• Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers. Farmers may have pushed hunter-gatherers to the northern edge of Europe while also in mixing with them.
• Identification and exploitation of wild rye (Secale spp.) during the early Neolithic in the Middle Euphrates valley. Those Europeans on the move — both farmers and hunter-gatherers — would have been familiar with wild rye, but that’s pretty much gone from the Fertile Crescent now.
• Caribbean Deep-Time Culinary Worlds Revealed by Ancient Food Starches: Beyond the Dominant Narratives. But enough about Europe. It wasn’t always all about cassava in the pre-colonial, and indeed colonial, Caribbean…
• Reuniting the Three Sisters: collaborative science with Native growers to improve soil and community health. …as there was also the maize/beans/squash system in that part of the world, and may well be again.
• Understanding Early Modern Beer: An Interdisciplinary Case-Study. Something else that could come back is early modern Irish beer, and I’d be there for that.
• Forgotten forest relics: Apple trees (Malus spp.) in eastern U.S. forests. Old abandoned orchards, and escapes therefrom, could have lots of interesting apple diversity. Early modern American cider, anyone?
• Building a feral future: Open questions in crop ferality. And it’s not just apples. It’s a whole movement in fact.
• Resynthesized Rapeseed (Brassica napus): Breeding and Genomics. Sure, we can rebuild it, we have the technology. But will it go feral on us again?

Every once in a while a new dam dataset crops up. Dam, not damn. Well, maybe damn as well. Anyway, when that happens, I feel compelled to mash it up with accession locality data. Because if I don’t do it, who will?

The new dataset is the Global Dam Tracker, and you can download it and everything of course. It’s pretty easy to then upload it to Google Earth and play around with it. Including combining it with data on wild Oryza accessions from Genesys, for example.

On this map, the dams are shown in blue and wild rice accessions in red.

You can zoom in if you’re worried about the long-term in situ future of any given population.

Not for the first time, I wonder about the feasibility of one day automatically and in real time combining data from multiple such potential stressors to predict the risk of genetic erosion around the world. Something that AI should be able to do, surely?

1. According to WWF, Solving the Great Food Puzzle involves, inter alia, nutritious indigenous crops, agrobiodiverse cropping systems, and traditional food cultures. Those are just 3 of 20 levers for food system transformation. Is it me or are levers and accelerators the current flavours of the month?
2. Even the Gates Foundation agrees on that indigenous crop thing, kinda sorta, if you squint. In this piece, for example, Enock Chikava, Interim Director, Agricultural Development, waxes lyrical about teff.
3. Meanwhile, in the middle of its tomato shortage, and not much interested in teff, the UK is betting on re-establishing prehistoric landscapes full of wild pigs and bison. Bold move.
4. But who needs bison protein when you have the genome of the faba bean? Which after all is a nutritious indigenous crop, part of agrobiodiverse cropping systems, and a component of traditional food cultures.
5. Ah, but you need to manage all that data on indigenous crops, and Clemson University is there to help. WWF take note.

Pieter Breughel the Younger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

• Implication of high variance in germplasm characteristics. Last week’s Brainfood focused on genomic variation. This week, in contrast, we look at phenotyping. But not old school phenotyping, oh no. This paper, for example, uses fancy-ish, but not especially expensive, imaging.
• High-throughput imaging of powdery mildew resistance of the winter wheat collection hosted at the German Federal ex situ Genebank for Agricultural and Horticultural Crops. This paper uses somewhat fancier, and possibly more costly, imaging. Vorsprung durch Technik.
• Low availability of functional seed trait data from the tropics could negatively affect global macroecological studies, predictive models and plant conservation. Even embryos in seeds can be phenotyped.
• Agroforestry Trees’ Architecture as Evidence of Domestication: Case of African Mango Tree in the Dahomey Gap, West Africa. I wonder if one could describe the shape of tree crowns from space? I hope not, this work sounded like fun…
• Diversidad biocultural de tomate nativo en Oaxaca, México. Phenotype is socially constructed in tomato too.
• Who Defines Fine Chocolate? The Construction of Global Cocoa Quality Standards from Latin America. Can you standardise a socially construct such as the flavour of chocolate, and would it help farmers? Maybe.
• Douro wine-tourism engaging consumers in nature conservation stewardship: An immersive biodiversity experience. How to make money out of a socially constructed phenotype.
• Natural range, habitats and populations of wild peas (Pisum L.). We should get out of our labs and look for wild peas in the oases of the Sahara Desert, the subalpine communities of Georgia, and the Asir Mts of Yemen. But will we know them when we see them?

