Dr Helen Anne Curry, an historian at the University of Cambridge, has a piece out to trail her much anticipated book, Endangered Maize.

I haven’t read the book yet, but the article is a brisk, knowledgeable and engaging run-through the history of crop diversity conservation in genebanks, using maize as a case study. Her conclusion is stark.

I’m sceptical that seed banks – still conceived today as the central element in successful conservation of genetic diversity in crop plants – offer the long-term solution we need.

But is this fair? I don’t think anyone who is serious about the conservation of crop diversity really thinks genebanks are “the” solution, or indeed “central” to the effort. We’ve been talking about complementarity between ex situ and in situ conservation for decades now. Genebanks are a piece of a complex puzzle: an important piece — and important in different ways and to different extents for different crops — but just a piece.

Dr Curry is similarly skeptical about genetic erosion:

…[o]ne especially disruptive piece of evidence was the discovery that, in some places, farmers didn’t change over to newly introduced “high yielding” crop varieties, even when they had an opportunity to do so. Or that when farmers did adopt new seed, they also kept continued growing the older types, too. As a result, varieties slated for inevitable extinction in the 1950s hadn’t disappeared.

But again, we’ve known for a while that the reality of genetic erosion is not as straightforward as the all-too-common “75%” narrative. Though admittedly it has taken us way too long to put that in writing.

In any case, it’s great to see the work of genebanks analyzed from a new perspective, or at least one that we’re not particularly used to. There’s always something to learn.

With the commercialization initiatives I’ve described here, there are now excellent opportunities to ensure the long-term survival of ‘heirloom’ varieties in the systems where they originated.

And that’s from a genebanker, Dr Mike Jackson! His recent blog post about his “conversion” is long, but well worth reading in full.

You might want to follow that up in a couple of days with ‘Is there a business case for forgotten crops?’, the next online event in the Forgotten Crops Society Dialogue Series. The topic will be discussed by Natasha Santos, Crop Science Division Vice President, Head of Global Stakeholder Affairs & Strategy Partnerships at Bayer AG.

1. IFAD paean to neglected crops.
2. BBC tribute to enset.
3. Threnody to unsustainable kava.
4. Hymn to a pot of ancient maize.
5. Toast to a new museum of food in the UK.
6. Jeremy’s duet with June Hersh on yoghurt.
7. Scientific American epic on the European Neolithic.
8. Rhapsody on saving wheat from climate change.
9. Collection of important tree species from ICRAF.
10. Panegyric to a clove tree.
11. A eulogy for monoculture?

• An analysis of the transformative potential of major food system report recommendations. Most recommendations are nudges rather than transformative. But is that such a bad thing?
• Linking farm production diversity to household dietary diversity controlling market access and agricultural technology usage: evidence from Noakhali district, Bangladesh. Farm diversity is associated with dietary diversity, but less if markets and irrigation are to hand. Phew, that’s good.
• Leveraging millets for developing climate resilient agriculture. Never mind the yield, feel the stability. Plus they’re good for you.
• Exploring the legacy of Central European historical winter wheat landraces. Not great that breeding has narrowed the genepool. Will it happen to millets next?
• A European perspective on opportunities and demands for field-based crop phenotyping. Would be good to have more sites in Central Europe, no?
• Genetic dissection of seasonal vegetation index dynamics in maize through aerial based high-throughput phenotyping. 1752 accessions fall into 2 phenological groups. Do it in Europe next?
• Changes in soybean cultivars released over the past 50 years in southern Brazil. Yield has gone up, but protein concentration down. No word on stability. Nor overall diversity. Good and bad.
• The grain quality of wheat wild relatives in the evolutionary context. Breeders should focus on the timopheevii lineage if they want to do some good.
• Signatures of selection in recently domesticated macadamia. Further evidence for the one-step domestication of clonal crops.
• Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process. One-step is precisely how domestication did NOT happen for seed crops in the Neolithic though.
• Conservation and use of genetic resources of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) by gene banks and nurseries in six Latin American countries. Not a great situation for such a financially important crop. Makes you think.
• Chloroplast phylogenomics in Camelina (Brassicaceae) reveals multiple origins of polyploid species and the maternal lineage of C. sativa. Such a lot of work, and they still don’t know in which landscape domestication took place.
• Making the invisible visible: tracing the origins of plants in West African cuisine through archaeobotanical and organic residue analysis. 3500 years of continuity in West African cooking investigated via lipid profiles on pottery.

• Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security. Resilience, but at a cost.
• Avenues for improving farming sustainability assessment with upgraded tools, sustainability framing and indicators. A review. How to measure an important aspect of the above-mentioned resilience.
• Envisaging an Effective Global Long-Term Agrobiodiversity Conservation System That Promotes and Facilitates Use. To effectively guarantee the resilience of farmers and the food system, genebank accessions for likely future use need to be distinguished dynamically from those for immediate use on the basis of the best available data, and then managed differently.
• Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene. Naturalization of phylogenetically diverse exotic plants from Australia, the Pacific and Europe is leading to a more homogeneous world flora. Much could be said of diets, come to think of it, except maybe for the source of the plants, which is interesting in itself.
• Identifying science-policy consensus regions of high biodiversity value and institutional recognition. And less than a third of the bits of the Earth that everyone thinks are important in terms of biodiversity are protected, including from the above exotics.
• Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. There was a 9% cropland area increase in 2003-2019, mainly in Africa and South America, half of it replacing natural vegetation.
• Include biodiversity representation indicators in area-based conservation targets. Needed because of the above exotic invasives and cropland expansion, among other things.
• Climate impacts on global agriculture emerge earlier in new generation of climate and crop models. Those new cropland areas will soon be in trouble. Unless genebanks and breeding, I guess.
• Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty. Could that cropland grow gene edited crops in an agroecological setting? Yes, but that will require recognizing that agroecology is not a setting.
• Plant biodiversity and the regeneration of soil fertility. Restoring biodiversity restores soil fertility too.
• Small targeted dietary changes can yield substantial gains for human health and the environment. Replace just 10% of meat calories with fruit and veggies for the win-win. Is this the answer to all of the above? Well, maybe, maybe not.

1. Alphabetical list of the citrus material in the US genebank.
2. Alphabetical list of spices.
3. The Canadian Encyclopedia tackles the national genebank.
4. Old tamarind and neem trees along a road get protection in India.
5. And old crop varieties get revived, also in India.
6. Interview with author of a book on Indigenous conservation science.

• Viewpoint: Aligning vision and reality in publicly funded agricultural research for development: A case study of CGIAR. Some countries and crops are being short-changed.
• Institutional and farm-level challenges limiting the diffusion of new varieties from public and CGIAR centers: The case of wheat in Morocco. No way either Morocco nor wheat are being short-changed, and yet both micro-level and institutional factors are holding back new varieties there.
• Estimation of genetic erosion on Ethiopian tetraploid wheat landraces using different approaches. No such adoption problems in Ethiopia, it seems.
• Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits in Napier Grass (Cenchrus purpureus) and QTL Regions Governing Forage Biomass Yield, Water Use Efficiency and Feed Quality Traits. Napier grass is clearly not being short-changed. I’m sure my MIL would approve.
• Tropical and subtropical Asia’s valued tree species under threat. Not valued enough, though.
• The origin of the genus Cannabis. If CGIAR decides to work on Cannabis, Yunnan would be the place to start getting material from.
• Phased, chromosome-scale genome assemblies of tetraploid potato reveals a complex genome, transcriptome, and predicted proteome landscape underpinning genetic diversity. Clonal propagation and limited meiosis has really short-changed the potato, but this work, which includes CGIAR, will really help breeders get rid of accumulated nasty alleles.
• Somaclonal variation in clonal crops: containing the bad, exploring the good. And then there’s somaclonal variation…
• Sugarcane Genetic Diversity and Major Germplasm Collections. Ripe for the above treatment. Followed by take-over by CGIAR.
• On-farm conservation in Phaseolus lunatus L: an alternative for agricultural biodiversity. On farm conservation must not be short-changed.
• Leveraging Digital Tools and Crowdsourcing Approaches to Generate High-Frequency Data for Diet Quality Monitoring at Population Scale in Rwanda. Younger people get short-changed in their diet; but, surprisingly, women do not.
• UAV-Based Mapping of Banana Land Area for Village-Level Decision-Support in Rwanda. Can’t help thinking we’re being short-changed by not mashing this up with the above somehow.
• The Genetic Diversity of Enset (Ensete ventricosum) Landraces Used in Traditional Medicine Is Similar to the Diversity Found in Non-medicinal Landraces. The title short-changes the casual reader. Medicinal varieties are in fact different from non-medicinal varieties, but do not cluster together. Mapping next?
• Phenological diversity in wild and hybrid grapes (Vitis) from the USDA-ARS cold-hardy grape collection. No sign of short-changing grapevine, at least in the US, resulting in some interesting opportunities for its expansion into new areas using wild relatives.

