Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

June 27, 2025June 30, 2025

Rice, rich folks, and reasons for hope

How much trouble is agriculture facing because of climate change?

There are lots of studies out there that seek to predict the effect of changes in rainfall and temperature on the yield of this or that crop, in this or that part of the world. There are even plenty of studies that look at what might happen to a whole bunch of crops on a global scale.

But they pretty much all have the drawback that they don’t take into account that farmers could in fact adapt, whether by changing crop or variety, or the way they manage their crops, for example through more irrigation. They may end up doing ok, at least for some crops in some places.

That’s a pretty big drawback, because it makes it difficult to prioritize.

But it’s also difficult to know what do about it. Farmers could potentially do a million different things, and even neighbouring farmers might do quite different things. How do you figure out what the effect on yields will be of all these things, everywhere?

A major global study in Nature has just tackled the problem by forgetting about the “what” and focusing on the “how much.” ¹

The authors looked at the yields over time of six staple crops — cassava, maize, rice, sorghum, soyabeans and wheat, or two thirds of global calories — across 12,600 regions of the world. They then calculated how well farmers have actually been coping with increasing temperatures, irrespective of what specifically they are doing, and then projected that level of success into an even warmer future.

The findings are striking. Adaptation is happening, but just not enough. It can alleviate 23% of global losses in 2050 and 34% at the end of the century; or 6% and 12%, respectively, for a moderate-emissions scenario. That’s worth having, but still leaves us with a mountain to climb. We’re going to have to keep breeding better crops, faster, and we’ll need the diversity in genebanks to do that.

I see two bright spots of hope in the gloom. One is that rice is predicted to do ok. And the other is that while the world’s poorest are as usual predicted to take a big hit, so are the world’s richest. Which might encourage them to actually do something about it.

June 24, 2025June 25, 2025

Noah? No way!

In the latest GROW webinar, Prof. Stef de Haan, of the International Potato Centre and more recently Wageningen University and Research, explains how genebanks alone won’t preserve crop diversity adequately unless linked with farmer custodians, local seed systems, and policy spaces. Sounds like he also falls squarely in the middle in the old Erna vs Otto bunfight.

To save you googling, the Rikuy Agrobio website he mentions, with the community-level tools for monitoring crop diversity, is here. And you can explore potato diversity in on-farm hotspots on wikiPapa here. Both only in Spanish so far, but well worth looking into. Fascinating stuff, and obviously valuable, but I do wonder how to scale up this sort of thing to all crops, everywhere.

June 23, 2025June 23, 2025

Brainfood: Protein, AnGR, Indian chickens, US Mashona cattle, Asiatic wild ass, European Neolithic pigs, Low methane pastures, American dogs, Baker’s yeast, Lager yeast

Links between protein-source diversity, household behavior, and protein consumption inadequacy in the Indian rural semi-arid tropics. More diversity in protein sources, including livestock, would probably lead to more consumption, especially if linked to more education on its importance.
Integrating Local and Indigenous Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (LIAnGRFA) into global biodiversity governance. We wont keep livestock diversity for long if we don’t integrate its conservation into existing mechanisms.
Introduction to chicken genetic resources of India: a comprehensive review. India seems to agree with the above, at least with regards to its chickens, and is doing something about it.
Out of Africa: genetic characterization and diversity of Mashona cattle in the United States. Something will certainly have to be done about the Mashona in the US if its interesting but limited diversity is to survive.
Impacts of Climate-Land Dynamics on Global Population and Sub-Populations of a Desert Equid. Ditto for the Asiatic wild ass, although I suppose its contribution to human protein supply is pretty safe.
Archaeogenomic insights into commensalism and regional variation in pig management in Neolithic northwest Europe. Even Neolithic European farmers managed the diversity of their livestock, pigs in this case.
Agronomic performance, herbage quality, methane yield and methane emission potential of pasture mixtures. All those diverse livestock might as well be eating the sort of feed that leads to lower methane emissions.
Ancient dog mitogenomes support the dual dispersal of dogs and agriculture into South America. Domestic dogs were taken into South America along with maize, according to their genetic structure. No word on whether they were used as protein sources.
Footprints of Human Migration in the Population Structure of Wild Baker’s Yeast. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is something else whose genetic structure was heavily influenced by early farmers, and indeed continues to be by modern farming.
Revealing the ancient origins of blonde beers: Phylogeography and phylogenetics of cryotolerant fermentative yeast Saccharomyces eubayanus from pre-Hispanic pottery in Northwestern Patagonia, Argentina. Did those early South American farmers ferment their maize, I wonder? They had the yeast for it, which eventually made it to Europe and gave us lager. And no, beer is not a good protein source.