1. New ICRISAT varieties of sorghum, pearl millet and pigeonpea are doing well in drought-hit Kenya. For now, at least: something to keep an eye on. Genebanks and breeding to the rescue?
2. It’s behind a Times of India paywall, alas, but this seems to be an article about the effects of a very warm February on wheat, vegetables and grapes in that country.
3. Spring is coming to the northern hemisphere, so of course The New Yorker has a piece on the allure of seed catalogues. I hope there are drought-tolerant and heat-resistant varieties in there. And that they’re clearly labelled as such.
4. Meanwhile, oblivious of it all, AramcoWorld has an elegiac piece on the revival of the Karabakh horse in Azerbaijan. Beautiful plumage.

Over on Twitter, Ty Beal of GAIN has a thread on micronutrients. It’s based on a recent lecture and it has useful data and nice slides. Here’s the money quote:

In lower income countries micronutrient deficiencies are due in part to people not having access to diverse diets. They want healthy, nutrient dense foods but can’t afford them or access them in markets.

1. The Living Library of Resilience is a great name for what Nikolai Vavilov put together, and this longish piece from Maria Popova at The Marginalian is a great tribute to a great man.
2. Vavilov’s example is being followed in Argentina, it seems, with the establishment of another genebank, in Corrientes.
3. The Millennium Seed Bank reaches an important milestone. Vavilov would be proud.
4. Can’t help thinking Vavilov would also wholeheartedly approve of grassroots Indian efforts to bring back millets, as usefully summarized The Locavore. Could have said a bit more about genebanks, though.
5. Even genebanks like that of farmers such as Manas Ranjan Sahu. You don’t have to run an institute like Vavilov to build a genebank.
6. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food and Transformational Investing in Food Systems Initiative (TIFS) have a report out on Mobilizing Money and Movements: Creative Finance for Food Systems Transformation. No genebanks in there either, alas, but there could so easily have been.
7. FAO says billions of people in the world cannot afford a healthy diet, and it has the data to prove it. Does that mean genebanks are not doing their job (eg on nutrient dense orphan crops)? Or doing it too well (eg on the major calorie-rich staples)?
8. African worthies say that we need to ramp up investment in the adaptation of agriculture on the continent to climate change. I hope that will include investment in Living Libraries of Resilience that conserve all manner of interesting local crops and varieties. And creative finance for them of course.

• How genomics can help biodiversity conservation. Let’s find out, but let’s broaden it to use as well, shall we? On the assumption that what’s good for conservation is good for use, and vice versa.
• Genetic and genomic interventions in crop biofortification: Examples in millets. Genomics can help you get more nutritious millets, and also use millets to improve the nutritive content of other cereals too.
• Genomics and biochemical analyses reveal a metabolon key to β-L-ODAP biosynthesis in Lathyrus sativus. Genomics can help you figure out ways to decrease the toxicity of grasspea.
• Extensive crop–wild hybridization during Brassica evolution and selection during the domestication and diversification of Brassica crops. Genomics can help you figure out the evolutionary history of crops…
• Molecular characterization of Brassica genebank germplasm confirms taxonomic identity and reveals low levels and source of taxonomic errors. …assuming you have you accessions labelled correctly that is.
• Dual domestications and origin of traits in grapevine evolution. Genomics can help you figure out the evolutionary history of crops. No, wait, we already had that one…
• Balancing grain yield trade-offs in ‘Miracle-Wheat’. Genomics can help you figure out the best phenotype in wheat.
• Focusing the GWAS Lens on days to flower using latent variable phenotypes derived from global multienvironment trials. Genomics can help you figure out the best phenotype in lentils too.
• Awned versus awnless wheat spikes: does it matter? Although actually you don’t necessarily need genomics to help you figure out the best phenotype in wheat. But let’s get back on track.
• SNP Diversity and Genetic Structure of “Rogosija”, an Old Western Balkan Durum Wheat Collection. That’s better. Genomics can help you figure out that a wheat collection can consist of distinct ecogeographic groupings.
• Repeatability of adaptation in sunflowers: genomic regions harbouring inversions also drive adaptation in species lacking an inversion. Genomics can help you figure out what’s behind local adaptation in crop wild relatives.
• Re-evaluating Homoploid Reticulate Evolution in Helianthus Sunflowers. Genomics can help you figure out the evolutionary history of crop wild relatives. Where have I heard that before?
• A thousand-genome panel retraces the global spread and adaptation of a major fungal crop pathogen. Genomics can help you figure out the evolutionary history of plant pathogens too. Here’s a Twitter thread from one of the authors with lots of maps to prove it.
• Honey bee populations of the USA display restrictions in their mtDNA haplotype diversity. Yeah, you guessed it, pollinators too.
• Mezcal worm in a bottle: DNA evidence suggests a single moth species. I rest my case.

