Brainfood: Safflower diversity, Afghan wheat diversity, Cassava diversity, SP drought tolerance, Olive diversity, Community genebanks, Organic yield meta-analysis, On farm success, Standardizing phenotyping, Wild collecting

3 Replies to “Brainfood: Safflower diversity, Afghan wheat diversity, Cassava diversity, SP drought tolerance, Olive diversity, Community genebanks, Organic yield meta-analysis, On farm success, Standardizing phenotyping, Wild collecting”

  1. As usual, thank you for all the great leads. The link to ‘Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on farm conservation projects? All you need is two graphs’ didn’t work for me. Would you mind posting that again? Gracias~

  2. I remain very doubtful about the value of on-farm conservation in addressing climate change: there are better ways of getting sounder results, namely collecting and ex-situ evaluation leading to breeding link to seed systems. In a couple of papers published around than twenty years ago we looked at the value of `dynamic’ conservation on-farm [D. Wood and J. Lenné 1993, 1997]. These looked at the cropping system and the ability to change over time better to meet changing conditions, but much more by crop and varietal introduction than by the ability of individual varieties of adapt over decades or millennia. These ideas were based on the enormous value of crop introduction (needed as local crops and varieties get `old and tired’ from a losing battle with biotic constraints), on seed systems on a range of scales, and on the everlasting (and sometimes desperate) search by farmers in drier environments for new varieties (at one time I was told, specifically,: `From other countries’).
    Given we are thirty years into on-farm conservation, there is a shameful lack of clear evidence for adaptive change of individual varieties uninfluenced by crossing from other varieties. For example, this Bellon et al. paper gives only one reference to supposed adaptive evolution on farm (Vigouroux et al., 2011b), which is a paper on pearl millet: `Selection for earlier flowering crop associated with climatic variations in the Sahel’ [ DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019563 ] However, from the evidence in this pearl millet paper it is impossible to dismiss the confusing factor of the introduction of new, earlier-flowering, varieties and the subsequent crossing of these with existing varieties. This is very thin evidence indeed to hang general recommendations for on-farm conservation to allow evolutionary response to climate change.
    If you want early maturity in pearl millet read the story of Okashana 1 in Namibia, based on the West African farmers’ early maturing variety `Iniadi’.
    It is far more likely that cropping system adaptive change comes predominantly not from autochthonous varieties over time but from off-farm seed systems form near and (very) far. It seems that plant breeders, agronomists, and seed specialist can better help farmers in the introduction of pre-adapted varieties than any wait-and-see on-farm conservation project. There are vast CGIAR data-bases going back 50 years on regional trials with improved and landrace germplasm of dozens of species that could be trawled for pre-adaptations to various modes of climate change.
    With the need for dynamic management of cropping systems the term `on-farm conservation’ should be consigned to the scrap-heap.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *