There’s a bunch of new videos out that readers might be interested in. You can find an entertaining take on herbaria on the Atomic Frontier YouTube channel. And if you’re into amaranth, check out the latest batch of resources on GRIN-U.

Talking of agrobiodiversity-themed podcasts1, there’s a fun dip into (some of the) history of the tomato over at Historically Thinking. Meanwhile, at Eat This Podcast, Jeremy has embarked on a monumental romp2 through the role of wheat in world history. Pizza, anyone?

1. Yes, we were, kinda.
2. Yes, you can have a monumental romp.

1. Good roundup of the latest thinking on land sharing vs sparing.
2. Hummus is not the only thing to use chickpeas for: you can also make sattu sherbert.
3. Africa looks to fonio. Again.
4. A new, unique high-protein, low glycemic index rice.
5. The Maya Maize God’s sacrifice re-enacted in a cave. And if you want more background, do listen to this fabulous podcast on the Popol Vuh.

• Genetic resources in Russia: from collections to bioresource centers. Ok, but why can’t they be both?
• Sowing the wheat seeds of Afghanistan’s future. Breed, fortify, irrigate, rebuild the knowledge base, invest in seed systems, engage farmers, include women, have the right policies. And hope for the best. No sign of bioresource centers, alas.
• Variation in Grain Zinc and Iron Concentrations, Grain Yield and Associated Traits of Biofortified Bread Wheat Genotypes in Nepal. Maybe Nepal can help Afghanistan, wheat-wise?
• Global food-miles account for nearly 20% of total food-systems emissions. Not a worry for Afghanistan or Russia, I suspect.
• Can agroecology improve food security and nutrition? A review. Yes. Afghanistan and Russia to be alerted.
• The geography of megatrends affecting European agriculture. Climate change, demographic change, (post-) productivism, and increasingly stringent environmental regulations mainly work together to destabilize the current system. Russia unavailable for comment.
• Agrobiodiversity Index Report 2021: Assessing Mediterranean food systems. Conservation of agricultural biodiversity doesn’t automatically translate into diversity in diets. I’d like to see the data for Russia and Afghanistan.
• Intra- and Inter-Population Genetic Diversity of “Russello” and “Timilia” Landraces from Sicily: A Proxy towards the Identification of Favorable Alleles in Durum Wheat. Lots of interesting variation in Sicilian wheat landraces. Now to get Sicilians to eat more diverse pasta.
• Global interdependence for fruit genetic resources: status and challenges in India. Maybe India could help Afghanistan. And vice versa. Wouldn’t that be a thing. Meanwhile, no word on the diversity of Indian fruit consumption.
• Wild Apples Are Not That Wild: Conservation Status and Potential Threats of Malus sieversii in the Mountains of Central Asia Biodiversity Hotspot. Climate change is coming for wild apples, and there’s only so much that protected areas can do. I believe Russia knows a thing or two about apple genebanks.
• Cider and dessert apples: What is the difference? Not much, as it turns out. But all I can think of now is wild apple cider.

Did you know that the survival of Manoomin (“the good berry,” aka wild rice, aka Zizania palustris) is enshrined in the treaty between the Ojibwe people and the US federal government? And that such treaties, of which there are dozens, “are the supreme law of the land” according to the US Constitution?

Neither did I, but I do now thanks to a fascinating podcast from 99% Invisible on The Rights of Rice and the Future of Nature. I also now know that some people think those two things (leavened with some decidedly out-of-the-box reasoning) mean that Manoomin can sue the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. It’s because of an oil pipeline that the Ojibwa people threatens wild rice populations. We blogged about it, perhaps a bit too succinctly, a few years back.

What I don’t know is what would happen if buffel grass were to follow its Minnesotan cousin’s example.

The data behind the recent paper Crop wild relatives of the United States require urgent conservation action, led by friend-of-the-blog Colin Khoury, is online in beta.

Do check it out, and fill out the user survey. Kudos to the first person to identify the crop wild relative in the map reproduced above. Orange shows the ex situ conservation gap. Genesys records just 3 accessions for this species.

