- New book on conserving crop diversity.
- New data on genetic gains in banana breeding.
- New European database for organic seeds. And more on organic ag in Europe.
Brainfood: DSI, SMTA, Geno-Phenotyping, Adoption ceiling, Vegetable seeds, Neutral diversity, Trait variation, Feed interventions, Polyploidy, Varietal selection, Sugarcane genomes, African supply chains, Farmers Rights, Agroforestry
- Bringing access and benefit sharing into the digital age. One thing needed: a Multi‐stakeholder Committee on the Governance of Digital Sequence Information. Well that was easy.
- A contract‐law analyses of the SMTA of the Plant Treaty: Can it work as a binding contract? Three things: the SMTA needs to be valid, binding and enforceable. Which it isn’t now, apparently.
- Recent Large-Scale Genotyping and Phenotyping of Plant Genetic Resources of Vegetatively Propagated Crops. Five things: standardized SSR loci, GBS-derived SNPs, SNP arrays, high-throughput phenotyping system, GWAS.
- “Breaking through the 40% adoption ceiling: Mind the seed system gaps.” A perspective on seed systems research for development in One CGIAR. Four things: capture the demand characteristics of farmers, identify effective seed delivery pathways, ensure seed health and stopping the spread of disease, effective policies and regulation. I guess this is where the Toolkit comes in.
- Africa’s evolving vegetable seed sector: status, policy options and lessons from Asia. Four things: technical capacity, regulations, extension, marketing. Well, yeah.
- The inflated significance of neutral genetic diversity in conservation genetics. Three things: functional genetic diversity, demographic history, and ecological relationships.
- Intraspecific trait variation in plants: a renewed focus on its role in ecological processes. Three things: report individual replicates and population means, investigate mechanisms that affect ITVs, studies that span sub-disciplines (see paper above).
- A scoping review of feed interventions and livelihoods of small-scale livestock keepers. Three things: consider absorptive capacity of livestock keepers and extensionists, focus on semi-commercial sector, consider resource requirements of feed options. It’s all in the podcast. Remarkable similarity with the vegetables thing above, eh?
- Induced Polyploidy: A Tool for Forage Species Improvement. Two things. Thanks, colchicine.
- Varietal selection in marginal agroecological niches and cultural landscapes: the case of rice in the Togo Hills. Three things: participation, low-input conditions, landraces.
- Three founding ancestral genomes involved in the origin of sugarcane. A, B and C.
- “Essential non‐essentials”: COVID‐19 policy missteps in Nigeria rooted in persistent myths about African food supply chains. Five things: imports are not central to food security, rural families buy a lot of food, small farmers access markets after all, small & medium enterprises are hidden but not missing, domestic distribution is important.
- What Should Farmers’ Rights Look Like? The Possible Substance of a Right. 64 things.
- The one hundred tree species prioritized for planting in the tropics and subtropics as indicated by database mining. Bingo!
Nibbles: Zoos, China genebank, Trinidad genebank, Patagonia & Breadfruit Institute, Dichotomising food, African food, Twitty on rice
- Seed banks, but for animals.
- New genebank, for seeds, in China.
- Old genebank, for seeds, in Trinidad & Tobago.
- Food company collaborates with oldish genebank, of trees.
- Industrialist or organicist, we’re still going to need genebanks.
- Podcasting on African food. Not a genebank in sight.
- How an African food became an American food.
Nibbles: Millets 2023, Pygmy hog, Iraqi seeds, Botanicals, Business, EU
- Watch out for the millets renaissance.
- This small wild pig is already having a renaissance.
- Can you help with the renaissance of some Iraqi vegetable seeds?
- Alpine botanicals will be having anything but a renaissance. Genebanks anyone?
- No way to call the uptick in interest in biodiversity in the financial industry a renaissance. I’m not even sure it’s an uptick, actually. Absinthe, anyone?
- Will the EU’s Farm to Fork plus biodiversity strategies lead to an environmental renaissance?
Nibbles: Transformation, Livestock pod, Coffee pod, GHUs, Viz double, Yaupon, Wild foods, GRIN, Korean vegetables, Oz Indigenous bakers, Warwick vegetables
- IAASTD ten years on. Not many people hurt.
- Interesting new ILRI podcast hits the airwaves.
- And here’s another new podcast: A History of Coffee. So far so pretty good.
- Meanwhile, CIP rounds up recent webinars on germplasm health.
- Fun visualizations on the seasonality of food.
- Speaking of visualizations, RAWGraphs is a pretty neat tool.
- North America used to have a native caffeinated beverage, the attractively named Ilex vomitoria.
- Maybe South Africa’s local wild foods have a better chance.
- Using USDA’s genebank database, GRIN.
- Not sure if this Korean-American farmer does (access USDA’s genebank database, do keep up), but probably.
- I wonder if any of these Australian wild foods will find their way into a genebank, just in case.
- Genebanks like the UK veggie one at Warwick.