- The CATIE coffee collection gets a really close look.
- Pigeonpeas for Australia.
- Coloured wheat for India.
- Also in India, a rice institute opens its doors.
- A livestock genebank for Uganda.
- The coconut for the Caribbean.
- Why crop-based businesses should pay for crop conservation. Holding my breath…
- Hawaiians reclaim taro. Breathing again…
- How to use wild species sustainably.
- Diversity Assessment Tool for Agrobiodiversity and Resilience. Yeah, what we need is more software.
- 16th century beer. From Quito, the first city to brew beer in South America.
- Egyptians: I see that and raise you about 6 thousand years.
- You too can drink Leonardo’s wine. Wonder if he liked beer.
- Exploring for wild tomatoes.
- Liberating diversity.
- Agricultural R&D is in the top 3 value-for-money development interventions. Just saying…
- Seconded: “Multiplying the budget of CGIAR, the world’s largest global agricultural innovation network, would be a good start. And, in a time of great disruptions, we ought to prioritize Sustainable Development Goal 2.4, implementing resilient agricultural practices, with a greater focus on smallholder farmers in developing countries.” And 2.5!!!
Nibbles: ISF & SDGs, Nutrition report, Plant blindness, Cowpea, Chefs, Ancient baking, Rotations, Blue maize, Forests & poverty, Food miles
- International Seed Federation secretary-general in podcast on seeds and the SDGs.
- Country nutrition profiles. Sobering.
- Share your plant stories on Herbaria 3.0.
- The secret history of the cowpea, from a chef: “Our peas were tiny little texts, and we didn’t even know it.”
- Speaking of chefs…
- More on that 4000-year-old baking yeast story.
- The economics of rotations.
- The economics of blue maize.
- Mapping the evidence base for the link between forests and poverty alleviation.
- Speaking of maps, here’s how food moves around the USA.
Brainfood: Ecosystem services, Farmer Variety protection, Pineapple genome, Almond genome, Date palm genome, Sesame diversity, Frangmentation double, Alternative beans, AI & farmers, De-domestication
- Global modeling of nature’s contributions to people. Declining where the need is greatest. And that’s not even taking CWR into account.
- Farmer’s Varieties in India – Factors affecting their preferential prevalence and the current status of their legal protection. Open-pollinated crops are missing out.
- The bracteatus pineapple genome and domestication of clonally propagated crops. Domestication and early improvement as the result of a single clonal propagation event.
- Transposons played a major role in the diversification between the closely related almond and peach genomes: Results from the almond genome sequence. Including the sweet kernel phenotype.
- Genome-wide association mapping of date palm fruit traits. Fruit color and sugar composition changed in parallel.
- Genetic diversity and population structure of the Mediterranean sesame core collection with use of genome-wide SNPs developed by double digest RAD-Seq. Three genetic groups, but not geographically based.
- Ongoing accumulation of plant diversity through habitat connectivity in an 18-year experiment. You need those corridors.
- Meta‐analysis of the differential effects of habitat fragmentation and degradation on plant genetic diversity. You really do.
- In search of alternative proteins: unlocking the potential of underutilized tropical legumes. Beyond soybeans. I always liked Bambara groundnut.
- A scalable scheme to implement data-driven agriculture for small-scale farmers. Fancy maths put to some good use in Colombia. But what if it tells you to grow more coca?
- The evolution of crops that do not need us anymore. They’re called weeds.
Brainfood: Nutrient availability, Afghani wheat, Poverty reduction, Tanzania ag development, Fish refuges, Gender, Cerrado conversion, Rice origins, Global erosion, Food perceptions, Ag & health, Mongolian Allium, Bean disease, Tropical legumes
- Combining the effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on protein, iron, and zinc availability and projected climate change on global diets: a modelling study. Global net availability to decrease by 15-20% by 2050, mostly where it’s already low.
- Tracking the adoption of bread wheat varieties in Afghanistan using DNA fingerprinting. 75% of samples were varieties released after 2000, landraces are being replaced, and farmers name varieties correctly about 50% of the times.
