Category: Tourism

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Nibbles: Cheese microbes, OSSI, Mung bean, Sustainable ag, Agroecology, Collard greens, African orphan crops, Olive diversity, Mezcal threats, German perry, Spanish tomatoes, N fixation

  1. A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
  2. The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
  3. The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
  4. 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.
  5. Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
  6. Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
  7. 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.
  8. There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
  9. The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
  10. Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
  11. 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.
  12. Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.
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Nibbles: Public breeding, Millet Man, Strampelli museum, Ghana community seedbanks, genebank trifecta, CWR, Illegal Canadian potatoes, Açaí GI, Mayocoba bean, Spartan Actinidia, Bitters

  1. Public sector plant breeders are disappearing.
  2. The Millet Man of India is still there though. And why he’s important.
  3. A museum to public sector breeder Nazareno Strampelli appears in Italy.
  4. Another couple of community genebanks appear in Ghana.
  5. We can never have too many discussions on the importance of genebanks, so here’s another one. Not much on the community sort, though. Here’s another example: Ireland. Even the Arab States of Asia want one!
  6. And a deep dive on crop wild relatives in genebanks to round things off.
  7. A community saves illegal potatoes in Canada. Yeah, I know, there’s a lot to unpack there.
  8. Maybe that humble illegal potato needs a geographic indication, like that superfood, açaí.
  9. The Mayocoba bean as a superfood is a bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty of other pulses out there making waves.
  10. The Michigan State kiwi could probably do with a geographic indication too, come to think of it. Cold-hardy and smooth-skinned? Super!
  11. Ok, this is probably the last Nibbles before Christmas, so let’s celebrate with a drink: with bitters of course.
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Nibbles: Fonio beer, ICRISAT seed kits, Dark Emu, China potatoes, 3D genebank, Bioculture, Microbiome genebank, Nutrition, Michigan kiwi

  1. You can make beer from fonio.
  2. ICRISAT providing Niger and Chad with sorghum and pearl millet seed kits. Fonio next?
  3. No, Echinochloa turneriana next. In Australia. I love the Dark Emu Hypothesis, and not least for its name.
  4. CIP is helping China improve its potato crop.
  5. Won’t be long before China’s genebank has 3D images of all its holdings. I’d love to see the potatoes.
  6. Want to see the earliest known site of domestication of teosinte?
  7. UK builds first crop biome cryobank.
  8. How the private sector can help with a more nutrition-sensitive agriculture. Should it want to.
  9. You can grow kiwi in Michigan. Should you want to.
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Nibbles: China seeds, Dixie apples, USDA genebanks, ASU dates, IPR, IFG grapes, Pick-a-mix, Coffee ESG, French heirlooms, Belgian brewing, Tanzanian sorghum, Horse-bread, Roots & tubers, Guyana cassava, SDG indicators

  1. China announces a slew of seed-related measures.
  2. A slew of seeds kept apples diverse in the US South, but not so much any more.
  3. Fortunately there’s a slew of apples, among many other things, in the USDA genebank system.
  4. Dates too, probably, but this article is actually about the (complementary?) collection at Arizona State University.
  5. A slew of intellectual protections has been good for seed companies. But consumers?
  6. IFG no doubts benefits mightily from intellectual property protection of its grape varieties. The diversity of which you can peruse on this nice website.
  7. Speaking of nice websites, this one helps farmers pick-a-mix of crops. Intercropping is diversity too.
  8. How the coffee industry is trying to cope with a slew of sustainability rules. Yeah, sometimes IP protection is not enough.
  9. But who owns heritage varieties?
  10. Including heritage varieties of Belgian malting barley and other cereals.
  11. Speaking of malting, they use sorghum in Tanzania.
  12. It’s unclear what heritage varieties went into making horse-bread, but I’d like to taste the stuff.
  13. But who needs bread (or beer?) anyway? There’s a slew of root and tuber crops in Africa and elsewhere just waiting to solve hunger…
  14. …as Guyana knows well.
  15. Wanna keep track of (most of) the above? FAO has you (sorta) covered via a slew of indicators.