Cenchrus ciliaris (buffel grass) is a valued forage and fodder species both in Africa and the regions of Asia where it is native, and in the other parts of the sub-humid and semi-arid tropics and subtropics where it has become naturalized or is cultivated.

“The buffel grass has been there from the days of my father, grandparents to my great grandparents,” says [Geoffrey] Letakaan [of Baringo County, Kenya]. “This grass has a lot of value. If fed to cows, they fatten within three months. There is also hay for baling, and it is also used for thatching. In the past, the elders used to say ‘nangrongong’, meaning ‘it (the buffel grass) is on the hills’ such as Arabal and Mukutani hills… People should plant this grass – everyone.”

There are almost 4000 accessions in genebanks around the world, which are being genotyped, phenotyped and improved.

And yet, not all is well, as a tweet from GRAIN recently alerted me.

In Australia, where the grass is introduced, it is becoming a serious threat to native wildlife and habitats, with calls for its eradication in some areas.

It’s … important to note controlling buffel doesn’t require its eradication from pastoral regions where it’s valued. It does, however, require a national commitment and dedicated research, with strategic, coordinated and committed action.

And even back in its native African range, specifically in the Baringo region of Kenya, there are problems. According to GRAIN:

Over the past few decades, a man named Murray Roberts, known to locals as “Omari” has led an effort to try and transform the local management of buffel grass – from a system based on communal land ownership and pastoralism to one based on private landholdings and intensive farming.

The issue is Roberts’ application for plant breeders’ rights over a number of buffel grass varieties, starting about 10 years back.

For many local pastoralists, Roberts is trying to claim ownership over their biodiversity. Eresia Erige, a Baringo community member, says that as soon as the community became aware of Roberts’ application for a breeders’ right, local elders went up the hills and collected samples to compare with the varieties grown by RAE. They found that it was the same grass. For Erige, “The grass belongs to the hills and therefore, its seeds and farming in general should be for all and not be privatised.”

The tug-of-war between Roberts and the Baringo pastoralists continues.

In both Australia and Kenya, the well-being on Indigenous communities is being impacted, in one case by the invasiveness of buffel grass threatening cultural sites, in the other by what is seen as an attempt to control access to seed of the species from traditional pastures. In neither case have the local communities had much of a say.

1. Call to set up a sheep genebank in Australia. Kinda surprised there isn’t one already, frankly.
2. Bringing back purple wheat in the US. Spoiler alert: genebanks were involved.
3. Going back to “organized chaos” in Hawaiian farming. There’s probably room for genebanks too, though.

• The quest for red rice beer: transregional interactions and development of competitive feasting in Neolithic China. In the 4th millennium BCE, in China, people brewed a sacred red beer in vats called dakougang using rice, millet, Job’s tears, wheat and snake gourd root.
• The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens. The earliest domesticated chickens are found 1650-1250 BCE in central Thailand and were attracted by stored rice and millet. No word on the role of beer.
• Performance, Economics and Potential Impact of Perennial Rice PR23 Relative to Annual Rice Cultivars at Multiple Locations in Yunnan Province of China. But does it make decent beer and attract chickens?
• Genomic prediction of zinc-biofortification potential in rice gene bank accessions. Check out in particular the aus subspecies. No word on whether the resulting beer and chickens are also high in zinc.
• Do ancient wheats contain less gluten than modern bread wheat, in favour of better health? More to the point, do they make better beer?
• Evidence for two domestication lineages supporting a middle-eastern origin for Brassica oleracea crops from diversified kale populations. Chickens not involved at all.
• Genome evolution and diversity of wild and cultivated potatoes. Propagation by tubers had a big effect on the cultivated potato genome compared to propagation by seed. And no, I’m not going to get into the whole chickens-in-South-America controversy right now, but you can google it.
• The genomics of linkage drag in sunflower. Introgression from wild relatives has been good for some things, bad for others, but in general pre-breeders should stick to the primary genepool. And watch out for chickens.
• From horticulture to agriculture: New data on farming practices in Late Chalcolithic western Anatolia. While domestic units were small and agriculture extensive, cooperation was widespread and inequality low. Then those Bronze Age elites got chickens…

1. Video on a participative system for seed quality control in Colombia.
2. Pushing out high quality new rice varieties in India.
3. Collecting high quality seeds after fires in Australia.
4. The road to high quality wheat starts in Obregón.
5. China’s latest genebank conserves ancient ceramics. No word on quality.

