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 ...

The latest episode of Eat This Podcast explores why the tomato, first recorded in England in the 1590s, took more than a century to become an important food. The explanation offered was that it took a ...

A recent episode of Eat This Podcast explored why the tomato, first recorded in England in the 1590s, took more than a century to become an important food. The explanation offered was that it took a ...

I decided to dig a little deeper into the climatic adaptation of Himalayan maize. You may remember from my last post on this that Genesys has 96 maize accessions from over 2000 masl in the Himalayas, ...

Never rains but it pours. Along very similar lines as the previous post on a fun effort to document people’s favourite breadfruit varieties, here comes the FruitDev project’s Wild Fruit Population of ...

To the Genebank Academy and Landscape Academy we should now add the Center for Plant Conservation’s Rare Plant Academy. I wonder if we can think of a collective noun for this proliferation? My initial ...

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 ...

FAO has a 6-page leaflet out on “Seed systems – Twenty things you need to know.” It’s well-written and comprehensive. These are the 20 things, in case you were wondering: Crop variety loss also ...

Quick follow-up to my post a few days ago on the recent study of the origin of the collard greens grown in the Moroccan oases of the Draa and Ziz valleys. Alas, that might in practice turn out to be ...

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 ...