A piece in The Tribune, an English-language daily out of Punjab, reminded me that we have discussed crop diversity and flooding quite a bit here over the years. The article, entitled "Community seed ...

Crops with massive ... importance, clear biological upside, and real demand for better genetics -- but a system where breeding remains small, underfunded, and structurally difficult to scale. What ...

I was vaguely aware of the Composite Cross II (CCII) long-term experiment in barley, not least because of a Brainfood entry a couple of years ago. But I didn't know a whole lot about it, so when a ...

I haven't yet had a chance to read the full FAO–WMO joint report on Extreme heat and agriculture, but some preliminary ...

Drawing on crop data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Compendium of Forgotten Foods in Africa, CAFRI calculated Nutrient Density (ND) scores for a broad range of African foods, a measure ...

Relocating is never any fun, but it's particularly tricky for collections of crop diversity. You have to get the new facilities all ready, and all those seeds or test tubes or indeed live plants need ...

The usual way wild species are used in breeding is to improve their domesticated relatives. But in Bajra–Napier Hybrids (BNH), it’s the crop that is used to improve the wild, or at least wilder, ...

A LinkedIn post by CGIAR stalwart Dr Carlo Fadda convinced me I should give more exposure to the recent paper Long-term agricultural diversification increases financial profitability, biodiversity, ...

A very interesting 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 record might ...

I haven’t yet had a chance to read the full FAO–WMO joint report on Extreme heat and agriculture, but some preliminary skimming reveals that agrobiodiversity does seem to be addressed, at least to ...

And here’s close-up on West Africa, because that’s where accessions are densest, and the suggested “gaps” a little more difficult to understand. Asked for a justification, this is what the LLM came up ...

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 ...