Data viz wiz Erin has a bunch of excellent new maps of crop distributions in the USA over on her website. The data come from USDA Quick Stats, but her maps are way cooler. This, for examples, shows very strikingly what a powerhouse of agricultural biodiversity California is. Though I guess southern Texas comes close.

1. Qatari botanic garden is providing training in food security, and more. Good for them.
2. The European Evaluation Network’s lettuce boffins have themselves a meeting. Pretty amazing this made it to FreshPlaza, and with that headline.
3. The Jordan Times pretty much mangles what is a perfectly nice, though inevitably nuanced, story about the genetic depth of Jordan’s olives.
4. In Kenya’s seed system, whatever is not forbidden in proposed new legislation…may not be enough.
5. Conservation through hybridization.
6. FAOSTAT now has a bit that gives you access to national agricultural census data. Which sounds quite important but give us a few days to check it.

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• Repurposing agricultural support: Creating food systems incentives to address climate change. Less subsidies and trade barriers, more investment in R&D.
• Impact investing in biodiversity conservation with bonds: An analysis of financial and environmental risk. How about agricultural biodiversity though?
• ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2022 07:53:34 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR7yyXkoDn6miCxhxzpi7FpJ https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6LwZAU-MFSo6vLeqE6yv18
  • Ancient DNA maps ‘dawn of farming’. Hunter-gatherers from Europe and the Middle East mixed and settled down as farmers in Anatolia, then spread to Europe.
  • The Australian dingo is an early offshoot of modern breed dogs. The dingo originated from grey wolves, and found itself isolated, much earlier than all other dog breeds.
  • The first use of olives in Africa around 100,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers used the wild olive long before they domesticated either it or the dog.
  • Intestinal parasites in the Neolithic population who built Stonehenge (Durrington Walls, 2500 BCE). Neolithic people and their dogs ate the same things.
  • Comparative seed longevity under genebank storage and artificial ageing: a case study in heteromorphic wheat wild relatives. Seeds of the same crop wild relatives species but with different shapes have different seed longevities.
  • Stepping up to the thermogradient plate: a data framework for predicting seed germination under climate change. But do heteromorphic seeds have different germination requirements too? Here’s how to find out.
  • Conservation interventions can benefit species impacted by climate change. Biodiversity was helped with the effects of climate change in 30% of cases, especially if interventions were targeted on specific species. Genebanks available for comment.
  • Urban conservation gardening in the decade of restoration. Speaking of interventions…
  • South and/or north: an indigenous seed movement in South Korea and the multiple bases of food sovereignty. Wait, what about the genebank though?
  • Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation. Surely if you can use fancy tech and maths to monitor cheetahs, monitoring crop wild relative populations and landraces should be a doddle.
  • Quantifying an online wildlife trade using a web crawler. Surely if you can crawl the web for evidence of illicit wildlife trade, crawling it to evidence of genetic erosion of crop diversity should be a doddle.
  • Plant beta-diversity across biomes captured by imaging spectroscopy. How about capturing beta-diversity within crop fields, though? A doddle, no? We’ve come a long way since those first Anatolian farmers and their dingoes.
  ]]> Mon, 30 May 2022 07:56:55 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6LwZAU-MFSo6vLeqE6yv18 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR44JM8lABna52Fk24e89-qg

  Want to know why New Zealand has a huge collection of temperate forage diversity in its Margot Forde Forage Germplasm Centre, part of AgResearch Ltd? Just check out its exports on the OEC website.