1. China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
2. US doubles down on cover crops…
3. …and pulses. No word on ginger.
4. How Campbell doubled down on tomato breeding.
5. Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
6. Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
7. Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
8. Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
9. A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
10. How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
11. A paean to the mango.
12. Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
13. It kind of already is in the Andes.

1. Seed saving in The Guardian.
2. Seed saving in Nigeria.
3. More seed saving needed in Zimbabwe.
4. Save seeds instead of growing GMO crops?
5. Is seed saving among the best-bet government interventions to fix our diets? Find out.
6. Seed saving on rsmag.com, whatever that is.
7. Will the new Oxford nature recovery centre look into seed saving, I wonder?
8. Saving baobab seeds in Burkina Faso.
9. We need joined-up food system thinking. Starting with seed saving?

I’m just back from a few weeks’ break in Kenya, where the big news was that over the holidays KFC ran out out chips (French fries). It was not a question of inadequate production, though. There are plenty of potatoes in Kenya.

The problem, apparently, was that potential local suppliers had not gone through KFC’s quality assurance process that makes sure “our food is safe for consumption by our customers”, the company’s East Africa chief executive Jacques Theunissen told the Standard newspaper.

So KFC ended up importing potatoes from Egypt, and ran into supply chain snarl-ups.

Makes you think. What’s the point of fancy breeding projects to boost local production, including by the likes of the International Potato Centre, based on decades of research, and using genetic resources painstakingly collected all over the Andes over many years, if in the end local growers get screwed over standards they don’t even know about?

Anyway, let me say a few words about what exactly it is I linked to above about potato collecting, because it really is worth having a look at.

Professor Jack Hawkes was a world-renowned potato and genetic resources expert who spent much of his professional life at the University of Birmingham. He made his first trip to South America in 1939 to collect wild and cultivated species of potato. And on this expedition and others that followed he made several 16 mm films, which have recently been converted to digital format, and become available to view more widely for the first time.

Dr Mike Jackson, no slouch at collecting potatoes himself, put the website together with help from Dr Abigail Amey, who wrote the narrative to accompany the films.

Happy new year.

…but we’ll be back with that and more in the new year.

1. Food security through seed saving in the African diaspora.
2. Food security through breadfruit in Hawaii.
3. Food security through the dietary diversity of women.
4. Food security through preserving fruits and veggies in Azerbaijan.
5. Food security through tomato wild relatives.
6. Food security through Native American farming practices.
7. Food security through agroecology.

Jeremy has his latest Eat This Newsletter out. Do subscribe if you’re minded to, there’s always great stuff there. Here’s a taster. To get the reference at the end, you’ll have to read the whole newsletter :)

In 1932, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov – the man who more or less invented the modern genebank and first understood the importance of crop diversity – visited Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He was there for the Sixth International Congress of Genetics and it was his final trip outside the USSR, because the forces of unreason were already pouring their poison into Stalin’s open ears.

