodiversity conservation, but probably not on its own. Can it support NUS, I wonder?
- On-farm crop diversity, conservation, importance and value: a case study of landraces from Western Ghats of Karnataka, India. Plenty of diversity in these study sites, including of NUS, but ex situ conservation still needed.
- Revealing Ghana’s unique fonio genetic diversity: leveraging farmers knowledge for sustainable conservation and breeding strategies. Supporting NUS is going to need the knowledge of farmers…
- African indigenous vegetables, gender, and the political economy of commercialization in Kenya. …especially women farmers. Up to a point.
- Cultivating prosperity in Rwanda: the impact of high-yield biofortified bean seeds on farmers’ yield and income. Ok, beans are not a NUS, but you get the point.
- Increased farmer willingness to pay for quality cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) planting materials: evidence from experimental auctions in Cambodia and Lao PDR. NUS or not, clean planting materials and new varieties attract a price premium.
- Brown-top millet: an overview of breeding, genetic, and genomic resources development for crop improvement. Urochloa ramosa is definitely a NUS. And labelling will probably not be enough.
- Survival analysis of freezing stress in the North American native perennial flax, Linum lewisii. If you want to help your NUS, make it perennial?
Nibbles: Seed info, Potato 101, Coffee 101, Rice repatriation, Iraq genebank, Use or lose, Teff breeding, Micronutrients, Agrobiodiversity, Plant a Seed Kit, WorldVeg to Svalbard, Seed Health Units
- Eastern and Southern Africa Small-scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF) launches SEED GIST, a quarterly repository of seed literature.
- A fun romp through potato history.
- A fun romp through coffee history.
- Hong Kong gets some rice seeds back from the IRRI genebank.
- No doubt Iraq will get some seeds back from the ICARDA genebank soon.
- Genebanks are only the beginning though.
- Breeding teff in, wait for it, South Africa.
- The possible tradeoffs of an environmentally friendly diet.
- IIED on the value of agrobiodiversity. Includes an environmentally-friendly and/or nutritious diet.
- Slow Food’s Plant a Seed Kit is all about agrobiodiversity and healthy diets. What, though, no teff?
- WorldVeg knows all about seed kits, and safety duplication.
- Gotta make sure those seeds are healthy, though. Here’s how CGIAR does it.
Happy birthday ILRI genebank
The genebank of the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa is 40 years old. There’s an online celebration tomorrow. See you there.
Oh, and probably coincidentally, you can read about ILRI’s forage work in Somalia in the latest newsletter from the Seed Systems Group.
Brainfood: Yield gap, Domestication & breeding, TEK, Breeding gourds, Breeding pearl millet, Breeding peas, Banana seed systems, Breeding bees
- Global spatially explicit yield gap time trends reveal regions at risk of future crop yield stagnation. For 8 of 10 major crops, yield gaps have widened steadily from 1975 to 2010 over most areas, and remained static for sugar cane and oil palm. Time to turbo-charge the breeding?
- Domestication and the evolution of crops: variable syndromes, complex genetic architectures, and ecological entanglements. If you want to turbo-charge breeding, you need to understand (among other things) the ecological context of domestication.
- Including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in Agricultural Research: Guidelines and Lessons Learned. I suspect Traditional Ecological Knowledge can help with figuring out the ecological context of domestication.
- High levels of genetic variation and differentiation in wild tropical gourds provide a novel resource for cucurbit crop improvement. Ok, but ecological knowledge would like a word.
- Understanding genetic diversity in drought-adaptive hybrid parental lines in pearl millet. Any link to ecology of original collecting sites, I wonder?
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis of a Diverse Panel of Pea (Pisum sativum). Again, ecological knowledge conspicuous by its absence. Maybe the passport data just weren’t up to it?
- Banana seed exchange networks in Burundi – Linking formal and informal systems. Yes, yes, it’s not just about the breeding, the seed system also has to work.
- Editorial: Current status of honey bee genetic and breeding programs: progress and perspectives. Pollinators need breeding programmes too.
Nibbles: Seed video, Kew video, Indonesian cassava, Crop maps, Neglected crops, KEPHIS lab, Turkish genebank, Nepal rice, Polynesian sugarcane, Ancient beer, Garlic basics
- 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.