The Quest to Save the World’s Most Coveted Chocolate is an engaging story in Smithsonian Magazine about Ecuador’s ancient, ...

After the recent worrying announcement about the USDA closing the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, there may now be some good news. US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has just ...

I've been following the vineyards of Pompeii for quite a while, it turns out. Maybe because archaeology and wine are two of ...

Cassava has been a persistent thread through this blog since the beginning. It first appears as a staple with a dark side: ...

Jeremy's latest Eat This Newsletter tackles cassava, the chestnut, rice and pears. But his coolest find is a website called ...

Land sparing is a seductive story. Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky ...

Brian Ford-Lloyd is excited about a recent Nibble, and who can blame him: Brilliant BBC piece on the famous mangelwurzel of Somerset and a tribute to Adge Cuttler and the Wurzels. Supermarkets would ...

We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation happens both on farms and in genebanks. But it may be that the most interesting – and intractable – bit of the process may be what happens between those ...

Land sparing is a seductive story. Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky ...

The USDA has decided to close its iconic flagship site, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Maryland. Everyone in plant genetic resources knows about the place simply known as ...

Seventeen years after we first blogged about the sad fate of the Iraqi national genebank at Abu Ghraib, it has re-opened. That made me happy. Screenshot It goes with one in Sulaymaniyah that was ...