- A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
- The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
- The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
- But then goes all serious with talk of trillions of dollars in benefits from sustainable food systems. Diversity not mentioned, alas, though, so one wonders about the point of the previous pieces.
- Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
- Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
- More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to. Seriously though, some crops do need more research, if only so they can be grown somewhere else.
- There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
- The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
- Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
- This piece about tomato diversity in Spain is worth reading for many reasons (heroic seed saving yada yada), but especially for the deadpan take on the Guardia Civil at the end.
- Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.
`More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to’
(The second part of comment 7 is exactly what the CGIAR has done for more than 50 years.)
The Financial Times report is very confused. African crops are described as `traditional’ or `indigenous’ or `neglected’ or `staples’ or even `colonial’ (apparently those for export). A clearer split is between `introduced’ (cassava, sweet potato, cocoa, maize, groundnut, Musa – part from ensete – common bean and tea and others), and `indigenous’ (tef, Bambara nut, cowpea, Sorghum and millets etc.). Purseglove in 1968 gave the reason for the predominance of introduced crops in Africa: they escape the continually evolving native pests and disease in their areas of origin. I wrote on it in 1988 (DOI 10.1016/0306-9192(88)90029-2).
Trying to adapt indigenous crops in Africa is not only very expensive but approaching the impossible—the continuously evolving pests and diseases in crop wild relatives will always constrain co-evolved native crops.
Almost cost-free solution: introduce crops away from their native co-evolved pest and disease load (and maintain effective quarantine). This is exactly what the USA did very well indeed starting over a hundred years ago, bringing in good varieties of everything and getting millions of samples out to what was a vast array of on-farm trials. It worked. “Agricultural exports from the United States were valued at 196.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2022”. Why ignore this method in Africa, with talk of `colonial crops’. They were actually a very useful diversity of new crops flooding into Africa after `Columbian exchange’.