It's a great pleasure to help Jeremy's latest newsletter amplify the work of the Culinary Breeding Network. There's other interesting stuff in there, so check it out. A very different approach to ...

In the interest of completeness, I feel it incumbent upon me to complement the post on gap analysis for crop diversity conservation that I put up a few days ago with a couple of additional links. The ...

It’s a great pleasure to help Jeremy’s latest newsletter amplify the work of the Culinary Breeding Network. There’s other interesting stuff in there, so check it out. A very different approach to ...

Usually, if plant breeders do anything at all with wild species, they use them to try to improve the domesticated relative in some way. But in Bajra–Napier Hybrids (BNH), it’s actually the crop that ...

The COUSIN project aims to conserve (trans situ, no less) and use crop wild relatives in Europe. That "use" part can be tough. But that doesn't stop the fine people at Aardaia. At least where aardaker ...

The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) awarded Dr. Diane Ragone, founder and director emerita of NTBG’s Breadfruit Institute 1, the 2024 David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. Dr. Ragone ...

Many thanks to long-time friend-of-the-blog Dr Colin Khoury for this latest contribution. Conservation gap analysis using Geographic Information System (GIS) tools relies on several sources of ...

A very interesting, wide-ranging review in New Scientist makes the point that fungi were not for ancient humans the marginal resources that their near invisibility in the traditional archaeological ...

Diverse Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (PGRFA) are an important aspect of biodiversity and greater investment in both in-situ and ex-situ conservation of genetic material will be ...

How much trouble is agriculture facing because of climate change? There are lots of studies out there that seek to predict the effects of changes in rainfall or temperature on the yield of this or ...

You know a crop has arrived when The Economist does a piece on it. Ube (Dioscorea alata), the purple yam long cherished in the Philippines, is indeed suddenly everywhere, and the newspaper for the ...

Two articles about the contrasting fortunes of Andean crops came out last week. They describe different sides of the same broad story: Indigenous agricultural systems are highly biodiverse and ...