Prabhu Pingali sets out the nutrition case for crop-neutral agricultural policy in an interview at Asterisk.

There’s a lot more talk about nutrition-sensitive agriculture and a lot more pronouncements about why this is important. However, most governments see this as an add-on, not a substitution. Rather than removing the existing supports or reducing the existing supports for staples, governments have just added supports for other crops. That creates some marginal improvement for some of the other crops, but your fundamentals don’t change. The crop-neutrality argument says: Treat all these crops on a level playing field and let market signals determine the supply responses.

Easier said than done, but there’s more in his chapter on Are the Lessons from the Green Revolution Relevant for Agricultural Growth and Food Security in the Twenty-First Century? in last year’s book Agricultural Development in Asia and Africa.

Yeah, ok, here’s that cool map about the Fertile Crescent that I alluded to in a recent Nibble.

But do read the blog posts by Chad Mulligan the thesis of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything with regards to the origins of farming Part 1 and Part 2.

In chapters six and seven of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow present a very different account of the origins of agriculture than that found most conventional history books. This account, they say, contradicts many of the assumptions made by the authors of Big History, who tend to portray farming as ineluctably leading to inequality, hierarchy, private property, violence, and centralized states.

Instead, they argue that early farming societies were no more hierarchical than their predecessors, and may have even been less violent more egalitarian than their hunter-gatherer neighbors. The imply that cultivation may have even initially began as a strategy expressly designed to avoid succumbing to the values of hierarchy and violence. They are especially critical of Yuval Noah Harari’s Russian reversal-style metaphor of “wheat domesticating us.” This, they say, is yet another “Garden of Eden-type narrative,” except with “wheat taking the place of the snake.”

1. Saleseforce is funding work by CIFOR-ICRAF to help diversify agriculture in the Brazilian state of Pará by growing more nutritious fruit trees in agroforestry systems.
2. USDA researchers are breeding sweet potatoes that are better able to deal with weeds. No word on how they do in agroforestry systems.
3. I wonder if those weed-resistant sweet potatoes would find a market in Egypt.
4. Beer “giant” Carlsberg says it’s going all-in on regenerative barley growing practices. Looking forward to seeing hops agroforestry systems.
5. The British Society for Plant Pathology has a series of really engaging Plant Pandemic Studies, including for some crops that do well in agroforestry systems.
6. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is getting a lot of attention for its thesis that agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent as diverging, complementary and interacting lowland and highland agroforestry systems.
7. And finally, here’s a report from Allianz on why the financial sector should care about biodiversity-friendly agricultural systems, like maybe, but not only, agroforestry.