Ninety years on, The Mann Library at Cornell has mounted an exhibit about Vavilov. Cultivating Silence: Nikolai Vavilov and the Suppression of Science in the Modern Era demonstrates the importance of Vavilov’s work and how he and genetics fell foul of Soviet science in the 1930s. I would be there if I possibly could. Instead, I’ll content myself with visiting The Mann’s Library’s online introduction to Vavilov and Cornell, a marvellous jumping-off point for anyone interested in the subject.

Oh, and, about that proletarian food movement…

• Overcoming racism in the twin spheres of conservation science and practice. Imagine.
• Getting accepted – Successful writing for scientific publication: a Research Primer for low- and middle-income countries. See above.
• A Performance Management System for Long-Term Germplasm Conservation in CGIAR Genebanks: Aiming for Quality, Efficiency and Improvement. Say what you do, do what you say, have someone verify it, correct it, improve it. Then repeat.
• Quinoa, potatoes, and llamas fueled emergent social complexity in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. Who needs maize, am I right?
• Harnessing root architecture to address global challenges. Something else for breeders to scour genebanks for.
• Evidence for host–microbiome co-evolution in apple. The genetic patterns in the endophytic microbiome of 11 wild and cultivated apple species mirrors the phylogenetic relationships among the species.
• Phylogenomic analysis points to a South American origin of Manihot and illuminates the primary gene pool of cassava. At least five wild species have contributed diversity to cassava. No word on microbiomes.
• Genetic Identification of the Local Mukodamashi Varieties of Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv) in Japan. Mukodamashi means “deceiving husband” and the legend is that when a wife makes dumplings from this millet variety, the husband mistakes them for rice cakes because the grains are white and sticky. Thing is though, it’s not just one variety.
]]> Mon, 13 Dec 2021 09:31:59 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6BPgic05Z4NmZMehmtHS8- https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR5oiHGbpZROnaJCIqJppjfU

This is definitely a new one for me. A genebanker and a poet have collaborated, and the result is Parchment Scalpel Rock: What’s Up, Doc?, a digital exhibition from Coventry Creates. Here’s a taste:

…genebanks are magicians’ hats from which all researchers
can magic the whole genepool’s variation when they need…

The genebanker is Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank:

I have never worked with a poet so I was excited to be paired with George and we had some really enjoyable discussions about carrots and the various drivers which underpin the current production systems which supply UK supermarkets. I was fascinated by George’s approach, where I had some input into the curation of his verse and the selection of pairs of lines for the final booklet.

And the poet is George Ttoouli:

Bringing Charlotte in to help me edit and curate the lines felt necessary, collaborative. I’m interested in decentering authorship, my own and that of others, through processes. With a little more time, I would have loved to devise a project to allow the rabbits (and hares) at Charlotte’s research centre to curate their own sequence of the poems I produced.

See what you think, and provide feedback on the Coventry Creates website.

]]> Fri, 10 Dec 2021 10:29:17 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR5oiHGbpZROnaJCIqJppjfU https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR5Cb1lq0NQeAyVCAQLB0bf5
1. Two guides to making good presentations. For what it’s worth, here’s my take: fewer words.
2. The latest on taro leaf blight in Samoa, from an Indigenous perspective. Not a presentation in sight.
3. Agroforestry in the Solomon Islands involves 132 species. Probably including taro.
4. The case for agroecology from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. You could also see the above.
5. Or, we could tweak photosynthesis.
]]> Thu, 09 Dec 2021 11:23:34 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR5Cb1lq0NQeAyVCAQLB0bf5 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR7wIZk9w7O6Pgpx5_w21kha

The papers that compose this issue evidence how an integrative approach is not only analytically beneficial but also necessary for research supporting the sustainable resolution of conflict, the related conservation of agrobiodiversity and equitable human-environment relations.

Gabriel Tamariz and Megan Baumann have co-organized and co-edited a special issue of Geoforum on “Agrobiodiversity Change in Conflict and Post-Conflict Landscapes.” I’m hoping I won’t get into trouble for sharing this table which gives an idea of what’s in it.



