Brainfood: Sweet potato in Polynesia, Land use in Jamaica, Himalayan Neolithic, Early modern Spanish ag, E Asian Neolithic double

Nibbles: Forgotten crops special issue, Coffee fingerprinting, Three Sisters, Food gardening, Magic mushrooming, Genebanks in Ukraine, Colombia, Australia, China

  1. Forthcoming special issue of Plants, People, Planet on forgotten crops. Get your paper in about how they’re under-represented in genebanks.
  2. Or about how they need to be DNA fingerprinted, like the USDA is doing for coffee.
  3. I wonder if there is a forgotten crops version of the Three Sisters. Answers on a postcard, please.
  4. Forget about genebanks, grow those forgotten crops in your garden. Rebelliously.
  5. Forget about forgotten crops, how about forgotten mushrooms?
  6. Lest we forget the Ukrainian genebank.
  7. No way to forget the Future Seeds genebank.
  8. Australians are not being allowed to forget about genebanks, plant and animal. With video goodness. There’s hope yet.
  9. Meanwhile, in China

Brainfood: Wild scarlet runner beans, Wild coffee, Mexican vanilla, Hybrid barley, Zea genus, Wild maize gene, N-fixing xylem microbiota, Drone phenotyping, Wild tomato, Potato breeding, Wild potato, Wheat evaluation, Rice breeding returns

Documenting agricultural biodiversity everywhere

Nice to see a couple of examples of agrobiodiversity catalogues, albeit of very different kinds, available online.

The Catàleg de varietats locals de Catalunya (from that autonomous community of Spain’s Department d’Acció Climàtita, Alimentació i Agenda Rural) can be searched online by either cultivated species (hint: “mongueta” is Phaseolus vulgaris) or the “entitat” that is managing the landrace.

On the other hand, the Field Guide to the Cultivated Plants of the Philippines (Volume 1: Commonly cultivated species) from the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) can be downloaded as a beautifully produced PDF.

And since I’m here, I might as well point to a nice infographic summarizing the cultivated Citrus family tree. I may have shared this (or something similar) before, but I’m hoping that if I keep doing so some of the details will eventually stick in my brain.