- Agar plates, hydroponics, or field? The best way to do your phenotyping in one handy chart.
- Pioneering chilli expert Fabián García inducted into the National Agricultural Center’s Hall of Fame.
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes Top 10 of Project Management Institute’s best 50 projects, between M-Pesa and Netflix.
- Saving horse breeds in the USA.
- CIAT’s new genebank is in the works.
- Beer companies try to save their water supply. No word on what they plan to do about saving barley and hops diversity.
- World Bank maps biodiversity and the threats it faces. No plants, but still interesting. Opening the buggers is not easy, though.
- Wildland farming in the UK. A glimpse of the beckoning post-Brexit future.
Nibbles: Baked beans, Romano-British diets, Roman butcher, Diet data, Israeli wheat, Radish podcast, Oyu Tolgoi, NZ genebank, CWR
- A very British baked bean.
- Hopefully it will prevent the sort of malnutrition for which there is archaeological evidence from Romano-British times.
- Although they did have lots of nice meat.
- “…differences in height by season of birth may not be due to climate-related fluctuations in nutrition or infections…” after all. No, not in Roman Britain.
- Recovering Israeli wheat landraces.
- Recovering a lost beer-snack radish.
- Will traditional Mongolian herding ever recover?
- New Zealand’s genebank in the news.
- The cool uses of potato wild relatives. And wheat too.
Nibbles: Colombian seeds, Seed diversity, Local crops & nutrition, Seed saving, Apple origins, Microbial collections, Dairy cows in USA, Bean sculptures, IPCC report, Potato linguistics, Piña cloth
- Climate-smartness and seeds in Colombia.
- Why do we need 158 varieties of cauliflower?
- Maybe it’s the nutrition? Gotta get those value chains working though: here’s how.
- Also, it will save the world.
- Biting hard into apple origins.
- Microbes need collections too.
- And cows.
- Inflatable beans. The jokes write themselves.
- Did I already link to my work blog post on the IPCC report?
- Papas or patatas? It’s…complicated.
- I want me a pineapple shirt.
Brainfood: Creole cattle, Wattle diversity, Olive death, Cucurbit diversity, Child nutrition, Seed systems, N efficiency, Black Sigatoka, Ag oils, Sharing double, Cow sharing, Horse phenotyping, Nutrients & CC
- The genetic ancestry of American Creole cattle inferred from uniparental and autosomal genetic markers. Out of Africa…
- Tracing the genetic origin of two Acacia mearnsii seed orchards in South Africa. For one of the orchards, the origin is unknown, but it’s distinct to all the other, known provenances.
- Genetic Characterization of Apulian Olive Germplasm as Potential Source in New Breeding Programs. Ok, but unclear what all this means for Xylella resistance, which presumably was the main reason for doing the work?
- Whole-genome resequencing of Cucurbita pepo morphotypes to discover genomic variants associated with morphology and horticulturally valuable traits. The two subspecies were domesticated and evolved independently.
- Mapping the effects of drought on child stunting. Lower precipitation is bad for kids.
- Governing Seeds in East Africa in the Face of Climate Change: Assessing Political and Social Outcomes. Wealthier, more food secure households are more likely to grow maize hybrids. Cause? Effect? But in any case the commercialization agenda has left sorghum behind.
- Exploiting genetic variation in nitrogen use efficiency for cereal crop improvement. Back to the genebank. Just one of a whole issue on genetic variation in physiological traits.
- Black Sigatoka in bananas: Ecoclimatic suitability and disease pressure assessments. The high yield areas are most at threat.
- Fats of the Land: New Histories of Agricultural Oils. Hidden histories are the best histories.
- Food Provisioning Services Via Homegardens and Communal Sharing in Satoyama Socio-ecological Production Landscapes on Japan’s Noto Peninsula. Sharing promotes diversity. Kinda beautiful.
- Cow Sharing and Alpine Ecosystems: A Comparative Case Study of Sharing Practices and Property Rights. The jury is out on whether it contributes to conservation, but it still seems pretty cool.
- Horse phenotyping based on video image analysis of jumping performance for conservation breeding. Judges don’t know what they’re talking about.
- Preserving the nutritional quality of crop plants under a changing climate: importance and strategies. Mainly due to eCO2. Need to breed for it under the new conditions. Or try other crops.
Brainfood: Rice roots, Avocado genome, Sicilian greens, Mexican & Colombian cacao, US diversity, Cassava photosynthesis, Intense dairy, Bourbon, Grape rootstocks, Heirlooms, Ancient pastoralism, Onion polyploidy, Toxic compounds, Technology adoption
- Root anatomical traits of wild-rices reveal links between flooded rice and dryland sorghum. Mine the rice G genome for sorghum-like root traits.
- The avocado genome informs deep angiosperm phylogeny, highlights introgressive hybridization, and reveals pathogen-influenced gene space adaptation. 2 polyploidy events in its evolution; the Hass is Guatemalan introgressed into Mexican material, recently.
- Wild leafy plants market survey in Sicily: From local culture to food sustainability. You can cultivate and market them, but people do like collecting them from the wild themselves.
- A History of Cacao in West Mexico: Implications for Mesoamerica and U.S. Southwest Connections. Associated with the cult of the sun deity Xochipilli.
- Cacao breeding in Colombia, past, present and future. Breeders only recently turned to local material, and are now reaping the whirlwind. No word of the involvement of deities.
- The impact of agricultural landscape diversification on U.S. crop production. Maize and wheat yields increase with the number of agricultural land use categories in a region.
- Protein Cross-Interactions for Efficient Photosynthesis in the Cassava Cultivar SC205 Relative to Its Wild Species. Domesticated cassava is more C4 than its wild relatives.
- Routes to achieving sustainable intensification in simulated dairy farms: The importance of production efficiency and complimentary land uses. Not for the first time, crop-level diversity provides the win-win.
- Assessing the impact of corn variety and Texas terroir on flavor and alcohol yield in new-make bourbon whiskey. It’s the benzaldehyde.
- Genetic diversity and parentage analysis of grape rootstocks. 39% of the genetic background of 26 rootstocks derived from 3 accessions, admittedly of 3 different species.
- Pursuing the Potential of Heirloom Cultivars to Improve Adaptation, Nutritional, and Culinary Features of Food Crops. Look beyond yield.
- The Rise of Pastoralism in the Ancient Near East. Couldn’t have done so without sedentary communities.
- Polyploidy promotes species diversification of Allium through ecological shifts. Largely edaphic shifts, in fact.
- Assessing Specialized Metabolite Diversity in the Cosmopolitan Plant Genus Euphorbia L. Toxic diterpenoids are more structurally diverse where pressure from herbivores is strongest.
- Rethinking technological change in smallholder agriculture. Not so much adoption as propositions, encounters, dispositions and responses.