I guess by now the whole world knows that this year is the 15th anniversary of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, that there was another deposit last week, that the number of seed samples is now over 1.2 million from 98 genebanks, and that you can take a virtual tour of the place. But it’s a slow news day…

• Food Biodiversity as an Opportunity to Address the Challenge of Improving Human Diets and Food Security. Biodiversity and food security can be mutually supportive, but you need education, research and inclusion, say educators and researchers.
• Achieving win-win outcomes for biodiversity and yield through diversified farming. Biodiversity and yield both win in only about a quarter of cases. But humanity does not live by yield alone, right?
• Accelerated Domestication of New Crops: Yield is Key. Ooops, looks like humanity does live by yield alone after all.
• Genetically Modified Maize: Less Drudgery for Her, More Maize for Him? Evidence from Smallholder Maize Farmers in South Africa. No, wait, man lives by yield alone, but not woman.
• Climate Change’s Impact on Agriculture and Food Security: An Opportunity to Showcase African Animal Genetic Resources. Forget GMO maize, Africa needs to develop its own agrobiodiversity…
• Friend or Foe? The Role of Animal-Source Foods in Healthy and Environmentally Sustainable Diets. …and it need not be bad for either health or the environment.
• AgriDiverCluster: An Innovative Cluster for the Utilization of Greek Biodiversity and Plant Genetic Resources. Maybe the Greeks have a way to make it not bad for either health or the environment. By vertical integration, it looks like.
• Socio-ecological benefits of fine-flavor cacao in its center of origin. Amazonian cacao farmers also seem to have a way to vertically integrate.

1. There’s a piece in The Guardian on how Spanish wine makers are fighting climate change by going back of old grape varieties like estaladiña.
2. Maybe the same will happen with bananas, and its wild relatives could help? If so, it’s good we have this nifty catalogue.
3. A pan-African tree seed platform is in the making, thanks to CIFOR-ICRAF and IKI funding. Where’s the catalogue?
4. Here’s a video from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on A New Way of Teaching Ancient Foodways.
5. And a video from USDA on their work on genotyping coffee collections.
6. Meanwhile, Barbados is still thinking about building a genebank.
7. The Genetic Literacy Project does some myth-busting (or tries to): have modern varieties decreased the diversity within crops, are contemporary plant varieties really not suitable for low-input farming, and is improving agricultural practices enough without plant breeding? Take a wild guess.
8. Yam researchers in Benin have their own take on improving agricultural practices.
9. More climate funding should go to food system transformation, says the Global Alliance for the Future of Food in a report. Those Spanish winemakers — and everyone else above — would probably agree.

• The world’s largest potato cryobank at the International Potato Center (CIP) – Status quo, protocol improvement through large-scale experiments and long-term viability monitoring. It’s been a long road, but they’re almost there…
• Overcoming Challenges for Shoot Tip Cryopreservation of Root and Tuber Crops. …but there’s a bit further to go for other roots and tubers….
• Conserving Citrus Diversity: From Vavilov’s Early Explorations to Genebanks around the World. …and citrus.
• Seed Longevity — The Evolution of Knowledge and a Conceptual Framework. The road goes on forever.
• The 3D Pollen Project: An open repository of three-dimensional data for outreach, education and research. The road has to begin somewhere.
• Pollen Cryobanking—Implications in Genetic Conservation and Plant Breeding. And we’re off…

Using an 8% discount rate, the net present value of the costs of… [X] …is estimated at $61 billion for the next 35 years, while the net present benefits in terms of net economic surplus (the sum of consumer and producer surplus) are estimated at $2.1 trillion.

Wow, that’s a pretty good deal, what would possibly be X? Oh lookie here, turns out X is agricultural R&D. According to a report by assorted boffins from the Copenhagen Consensus Center and IFPRI, that is.

Bjorn Lomborg of the said Copenhagen Consensus Center ably summarizes the report in a recent op-ed, though the framing as Green Revolution 2.0 seems a little tired to me.

Research published this week by Copenhagen Consensus demonstrates that the world will only need to spend a small amount more each year to generate vast benefits. It estimates the additional cost of R&D this decade is about $5.5 billion annually—a relatively small sum, less even than Americans spend on ice cream every year.

This investment will generate better seeds and high-yield crops that can also better handle weather changes like those we will see from climate change. Creating bigger and more resilient harvests will benefit farmers and producing more food will help consumers with lower prices.

