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 ...

Journey through 1946's South America to find and collect wild potato plants, which might hold the key to defeat the blight ...

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 ...

Remember that “A comprehensive analysis of the operations of the Multilateral System – Insights and key figures 2025” that we trailed a few months back? The official launch is on 22 May and you can ...

Sad to report that two giants of our field have passed on. Dr Melaku Worede helped establish the national genebank of Ethiopia in 1976 and led it for 14 years. He was a champion for the equal ...

A couple of crowd-sourcing initiatives caught my eye. First, the good people at the COUSIN project want to expand genebank collections of wild relatives of wheat, barley, lettuce, brassica, and peas ...

Long-time readers will know that I regularly try to roundup training opportunities in crop diversity conservation, basically because nobody else does it. Well, maybe I can stop doing that now. Yes, it ...

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 ...

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 ...

At the International Congress of Genetics in New Delhi in 1983, I stressed the need for a conservation continuum, beginning with revitalizing conservation of domesticated plants by farm families in ...

Can the food processing industry contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity? Of course it can. Even in genebanks? Sure, why not. There’s no reason beyond a failure ...

Jeremy was thrilled — thrilled I tell you — at some recent news from Irish Seed Savers Association. And, frankly, so was I. It’s all in his latest newsletter. Thrilled to see that the apple juice ...