  

  I learned about the OEC’s snazzy visualisations of economic data via their addictive daily game Tradle, which invites you to guess the country based on its exports.

  I think we should do a version where you guess the country based on its genebank holdings, but that’s another story.

  ]]> Sun, 29 May 2022 09:34:18 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR44JM8lABna52Fk24e89-qg https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR7cbjae7R7ZOH-fx8LWuXng
  1. Embrapa genebanks hard at work saving seeds in Brazil.
  2. Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance hard at work saving seeds in the USA.
  3. Naples Botanical Gardens hard at work saving seeds in Florida.
  4. Really does take all sorts…
  ]]> Fri, 27 May 2022 12:49:18 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR7cbjae7R7ZOH-fx8LWuXng https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6Hw_kaeK7iy2W0GqTRQSgk
  1. So there’s an African Seed Access Index whose relationship with the Access to Seeds Index is unclear.
  2. The Pacific Northwest has a genebank called the Miller Seed Vault whose relationship with the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado is quite clear.
  3. The relationship between climate change and changes in crop distributions is becoming clearer, and more worrying.
  4. What is the relationship between huge markets such as Samper Mendoza in Bogota and plant conservation?
  ]]> Thu, 26 May 2022 11:25:17 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR6Hw_kaeK7iy2W0GqTRQSgk https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR7yB8EROMVB4m0dX84dnP8Y

  What I forgot to do when I mentioned the Seeds4All Newsletter recently is link to their new “brochure outlining the regulatory steps to be taken in order to market OHM-labelled varieties.”

  OHM?

  2022 is a special year, as it will start with the entry into force of the new European Regulation on organic production, introducing the possibility of marketing seeds of ‘organic heterogeneous material’ (OHM) without any obligation to be registered in official catalogues.

  We believe that this new legislation is a real advance for cultivated biodiversity and could reinforce the sustainability of organic agriculture by allowing the marketing of a greater quantity and diversity of truly organic seeds.

  For these regulatory advances to be effective, it is necessary though that field operators seize them and commit to the marketing, reproduction and use of seed of organic heterogeneous material.

  Bet there was a bit of resistance to that. You can download the brochure from the Seed4All website. Have fun.

  ]]> Mon, 23 May 2022 14:58:06 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR7yB8EROMVB4m0dX84dnP8Y https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR4vQAJU5_1iQETXPGaG87AR
  • Agricultural trade and its impacts on cropland use and the global loss of species habitat. Rich countries have a large biodiversity footprint outside their borders because they import a lot of agricultural products from areas where biodiversity is disappearing fast.
  • International food trade benefits biodiversity and food security in low-income countries. Ah, but low-income, high biodiversity countries import a lot too. I really don’t know what to think about trade now.
  • Biodiversity and yield trade-offs for organic farming. Biodiversity gain and yield loss balance each other out. Oh, come on scientists, would it kill you to give a definite answer?
  • Crop harvests for direct food use insufficient to meet the UN’s food security goal. We should definitely use more cropland for actual human food. But that would probably not be good for exports, no? Uff.
  • The hidden safety net: wild and semi-wild plant consumption and dietary diversity among women farmers in Southwestern Burkina Faso. Yeah, but who needs crops and imports anyway.
  • Six decades of warming and drought in the world’s top wheat-producing countries offset the benefits of rising CO2 to yield. In any case, crops are in trouble.
  • Planning complementary conservation of crop wild relative diversity in southern Africa. But CWR will save crops if only we can conserve them.
  • Genome Editing for Sustainable Agriculture in Africa. Especially if we use the latest toys.
  • Impact of the European Union’s Seed Legislation and Intellectual Property Rights on Crop Diversity. And have all the right policies in place.
  • Farm-level production diversity and child and adolescent nutrition in rural sub-Saharan Africa: a multicountry, longitudinal study. But actually, it’s livestock we really need.
  ]]> Mon, 23 May 2022 08:11:01 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/GlcfeVzmzR4vQAJU5_1iQETXPGaG87AR