The paper “Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa for healthy diets in a changing climate” by Maarten van Zonneveld, Roeland Kindt, Stepha McMullin, Enoch G. Achigan-Dako, Sognigbé N’Danikou, Wei-hsun Hsieh, Yann-rong Lin, and Ian K. Dawson has won the PNAS 2023 Cozzarelli Prize for the best paper of the year in Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. Here’s the abstract: As the climate changes, major staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa becomes increasingly vulnerable. Underutilized traditional food plants offer opportunities for diversifying cropping system ..read more

Benjamin Nowak, a “French lecturer in agronomy with teaching and research activities focused on soil sciences and remote sensing for crop monitoring” has a nice infographic showing “what a large farm would look like, growing all the world’s crops.” Pretty cool. But where’s all the ganja? A high-resolution version is available ..read more

From Dr Pat Byrne, Professor Emeritus of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Colorado State University. Colorado State University Online will offer 3 one-credit courses in Fall 2024 on Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Use. Courses are targeted to the upper undergraduate/graduate student level and can be taken sequentially or independently. Course instructors are Dr Geoff Morris (CSU), Dr Davina Rhodes (CSU), and Dr Gayle Volk (USDA-ARS). The courses are as follows: SOCR 501 – Plant Genetic Resources: Origins, Aug. 19 – Sep. 22. Discover the origins of plant genetic resources, their domesti ..read more

Nice video celebrating seeds. Nice old video about Kew Gardens. Tracing the origins of Indonesian cassava. No, it wasn’t introduced by Kew, but yes, colonialism was involved. Latest data on where crops are grown. Including cassava. Self Help Africa director turns on to neglected crops. Including cassava. New lab in Kenya for spreading clean crops around. Including cassava? Türkiye’s genebank in the news. No cassava. Nepalese rice gets a Welsh upgrade. Collecting sugarcane in French Polynesia to (eventually) support local booze industry. Long live the ancient booze bandwagon. Garlic 101 ..read more

A couple of quick announcements today that I don’t want to get lost in Nibbles. First, there’s an International Conference on Agrobiodiversity going on in Nepal. I just found out about it, but it’s hybrid, so you can still join. Second, if you’re an expert on potatoes or sweet potatoes, consider taking this survey from CIP ..read more

Arboreta have a community. And a newsletter. IPES-Food has a new website. The Dutch genebank describes its users. China has a back-up genebank. Dan Saladino has a new article out, and it’s bananas. The Brits freak out about their beer. As usual. And with limited justification. The EU gets tough on coffee ..read more

Did you have to develop new methods to clean the seed? Is it one of the longest cleaning or dormancy breaking processes? Was it the first time your species was germinated in a collection and unique germination methods had to be found? The catch is that the “you” has to be a botanic garden, but I do like the idea of the Global Seed Conservation Challenge Awards. The above is just one of six different categories. A few more days only for nominations, so get cracking ..read more

More on the US push for opportunity crops. Oh look there’s a whole compendium on African opportunity crops from FAO. Many of them are roots and tubers. For the Hopi, maize is an opportunity crop. For the Adivasis, it’s rice. And more along the same lines from Odisha. Llamas were an opportunity for lots of people down the ages. …and still are, for some. Portugal eschews llamas for an ancient cattle breed. I bet Mexico’s genebank offers some amazing opportunities. And New Zealand’s too. Let’s not forget bats. Yes, bats. Jeremy’s latest newsletter tackles turmeric, pepper and sweet potatoes, amo ..read more

Well, it all started with a paper with more or less that title from Maarten van Ginkel & Jeremy Cherfas last year. Their answer was that biofortification doesn’t work, costs yield and risks genetic uniformity. Ouch. So what to do? Diversify diets, of course. That was followed by a rebuttal from Prasanna Boddupalli, Jill Cairns and Natalia Palacios-Rojas of CIMMYT. Unfortunately, their letter is not open access, but if you want to know what van Ginkel and Cherfas think of their arguments, they’ve just published a counter: In conclusion, the charges raised by Boddupalli et al. are exactly t ..read more

Frugivory by carnivores: Black-backed jackals are key dispersers of seeds of the scented !nara melon in the Namib Desert. Jackals pee on wild melon relatives and disperse their seeds, not necessarily in that order. Out of the Shadows: Reestablishing the Eastern Fertile Crescent as a Center of Agricultural Origins: Part 1. Go East, young archaeobotanists! Extinction risk predictions for the world’s flowering plants to support their conservation. Fancy maths says 45% of angiosperms are potentially threatened. Same for crop wild relatives in the Eastern Fertile Crescent? Black-backed jackals una ..read more