]]> Wed, 08 Dec 2021 13:26:26 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR7wIZk9w7O6Pgpx5_w21kha https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6URZaHbVX1WSVCAQLB0bf5
1. A Mexican entrepreneur and a Pawnee Keeper of the Seed try to save maize landraces in their different ways.
2. Indian farmer tries to save plantain varieties.
3. Indigenous conservation will save conservation.
4. Alice Walters cannot save the food system. But why not let her try?
5. None of the above of them would understand the concept of designing a perfect tomato.
6. Saffron is the perfect spice.
]]> Tue, 07 Dec 2021 12:28:37 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6URZaHbVX1WSVCAQLB0bf5 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6np2GO8jCHPGFk24e89-qg
• The crucial role of genome-wide genetic variation in conservation. Don’t fetishise functional variation.
• The Ancient Varieties of Mountain Maize: The Inheritance of the Pointed Character and Its Effect on the Natural Drying Process. Case in point? You fetishise.
• Diversification for enhanced food systems resilience. Do fetishise diversification.
• Restoring fertility in yeast hybrids: Breeding and quantitative genetics of beneficial traits. Well, that’s one way to diversify. Mules next?
• Predictive genotype-phenotype relations using genetic diversity in African yam bean (Sphenostylis stenocarpa (Hochst. ex. A. Rich) Harms). From 93 IITA accessions to a handful of good ones for the fetishes of seed and/or tuber yield.
• Genetic resources management, seed production constraints and trade performance of orphan crops in Southern Africa: A case of Cowpea. Could maybe fetishise cowpea a little more?
• Urbanization and agrobiodiversity: Leveraging a key nexus for sustainable development. What’s the opposite of fetishising? Demonising? Ok, don’t demonise urbanisation then. Gosh I hope I’m using these words correctly…
• Edaphoclimatic Descriptors of Wild Tomato Species (Solanum Sect. Lycopersicon) and Closely Related Species (Solanum Sect. Juglandifolia and Sect. Lycopersicoides) in South America. We may be in danger of fetishising ecogeography.
• Banana seed genetic resources for food security: Status, constraints, and future priorities. Half of banana wild relatives are not in genebanks at all. Not that we want to fetishise crop wild relatives, but that seems a lot.
• Regulating Seeds—A Challenging Task. How do we avoid fetishising neither formal nor informal seed systems?
• The phytosanitary risks posed by seeds for sowing trade networks. The case for robust phytosanitary measures in global forage seed trade networks. No need to fetishise them though.
• The value of agrobiodiversity: an analysis of consumers preference for tomatoes. Consumers fetishise heirloom tomatoes to the tune of an additional €0.90 per kilo.
• Dynamic guardianship of potato landraces by Andean communities and the genebank of the International Potato Center. Communities don’t fetishise rematriated landraces, but that doesn’t matter.
• Facing the Harsh Reality of Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Legislation. The dangers of fetishising ABS. Or is it demonising?
]]> Mon, 06 Dec 2021 09:27:24 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6np2GO8jCHPGFk24e89-qg https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR5J3WKLx2gT5msGk81fO-bN
1. Europe gets a genetic resources strategy at last. Rejoice.
2. Book on how international organizations could, should, would transform agriculture.
3. Meanwhile, in Cali…
4. BBVA and El Celler de Can Roca collaborate on forgotten foods documentary, Seeds for the Future.
5. A novel about Vavilov? Well, why not.
6. Exhibition on pastoralism.
7. Visual essay on floods in South Sudan.
8. Why not throw money at food security though? I mean, just see above, right?
9. Beyond the EAT-Lancet diet. S. Sudan unavailable for comment.
10. The SPC genebank curator waxes lyrical.
11. Not far away, New Zealand cryopreserves some of its native plants.
12. The latest on the Four Corners potato. I hope it’s in cryo…
13. …and that it doesn’t go the way of the peyote.
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