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Weed all about it

I think I vaguely knew that USDA had a hemp collection, but I would definitely not have been able to say that it was located in Geneva, NY, that it may be the largest in the world, or that it only started in 2021. Fortunately, though, the researchers responsible for the collection organized a USDA Hemp Stakeholder Event at Cornell AgriTech on September 10, and the good people at the International Hemp Podcast are summarizing the proceedings in a series of four episodes. Episode 1 is out and it includes those tidbits I began with, as well as lots of other interesting information, about hemp in particular but also more generally about how the US genebank system works. Well worth a listen.

But is it the largest collection in the world? Well, the podcast says it has over 800 accessions, and GRIN does indeed return 871 (714 active, 92 available). However, Genesys, which gets its USDA data from GRIN, says 569, which is at least closer to the “N > 600 accessions” on the webpage of the USDA Hemp Germplasm Laboratory. As it’s a fairly new collection, this all probably just means that its numbers go up fairly frequently and USDA just hasn’t updated either its website or its data on Genesys lately. Anyway, that would still make it more accessions than at VIR (491), but fewer than in Ukraine (610). That Ukraine number is split over two institutes, though. So it does look like USDA has managed to put together the world’s largest hemp collection in just 5 years. Pretty impressive.

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Give farmers room to grow

Farmers conserve and improve the crop diversity around them. They have been doing it for millennia. Their livelihoods depend on it. But how much more might they be able to do?

Consider the coconut. Farmers know which palms have characteristics they value, but with ordinary open pollination they can choose the mother but not the father of future coconuts. A recent paper proposes relatively simple techniques that would allow farmers to control pollination and thus choose both parents and produce more predictable seednuts. It won’t turn them into breeders, but it could help them produce — and maybe even sell — better planting material.

Tamarind presents a different version of the same problem. Much of the African crop still comes from scattered, semi-wild trees. Harvesters know which trees are best, but turning a particularly good tree into a reliable source of planting material is hard. Seedlings don’t necessarily reproduce the parent’s characteristics, and tamarind takes years to mature. Grafting and other forms of vegetative propagation exist, but have not been widely adopted, according to a recent review.

There’s a nice example from southern Africa that gives a glimpse of what might be. Researchers are identifying exceptionally productive wild fruit trees in the miombo woodlands and cloning them through grafting and air-layering. A tree that might otherwise take around a dozen years to fruit can produce within four or five when propagated this way.

But it doesn’t have to be a researcher doing that. A farmer or harvester who knows a particularly productive tree, or one with especially good fruit, could propagate it through cloning rather than relying on whatever seedlings happen to arise.

Coconut and tamarind aren’t the same, and neither are the technologies needed. But the principle is similar. We sometimes fall into the error of thinking that conserving and improving crop diversity are things done for farmers, whether in a genebank, a breeding programme or a research station. But they already do these things. Sometimes they just need a little room to try doing them a little bit differently.

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Africa gets behind genebanks

The African Union Commission organized a Seed Summit under the theme “Resilient Seed Systems for a Food Secure Africa”, hosted by the Kingdom of Eswatini from 5-7 October 2026.

The results are summarized in the Ezulwini Outcome Document, which includes the following:

Given the precarious state of many national genebanks, it’s really good to see the call to “strengthen and sustainably finance…” them “…in Member States.” Though I would have preferred to see that phrased as “…by Member States.”

The document is a ministerial outcome that I believe still has to go through AU policy organs for validation and endorsement, so nothing here is binding yet. It sets no funding figures, timelines or locations for the continental genebank, and it uses verbs like “support” and “request” rather than “establish.” Nevertheless, the recognition of the importance of genebanks is very welcome. We will keep a beady eye on how this develops.

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Rounding off the 20th anniversary celebrations

I’ve been celebrating 20 years of the blog with deep dives into its past, focusing on my favourite recurring themes. I did one post a day for a week, but I could have gone on for a month, I reckon. By way of summary, here are the links:

Let me know in the comments or on social media if you have your own favourite subject you’d like explored in the archives, and I’ll see what I can do. Or you can do it yourself and send me the results and I’ll share them on the blog.

BTW, since we’re reminiscing, this is what Jeremy had to say about the blog on its 15th birthday.

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Eucalyptus: it’s complicated

Are eucalyptus plantations good or bad?

I’ve been wondering about this one for a while. Back in 2010, I wrote about my mother-in-law’s eucalypts near Limuru in Kenya. She had been tending and coppicing them for years, and they were her main source of firewood. When part of the plantation was felled by government decree, she considered planting indigenous trees, but eucalypts were, as I put it then, “too fast-growing to give up altogether.”

Two new studies make the same point rather more systematically. In Uganda, eucalyptus plantations appear to have some positive effects on livelihood, including higher cattle holdings than among households near pine plantations, without producing the sweeping negative effects sometimes attributed to them. In Brazil, mixed eucalyptus–native plantations (as a transitional stage in restoration) produced substantially more biomass than native-only plantings, while allowing native trees to regenerate. The timber income also covered a significant proportion of restoration costs.

So the value of eucalyptus depends on what it’s doing there, what it replaced, what else is growing with it, and what people are getting from it. A plantation replacing native forest is one thing. Eucalyptus providing firewood to my mother-in-law, generating income from degraded land, or helping pay for ecological restoration is another.

The tree is the same. The story isn’t.