Brainfood: Private finance, Public finance, Land sparing, Land sharing, Trade-offs, Ecological intensification, Metaverse, Crop failure

Brainfood: Croplands, Satellite phenotyping, Farm size, Bt double, Scaling up, Opinion leaders, Gendered knowledge, OFSP, Ethiopia sorghum diversity, Banana bunchy top, Climate change & pathogens, Bean pathogens, Mixtures, Rewards

Nibbles: Business, CGIAR & FARA, Agrobiodiversity Index, Beans, Artisanal sake, Nabhan on mezcals, Kernza anniversary, Fish diversity, Amazon trees, Dark extinctions

  1. Gardening pioneer says “Be as diverse as possible!
  2. Frank Elderson, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, says businesses should be as biodiverse as possible.
  3. CGIAR and FARA launch an initiative to transform agriculture in Africa but the role of biodiversity is unclear.
  4. Maybe they should embrace the Agrobiodiversity Index, now that it has won a big prize.
  5. Speaking of agricultural biodiversity and prizes, here’s a podcast on the EXARC Experimental Archaeology Award winning project “Investigating the Origin of the Common Bean in the New World.”
  6. A trio of pieces on agrobiodiverse products: sake, mezcal, Kernza.
  7. Don’t forget fish need to be as diverse as possible too.
  8. Ok, not agriculture-related, but this visual essay on finding the tallest tree in the Amazon is really cool.
  9. Not so cool: some species you can only see in natural history collections. The world is not as diverse as possible.

Brainfood: Traits & environment, Acacia growth, Local extinction risk, Lebanese CWR priorities, Malawi CWR payments, Bread wheat origins, Wild lettuce, Ethiopian forages, Editing forages

Nibbles: Food tree, Wild chocolate, Cacao, Cassava in Africa, Indigenous ABS, Abbasid food, Valuing trees

  1. Gastropod episode on The Fruit that Could Save the World. Any guesses what that might be?
  2. Atlas Obscura podcast on an apparently now famous wild-harvested chocolate from Bolivia. But how wild is it really?
  3. BBC podcast on cacao for balance.
  4. Forbes touts an African cassava revolution. What, no podcast?
  5. Very interesting piece from the ever reliable Modern Farmer on how a small seed company called Fedco Seeds designated a bunch of maize landraces as “indigenously stewarded,” and are paying 10% of what they make from the sale of their seeds to a pooled Indigenous fund which goes to support a local, multi-tribal project called Nibezun. A sort of mini-MLS? Definitely worth a podcast. Any takers?
  6. A long but rewarding article in New Lines Magazine describes medieval cookbooks from the Abbasid caliphate. The recipes make up for the somewhat stilted podcast.
  7. BGCI publication on how the Morton Arboretum works out whether it should be growing a particular population or species of tree. The trick is to quantify 5 types of “value”: environmental, evolutionary, genetic diversity, horticultural, conservation. Though one could also consider hostorical/cultural, educational and economic value as well. I suspect in the end it comes down to whether it looks nice in an available gap. If I were to do a podcast on this, I’d test it out with the tree in the first of these Nibbles.