- Benefit–Cost Analysis of Increased Funding for Agricultural Research and Development in the Global South. Fancy model says funding agricultural research is great value for money. Ok, let’s see if we can find some examples.
- Exploring CGIAR’s efforts towards achieving the Paris Agreement’s climate-change targets. Yeah, but in designing such research to mitigate climate change there should be more complete integration of food-systems perspectives.
- Crop species diversity: A key strategy for sustainable food system transformation and climate resilience. Now there’s a nice thing to integrate into your climate change adaptation and integration research.
- Cultivating success: Bridging the gaps in plant breeding training in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Gonna need more plant breeders also, though.
- Artificial intelligence in plant breeding. Yeah, and probably more artificial intelligence too.
- Wheat genetic resources have avoided disease pandemics, improved food security, and reduced environmental footprints: A review of historical impacts and future opportunities. Great advances have been made (even without AI) by wheat breeders, but there’s still a lot of untapped diversity out there.
- Harnessing landrace diversity empowers wheat breeding. For example in the A. E. Watkins landrace collection.
- Enhanced radiation use efficiency and grain filling rate as the main drivers of grain yield genetic gains in the CIMMYT elite spring wheat yield trial. Gotta wonder if there’s a limit though.
- Origin and evolution of the bread wheat D genome. Maybe we can squeeze a bit more out of the D genome. I wonder what AI says about that.
- The Role of Crop Wild Relatives and Landraces of Forage Legumes in Pre-Breeding as a Response to Climate Change. As above, but for a bunch of forages.
- Stakeholder Insights: A Socio-Agronomic Study on Varietal Innovation Adoption, Preferences, and Sustainability in the Arracacha Crop (Arracacia xanthorrhiza B.). Here’s an interesting methodology to evaluate the impact of new varieties designed and developed by AI (or not).
- Deep genotyping reveals specific adaptation footprints of conventional and organic farming in barley populations — an evolutionary plant breeding approach. An initial, diverse barley population is allowed to adapt to contrasting organic and conventional conditions for 2 decades and diverges considerably genetically as a result. Don’t need AI to predict that. Perhaps more surprisingly, analysis suggests organic-adapted populations need to be selected for root traits to catch up in yield.
- Natural selection drives emergent genetic homogeneity in a century-scale experiment with barley. What is it with barley breeding and long-term experiments? This one shows that a hundred years of natural selection has massively narrowed genetic diversity. Why aren’t there long-term wheat experiments? Or are there?
- Association study of crude seed protein and fat concentration in a USDA pea diversity panel. Really high protein peas are possible. No word on whether kids will like them any better. Let’s check again in a hundred years?
- Telomere-to-telomere Citrullus super-pangenome provides direction for watermelon breeding. Forget sweetness and disease resistance, maybe one of these wild species will help us grasp the holy grail of seedlessness. Wait, let me check on the whole cost-benefit thing for this.
- An indigenous germplasm of Brassica rapa var. yellow NRCPB rapa 8 enhanced resynthesis of Brassica juncea without in vitro intervention. Sort of like that wheat D genome thing, but for mustard. I do wonder why we don’t try crop re-synthesis a lot more.
- Special issue: Tropical roots, tubers and bananas: New breeding tools and methods to meet consumer preferences. Why involving farmers in all of the above could be a good idea.
Nibbles: SeedLinked, Heritage Seed Library, HarvestPlus, Enset, EBI, Saharan/Sahelian flora, Pollen, Food & climate, Food prices, Moonraker, Svalbard eats, Devex does seeds, CGRFA ABS survey
- SeedLinked: an app to source cool vegetable seeds. And more.
- Want to become a variety champion for the Heritage Seed Library? Where’s the app though?
- A compendium of evidence on the efficacy of biofortification from HarvestPlus. Jeremy surely available for comment?
- Kew celebrates efficacy of enset conservation in Ethiopia.
- Not sure if the Ethiopia Biodiversity Institute is in on that celebration.
- Some of Ethiopia is Sahelian, no? Anyway, here’s a nice piece on the forgotten, but important plants from that neck of the woods.
- We should all celebrate pollen banking much more.
- Celebrity chef worried about the effect of climate change on food.
