- A couple of EU DGs discuss farming for diversity, maybe even diversity in farming?
- They recently heard about urban farming from FAO, which might help. Oh no, wait, that’s a different DG.
- Gates Foundation doubles down on nutrition, nice to see agriculture in the mix too.
- Meanwhile, efforts are underway to measure the food security of indigenous people in better ways, so that we can figure out whether things like the above are actually working.
- Sourcing high quality coffee. I think we can all get behind that goal.
- Deconstructing salt tolerance in chickpea.
- Botany has an image problem. No, really?
- Fact-checking pollinator decline.
- Only local cows for Haryana. Seems extreme? Well, Michigan not above doing the same.
- Coca-Cola has plant-based bottles. Now to embed some seeds in them.
- Maybe Swedish vegetable seeds. Do they have Coke in Sweden?
Gotta have a villain
Disturbing follow-up to the story of the devastating olive disease in southern Italy: now some of the researchers involved in fighting the epidemic are being blamed for it.
Nibbles: Cuban heritage, Old food, Forest restoration, Botany in trouble, Community genebanks, Seed book, Beer genomes, Old wheat, Fowler/Naylor, Veggie kiosks, Breeding & data
- Cuba recognizes traditional medicine.
- Your grandma’s cooking was not that great.
- Using genetics to guide teak restoration.
- Botany dying in the US.
- Brazil sets up lots of community seedbanks.
- Aren’t seeds just great?
- The 1000 beer genomes project is as great as it sounds.
- Palestinians freekeh out.
- Interview with Cary Fowler: about Svalbard, and much more.
- Mama boga in trouble. Bastards.
- Nature calls for crop improvement.
Brainfood: Agrobiodiversity & nutrition, Solanaceae, Pepper resistance, Fenugreek erosion, Wild grapes double, CC & mountains
- Improving diets with wild and cultivated biodiversity from across the landscape. Only 12 papers on the link between agrobiodiversity or crop diversity and nutrition included nutritionally relevant information, so perhaps not surprising that we still don’t really know how agrobiodiversity or wild biodiversity contribute to overall diet quality.
- Biodiversity of Food Species of the Solanaceae Family: A Preliminary Taxonomic Inventory of Subfamily Solanoideae. 15 genera used as food, 4 have economic crops, but then one of them is Solanum.
- Diversity of genetic backgrounds modulating the durability of a major resistance gene. Analysis of a core collection of pepper landraces resistant to Potato virus Y. Breakdown of resistance conferred by given allele depends a lot on the background it finds itself in.
- Brief but alarming reminder about the need for reintroducing ‘Greek hay’ (Trigonella foenum-graecum L.) in Mediterranean agricultures. Why don’t people like this thing? Is it the smell?
- Crop Wild Relatives as Genetic Resources – the Case of the European Wild Grape. Introgression from American wild species in S. German wild grapes. Still probably valuable for various disease resistances, though.
- Mining new resources for grape resistance against Botryosphaeriaceae: a focus on Vitis vinifera ssp. sylvestris. See what I mean?
- Global mountain topography and the fate of montane species under climate change. Some plants may have more land available to them as they migrate upwards.
Nibbles: Lovely bunch of coconuts, Svalbard backlash backlash, ADAPTS, British food history, Artisanal backlash, NASA maps soils, Rock bee art
- Kinda random SciDevNet piece about threats to coconut germplasm collections in Asia which doesn’t even mention Bogia. Star of the piece is the Philippines collection, which nobody suggests is threatened.
- Speaking of threatened collections, Mike Jackson rounds up comments on the recent Guardian piece on Svalbard.
- Native Seed/SEARCH gets a new interface.
- How the war changed British agriculture. Fish and chips has always been there though, right?
- The farm-to-table backlash begins. And more along the same lines: “eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical.”
- Mapping soil moisture from space.
- Rocking African bee art.