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Brainfood: Seed quantity, Seed quality, Seed testing, Seed sampling, Cryo review, Potato diversity, Coconut cryo, Apple genebanks, Pear vulnerability, Pear restoration, Celebrity conservation, Indigenous rematriation, Farmers’ Rights

Agricultural Biodiversity

Optimizing the accession-level quantity of seeds to put into storage to minimize seed (gene)bank regeneration or re-collection. = [n vt × 3]+[n d × (y × x)]+ q min if you must know. A pragmatic protocol for seed viability monitoring in ex situ plant genebanks. Formulas are good, but you need some flexibility too. No problem.

Seeding 171
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Nibbles: Cropscapes, Ecuador cacao, Nigerian yams, Lima bean show, Mesopotamian cooking, Nepal seed banks, RNA integrity, China genebanks, Cryo comics, Greening

Agricultural Biodiversity

The community seed banks of Nepal have a new website. A new project is testing RNA integrity number (RIN) as a metric of seed aging for a bunch of rare wild plants. One day maybe community seed banks will be using it. What if you can’t work out what the crops are, though? As in Mesopotamian recipe books , for example.

Seeding 203
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Nibbles: SeedLinked, Heritage Seed Library, HarvestPlus, Enset, EBI, Saharan/Sahelian flora, Pollen, Food & climate, Food prices, Moonraker, Svalbard eats, Devex does seeds, CGRFA ABS survey

Agricultural Biodiversity

SeedLinked : an app to source cool vegetable seeds. Want to become a variety champion for the Heritage Seed Library? Maybe there’s a nice view of the Seed Vault though? The latest Devex newsletter has lots of stuff on food prices and prizes and seed vaults. Where’s the app though?

Seeding 152
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Nibbles: IUCN report, Land Institute, Climate smart beer, BioLeft seeds, Cryo coral

Agricultural Biodiversity

If only improved seeds were open source , for example, eh? If only we incorporated more sustainable agriculture in education , for example, eh? Apart from anything else we could still have beer. No word on the role of perennial barley though. If only we could cryopreserve coral , for example, eh? Wait, what?

Seeding 159
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Nibbles: Fonio beer, ICRISAT seed kits, Dark Emu, China potatoes, 3D genebank, Bioculture, Microbiome genebank, Nutrition, Michigan kiwi

Agricultural Biodiversity

ICRISAT providing Niger and Chad with sorghum and pearl millet seed kits. You can make beer from fonio. Fonio next? No, Echinochloa turneriana next. In Australia. I love the Dark Emu Hypothesis , and not least for its name. CIP is helping China improve its potato crop.

Seeding 189
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Brainfood: QMS, Seed viability, Genotyping, Taxonomy, FAIR data, Evaluation data, Lentil data, Indian cryobank, Home genebank, Dry chain, Botanical gardens, Environmental monitoring, Bending the curve

Agricultural Biodiversity

A pragmatic protocol for seed viability monitoring in ex situ plant genebanks. Share a Tiny Space of Your Freezer to Preserve Seed Diversity. Meanwhile, at the other end of the technology continuum… Applications of dry chain technology to maintain high seed viability in tropical climates. Is it certified, though?

Seeding 155
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Nibbles: Svalbard Global Seed Vault, CePaCT genebank, CIAT genebank, Australia rice genebank, Bangladesh genebank, Maize mutants garden, Inoculants genebank, Millets community seedbank, Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services, Triadic Comparison of Technology Options, Crop diversity, Intercropping, Agroforestry, Diet diversity, World economy, Sustainable food

Agricultural Biodiversity

Never thought I’d see the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Psychology Today , yet here we are. The Pacific’s regional genebank is set for more work on lesser-known crops. Too bad most of them won’t be able to go to Svalbard. How to make a genebank beautiful as well as sustainable. Australia has a rice genebank. For some reason.

Seeding 199