Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 4, 2026October 4, 2026

The bit in between

We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation is done, in its different ways, both on farms and in genebanks. But it may be that the most interesting – and intractable – bit of the process is what happens between those places.

A new IIED report, Nature Nurture: How to keep agrobiodiverse forest and farm systems alive in the modern world, looks at local collective community organisations in Indonesia, the Philippines and Tanzania and how they support on-farm conservation and use of crop diversity. In Tanzania, community seed banks lend seed to farmers, who return it after harvest; seed exchanges have brought previously little known local varieties into the banks. In the Philippines, a demonstration farm maintains traditional sweetpotato varieties for distribution. In Indonesia, producer groups run nurseries while much seed management remains in farmers’ hands.

Farmer-run seed banks, demonstration farms and nurseries give communities ways to organise for themselves the conservation and use of crop diversity. That’s great. But what if something goes wrong? A crop disappears from a village. A variety falls out of use in a district. A community seed bank loses its stock. And what if a variety being maintained in one place could be useful somewhere else, perhaps very far away?

This is where the bit in between comes into play.

Nature Nurture has very little to say about how seeds and knowledge move to and fro between farmers and community organisations on one side and formal genebanks on the other. It recognizes their complementarity, but deals with it in a single sentence: “While ex-situ conservation remains an important safeguard against genetic erosion, the farmer-led and Indigenous systems that actively sustain agrobiodiversity within living production landscapes must have greater recognition and investment.” That’s all true, but somehow insufficient.

The report does promise practical guidance for collective organisations in its next phase. How they can connect with national genebanks would be a good place to start. Meanwhile, though, national genebanks should be doing the same. Maybe by re-thinking their information systems, as I suggested a few days ago.

October 3, 2026October 3, 2026

Two legends of agricultural transformation

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 land sharing business. Everybody wins.

A new paper in Agriculture and Human Values calls this a “policy legend”: a complicated and contested body of research gets turned into a simple, reassuring story about technology and intensification. The politics of who owns land, who benefits from intensification, what gets produced and where, and what happens to rural livelihoods very conveniently disappear from the equation.

But the other side of the debate has its own temptations. Agroecology as a movement is often explicit about context, politics and food sovereignty. Yet it too can occasionally shrink to something that’s cosily tidy: conventional agriculture is the problem, agroecology is the solution, here are some desirable practices, get farmers to switch.

Another new paper, this one in Ecological Economics, also makes that story look way too simple. And you know how we love that here. The authors look at 2,721 farms in six African countries and find very different starting points for the transition to agroecology, and different trajectories. The smallest farms tend to combine autonomy and income diversification; larger farms more often go for some crop-livestock integration; small and medium farms may put more land into legumes for soil health.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The way farmers make decisions is complicated. And I coincidentally came across a study in Food and Nutrition Bulletin that illustrates that rather well, albeit on a small scale. Surveys of 26 farmers in the Ecuadorian highlands found that they grew diversity for economic reasons, sure, but also for social, emotional or health and safety reasons. And, rather wonderfully, sometimes simply because they liked it.

Farm size, labour availability, markets, tenure, risk, access to inputs, knowledge, household objectives and yes, sheer aesthetics, all shape what farmers can do, are willing to do, and indeed eventually end up doing. Change one part of the system, and you can change the economics of the rest.

So why do we keep reaching for legends?

Simple stories are useful, I guess. They fit snugly into funding proposals, policy briefs and campaign slogans, and every camp needs something to organise around. Unfortunately, agriculture is way messier than the legends we tell about it.

October 2, 2026October 2, 2026

Transition at CGN

Theo van Hintum, is moving on from his gig as Head of the CGN-Plant group, and the job is being advertised, albeit under a slightly different name. Theo has come up several times on the blog over the years. Which is not surprising, as he’s been a pillar of the global plant genebank community for decades. We wish him all the best in his new endeavours, and look forward to welcoming his successor.

September 29, 2026September 29, 2026

Featured: Wurzels and mangelwurzels

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 need reinforced trolleys to stock them but I can see small holdings and pig fanciers growing them to feed their livestock. Plenty of seeds to be had in European genebanks, some collected by me, but they may be found under other names like mangolds or fodder beet. I’d love to visit the Somerset festival though — wonder where they get their seeds from?

September 28, 2026September 28, 2026

Brainfood: Archaeology edition

Editorial: Food matters. Antiquity‘s editorial puts food at the centre of archaeology, a window onto societies, economies, identities and power: a fair place to start a run of items that dig into the evidence.
Pottery residues provide earliest direct evidence for domestication and dairy processing in equatorial Mainland Southeast Asia. Molecular traces in ancient pottery provide direct evidence for animal domestication and dairy processing 3000 years ago where the rest of the archaeological record can be frustratingly coy. Complicates assumptions that dairying was restricted by tropical conditions or in pastoral societies.
Agricultural Practices of Rice and Millet at the Largest Zhou Dynasty Settlement by the Weishui River in South-Central China. How rice (mainly) and millets (foxtail and broomcorn) were grown, processed and consumed side by side, 1046-256 BCE.
Ancient DNA reveals early use of melons in China’s Song dynasty. Genetic evidence from archaeological remains pushes back the record of melon use in China (960-1279 CE). They weren’t domesticated there, though. And they weren’t sweet.
Origin and Dispersal of Domestic Chickens in Africa: Integrating Archaeological, Genetic and Historical Evidence. Archaeology is combined with genetics and history to trace how chickens arrived and spread across the continent in waves: via Egypt around 300 BC, then Indian Ocean connections during the first millennium AD, the trans-Saharan trade, Bantu movements and regional exchange networks.
Betel nut sucking is the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug. Not just food though. The archaeological record for habitual plant-drug use turns out to reach back a long way, approximately 25,000 and 16,000 years ago to be not-so-precise.
Plants and Humans in the Ancient Near East. No, plants are definitely not just food. A new volume treating plants as active participants in religion, art and symbolism, with chapters on plants as persons in Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and on meeting gods under trees in the Hebrew Bible.