- Pathways from research on improved staple crop germplasm to poverty reduction for smallholder farmers. Land, land, land.
- “Modern” farming and the transformation of livelihoods in rural Tanzania. Small is still beautiful.
- Analyzing drivers of fish biomass and biodiversity within community fish refuges in Cambodia. Governance, governance, governance.
- The Role of Women in Production and Management of RTB Crops in Rwanda and Burundi: Do Men Decide, and Women Work? Guess. I bet you’re wrong.
- Soy expansion in Brazil’s Cerrado. Forget the Amazon.
- Genomic history and ecology of the geographic spread of rice. Yangtze Valley –> global cooling –> temperate + tropical japonica –> SE Asia –> diversification. Indica is more complicated.
- Estimated six per cent loss of genetic variation in wild populations since the industrial revolution. The new 75%.
- Eating Healthy or Feeling Empty? How the “Healthy = Less Filling” Intuition Influences Satiety. Healthier food is perceived as less filling, unless it’s described as nutritions. People are strange.
- What is the cost of integration? Evidence from an integrated health and agriculture project to improve nutrition outcomes in Western Kenya. Not insignificant, but worth it.
- Traditional utilization and management of wild Allium plants in Inner Mongolia. 38 species, no less; many uses, much threatened.
- Haplotypes at the Phg-2 Locus Are Determining Pathotype-Specificity of Angular Leaf Spot Resistance in Common Bean. Good use being made of the CIAT genebank.
- A decade of Tropical Legumes projects: Development and adoption of improved varieties, creation of market‐demand to benefit smallholder farmers and empowerment of national programmes in sub‐Saharan Africa and South Asia. US$ 67 million in from Gates Foundation, US$ 3.2 billion out in certified seed alone. Read the whole special issue for more. All starts with genebanks, though, doesn’t it. Doesn’t it? Hello? Is there anyone out there? Is this thing on?
Brainfood: Barley diversity, Chinese veggies, Perennial legumes, Ecosystem value, Wild restorer, Eggplant taxonomy, Sweet potato phenotyping, Grass pollen, Aromatic rice origin, Orange cucumber, Watermelon breeding, Livestock value, Wild apples
- Genome-Wide Association Mapping of Seedling Net Form Net Blotch Resistance in an Ethiopian and Eritrean Barley Collection. 8 new QTLs, just like that.
- Vegetable Genetic Resources in China. 36,000 accessions. Just like that.
- Building a botanical foundation for perennial agriculture: Global inventory of wild, perennial herbaceous Fabaceae species. Check out the Perennial Agriculture Project Global Inventory.
- Ecosystem services and nature’s contribution to people: negotiating diverse values and trade-offs in land systems. Biological diversity has a diversity of values. Duh.
- Development of a drought stress-resistant rice restorer line through Oryza sativa–rufipogon hybridization. From F6 via BC5F5 to BIL627.
- Eggplants and Relatives: From Exploring Their Diversity and Phylogenetic Relationships to Conservation Challenges. The taxonomy is “arduous and unstable.”
- Morphometric and colourimetric tools to dissect morphological diversity: an application in sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.]. Beyond colour charts. Way beyond.
- Chemotaxonomy of domesticated grasses: a pathway to understanding the origins of agriculture. Fancy maths can identify pollen grains.
- Origin of the Aromatic Group of Cultivated Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Traced to the Indian Subcontinent. Arose when japonica hybridized with local wild populations.
- Orange-fleshed cucumber (Cucumis sativus var. sativus L.) germplasm from North-East India: agro-morphological, biochemical and evolutionary studies. Possible niche market?
- Progress in genetic improvement of citron watermelon (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides): a review. These are all orange-fleshed.
- Review: Domestic herbivores and food security: current contribution, trends and challenges for a sustainable development. Can’t live without them, but gotta do something about that enteric fermentation.
- Evaluation of Malus genetic resources for tolerance to apple replant disease (ARD). It’s the wilds, of course.