- Including food prices. I dunno, maybe pollen banking will help.
- Or maybe even a lunar repository.
- Speaking of food prices, I bet this Svalbard restaurant is not cheap. Maybe there’s a nice view of the Seed Vault though. Who needs the moon?
- The latest Devex newsletter has lots of stuff on food prices and prizes and (non-lunar) seed vaults.
- Do you use any of the above for research and development? The FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture would like to hear from you.
Nibbles: Forest seed collecting, Colombian maize, Türkiye & China genebanks, Community seedbank trifecta, Wheat breeding, Rice breeding, Bean INCREASE, WorldVeg regen, UK apples, Rangeland management
- How to collect forestry seeds.
- Whole bunch of new maize races collected in Colombia.
- The Türkiye national genebank in the news. Lots of collecting there. Though maybe not as much as in this genebank in China.
- But small communities need genebanks too. Here’s an example from Ghana. And another from India. And a final one from the Solomon Islands.
- Need to use the stuff in genebanks though. Here’s how they do it in the UK. And in Bangladesh. And in Europe with the INCREASE project, which has just won a prize for citizen science. And in Taiwan. Sort of citizen science too.
- Collecting apples in the UK. Funny, the canonical lost-British-apple story appears on the BBC in the autumn usually. Kinda citizen science.
- Or we could do in situ conservation, as in this South African example… Just kidding, we all know it’s not either/or. Right? Probably a good idea to collect seeds is what I’m saying. Could even do it through citizen science.
Brainfood: UK NUS, German labelling, Indian diversity, Ghana fonio, Kenya veggies, Rwanda biofortified beans, Cassava WTP, Urochloa resources, Perennial flax
- Diversifying the UK Agrifood System: A Role for Neglected and Underutilised Crops. It’s really hard to pick potential NUS winners. So why even try? Support them all!
- Can markets for nature conservation be successful? An integrated assessment of a product label for biodiversity practices in Germany. Labelling agricultural products can support biodiversity conservation, but probably not on its own. Can it support NUS, I wonder?
- On-farm crop diversity, conservation, importance and value: a case study of landraces from Western Ghats of Karnataka, India. Plenty of diversity in these study sites, including of NUS, but ex situ conservation still needed.
- Revealing Ghana’s unique fonio genetic diversity: leveraging farmers knowledge for sustainable conservation and breeding strategies. Supporting NUS is going to need the knowledge of farmers…
- African indigenous vegetables, gender, and the political economy of commercialization in Kenya. …especially women farmers. Up to a point.
- Cultivating prosperity in Rwanda: the impact of high-yield biofortified bean seeds on farmers’ yield and income. Ok, beans are not a NUS, but you get the point.
- Increased farmer willingness to pay for quality cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) planting materials: evidence from experimental auctions in Cambodia and Lao PDR. NUS or not, clean planting materials and new varieties attract a price premium.
- Brown-top millet: an overview of breeding, genetic, and genomic resources development for crop improvement. Urochloa ramosa is definitely a NUS. And labelling will probably not be enough.
- Survival analysis of freezing stress in the North American native perennial flax, Linum lewisii. If you want to help your NUS, make it perennial?
Nibbles: SPAM2020, Pullman genebank, Svalbard, Olive plague, Rice diversity, Vanilla threat, Gum rockrose, VACS demand, AI double, Food & climate change
- The latest version of the SPAM global crop area distribution model is out. You can play with it here.
- Some bullet points on the USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System outpost in Pullman.
- Yes, the above references Svalbard, as does this piece on Spanish tomatoes.
- Pity we can’t put olives in Svalbard, but there’s a another way to protect olive diversity.
- A breakdown of rice colour diversity. A lot of this stuff will be in Svalbard, with any luck.
- Vanilla will also need attention.
- But gum rockrose seems to be taken care of, at least in Bulgaria. It’s what you make Holy Chrism with.
- So there’s bound to be demand for it, at least in some quarters. Unlike for other opportunity/orphan/neglected crops, but GAIN is on it.
- And if all else fails there’s always AI, be it to fight pests and diseases or find cool plants out in the jungle.
- Why does all this matter? Because of the climate F-word.