Time to celebrate the fact that I’ve spent a surprisingly large part of the life of this blog trying to answer what sounds like a simple question: Where are crops actually grown? In Where do bananas ...

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In an earlier post I argued that the crop diversity conservation and use system has a missing middle: someone whose job it is to get the whole way from an agricultural problem to a diversity-based ...

Genebank data seems to be in the air. Just in the past few days, I pontificated about descriptors, Mike Jackson has reminisced about the early days of rice molecular markers and CGIAR announced a big ...