- Dr Fiona Hay, seed scientist, on why we need genebanks, including seed banks.
- Prof. Richard Ellis retires. A genebank legend, as Fiona would probably agree.
- FAO exhibition goes From Seeds to Foods. By way of genebanks, no doubt.
- And peasants, of course. No, it’s not a derogatory word, settle down.
- Can Green Revolution breeding approaches (and genebanks) help peasants deal with climate change?
- Even genebanks need a back-up plan though.
- New Mexico genebank helps out Danish chef.
- The history of the Concord grape and its foxiness. Chefs intrigued.
- The history of Aport and Amasya apples. No foxiness involved, as far as I know. Genebanks? Probably.
- The origin of caffeine. Now do foxiness.
- Where did collards come from anyway? No, not genebanks. Bloody historians, always re-writing history.
Brainfood: Taxonomic identification, Niche mapping, Harvest tracking, Drones, Phenomics, Yield analysis
- Review of herbarium plant identification of crop wild relatives using convolutional neural network models. Cool tech helps you figure out which species is which. Now you can map them properly I guess.
- Habitat prediction mapping for prioritizing germplasm collection areas of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp) in India using BioClim model. Having mapped them, another cool tech helps you figure out where to collect them.
- Harvest Date Monitoring in Cereal Fields at Large Scale Using Dense Stacks of Sentinel-2 Imagery Validated by Real Time Kinematic Positioning Data. And when.
- Drone methods and educational resources for plant science and agriculture. In the field, cool tech could help you find and collect them. And not just that…
- Foliar disease resistance phenomics of fungal pathogens: image-based approaches for mapping quantitative resistance in cereal germplasm. Having collected them, more cool tech helps you evaluate them.
- Machine learning reveals drivers of yield sustainability in five decades of continuous rice cropping. Finally, having evaluated them over many years, cool tech helps you figure out what’s going on.
Nibbles: Corn diseases, German potato collection, Vietnam rice trials, Endophyte strain, Fish nutrition, Himalayan pea, Subversive seeds
- The US needs better maize.
- German genebank looks for the best potatoes.
- Vietnam looks for better rice in IRRI’s genebank.
- New Zealand markets an endophyte for better grass performance.
- Some Timor-Leste fish are better than others.
- The Himalayas have a better pea. Of some kind.
- How’s that for subversive cataloguing?
Nibbles: Impact assessment, Kenyan veggies, African veggie genebank, Madd fruit, Moroccan fruits, Date palm, DOGE at USDA
- Modelling adoption of biofortified crops is no substitute for empirical field surveys. Kind of obvious, but I guess needed saying.
- Kenyans may not need biofortified crops, though. Assuming they are actually eating their traditional vegetables.
- There’s a whole genebank for Africa’s vegetables.
- Saba senegalensis is also naturally biofortified.
- The High Atlas Foundation is also on a fruit tree mission
- Is the date palm the most important fruit tree in the world, though?
- I wonder what will happen to USDA’s fruit tree collections.
Nibbles: SOTW report, Food prices, Rex Bernardo, Odisha landraces, Cyprus community seedbank, Haiti seed producers, Trees for the Future, Iraq genebank, Sudan genebank, Climate-Conflict-Vulnerability Index, India SDG2,
- FAO explains why crop diversity matters.
- Well, for one thing, there’s food prices, that’s why.
- Ah, yes, crop diversity: “You gotta have it. You gotta use it. You gotta talk about it.”
- Odisha mainstreams landrace diversity in its seed system.
- Meanwhile, the Farmers Union of Cyprus is stashing seeds away in Community Bank of Cypriot Traditional Seeds.
- Looks a bit like the Groupements de Production Artisanale de Semences in Haiti. If you squint.
- If only there were some guidelines for managing such community seed banks.
- Iraqi Kurdistan gets in on the genebank act.
- Iraq used to have a genebank, but what happened to it has just happened in Sudan.
- Ah, to have a Climate—Conflict—Vulnerability Index so that such things could be predicted and steps taken.
- And a monitoring system and some targets would be good too.