The report doesn’t go into exactly what the $61 billion ought to be spent on, but I hope genebanks turn out to be on the list.

1. Another recent article in the mainstream media about the Japanese genebank. Not entirely sure why, but let’s not look a gift horse etc etc. Couple nice examples of re-introduction of lost diversity to farmers.
2. And here’s the mainstream media in India (and the PM, no less) singing the praises of a farmer custodian of millet diversity.
3. The mainstream media in Zimbabwe doesn’t want to be left behind and jumps on the genebank bandwagon too with a piece about the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre.
4. Yes, silkworms need a genebank too, and China is all over it.
5. The Union of Concerned Scientists wants a new definition of food security and genebanks could probably help with that.

• Genetic diversity goals and targets have improved, but remain insufficient for clear implementation of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. The struggle to ensure recognition of the importance of measuring genetic diversity is real, despite the available tools. And despite the range of uses to which the results can be put, as illustrated in the following papers.
• DNA barcoding markers provide insight into species discrimination, genetic diversity and phylogenetic relationships of yam (Dioscorea spp.). Measuring genetic diversity can help you tell species apart.
• Genetic diversity and population structure of barley landraces from Southern Ethiopia’s Gumer district: Utilization for breeding and conservation. Measuring genetic diversity can help you decide what’s new and what to use in breeding.
• Management of genetic erosion: The (successful) case study of the pear (Pyrus communis L.) germplasm of the Lazio region (Italy). Measuring genetic diversity can help you detect genetic erosion and figure out what to do about it.
• Genetic and Pomological Determination of the Trueness-to-Type of Sweet Cherry Cultivars in the German National Fruit Genebank. Measuring genetic diversity can help you fix mistakes in genebanks.
• Genetic diversity and local adaption of alfalfa populations (Medicago sativa L.) under long-term grazing. Measuring genetic diversity can help you identify adaptive genes.
• A common resequencing-based genetic marker data set for global maize diversity. Measuring genetic diversity can help you pinpoint useful flowering genes.
• Genome-wide association study of variation in cooking time among common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) accessions using Diversity Arrays Technology markers. Measuring genetic diversity can help you identify carbon-friendly genes.
• Dissecting the genetic architecture of leaf morphology traits in mungbean (Vigna radiata (L.) Wizcek) using genome-wide association study. Measuring genetic diversity can help you find plants with nice leaves.
• Genetic Diversity Strategy for the Management and Use of Rubber Genetic Resources: More than 1,000 Wild and Cultivated Accessions in a 100-Genotype Core Collection. Measuring genetic diversity can help you go from over 1000 accessions to under 100.
• Sustainable seed harvesting in wild plant populations. Measuring genetic diversity can help you model optimal germplasm collecting strategies.
• Genetics of randomly bred cats support the cradle of cat domestication being in the Near East. Measuring genetic diversity can tell you where the cat was domesticated.
• Bacterial species diversity of traditionally ripened sheep legs from the Faroe Islands (skerpikjøt). Measuring genetic diversity can help you figure out how to ripen sheep legs properly.

1. Let’s say we wanted to transition to a more local and low-input production system in Europe. What seeds would we need and where would we get them from? The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament have some ideas.
2. IITA is pushing the yam bean in Nigeria. Europe next?
3. More on that new Australian wild tomato from a couple of years back. With audio goodness.
4. The largest ever einkorn variety comparison trial makes the German news. Well, makes a press release anyway. Yam bean next?
5. Another continent, another ancient grain: sorghum in the US. Yam bean next?
6. The Ethiopia Grass project aims to improve livestock production, food crop yields AND soil quality. The trifecta!
7. Nice infographics displaying dodgy data on the most common ingredients in different cuisines. Yam bean and einkorn nowhere to be seen.
8. Cool community-created online catalogue of British apples. Looking forward to the yam bean one.
9. It was drought that did for the Hittites, not lack of yam beans. Sea Peoples unavailable for comment.
10. It was Yersinia pestis from Issyk-Kul that nearly did for Europe in the Middle Ages. Yes, you can study the genetic diversity of ancient deadly bugs and well as crops like yam bean and einkorn.