June 16, 2025June 16, 2025

Brainfood: Rice breeding, Sorghum parents, Cowpea diversity, Sweet potato double, Lesser yam uses, Tomato breeding, Peanut hybrids, Rice wild relatives, Sorghum genetic erosion

Future flooding tolerant rice germplasm: Resilience afforded beyond Sub1A gene. You want to make rapid breeding progress? You need the “Transition from Trait to Environment” approach. As far as I can tell, this means that you fix your trait of interest in a pool of elite parents before using it in proper yield breeding.
Prioritizing parents from global genebanks to breed climate-resilient crops. Yeah but how do you find your trait of interest in the first place. You start with passport and genotyping data from genebank collections of course.
Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) landraces in Mozambique and neighbouring Southern African countries harbour genetic loci with potential for climate adaptation. You see what I mean?
Genetic diversity and population structure of Colombian sweet potato genotypes reveal possible adaptations to specific environmental conditions. Ok, now do you see what I mean?
Genetic diversity analysis and duplicates identification of new sweetpotato accessions collected in China. Manage your duplicates though, right?
The lesser yam Dioscorea esculenta (Lour.) Burkill: a neglected crop with high functional food potential. This doesn’t have decent collections, let alone duplicates.
Molecular screening of wild and cultivated tomato germplasm reveals potential materials for multi-locus disease resistance breeding. Again, thank goodness for genebanks — plural.
First report on trait segregation in F1 hybrids between the cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) and the wild incompatible species A. glabrata Benth. I wonder if this could be used in tomato.
A blueprint for tapping the wild relatives for crop improvement: A success story of CWR-derived rice varieties, Nông Dân 1 and Nông Dân 2. No need for embryo rescue here. No word on the need for submergence tolerance.
Genetic diversity in in situ and ex situ collections of sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] landraces. Diversity is still out there, at least in India. Which is great. But how would you know without genebanks? And you need genebanks for breeders to use it.
And to cap things off, a new occasional feature: A ChatGPT-generated one-sentence summary of the week’s Brainfood. “To breed crops for climate resilience and future food security, you need to systematically mine, manage, and mobilize the diversity stored in genebanks—especially landraces and wild relatives—and integrate it into elite breeding pipelines using smart, trait-targeted strategies.”

June 13, 2025June 15, 2025

Erna vs Otto

Is it possible to distil the ongoing debate over how to conserve plant genetic resources into the contrasting views of two people?

For Julia Nordblad of the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, the answer is a resounding yes, if the two people are Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett, both very much friends of the blog. She sets out her argument in a paper that is just out:

…Frankel and Bennett exemplify that there are indeed different versions of planetary temporalities that imagine the entanglements between the social and the planetary differently, and thus end up promoting distinctive politics for amending diversity loss and saving evolution. For Frankel, the solution lay within the temporality of development. Modern technology could be used to replace the storage of evolutionary time in the “primitive” agriculture, and progressive norms could emerge that would achieve protection of wild evolutionary time in the natural world. For Bennett in contrast, development was not the only possible historical trajectory, but a particular historical process driven by economic and political interest. Her vision of how evolutionary time should be protected was to let it be decentralized in varied agricultural practices shielded from corporate interest that would otherwise quickly drive diversity down and eclipse the evolutionary temporal horizon.

So it’s possible. But is it helpful?

Well, I’m torn. You can certainly find descriptions of the early days of the crop diversity conservation movement that have a larger cast of characters. Like for example the equally recent Australia’s Search for Greener Pastures: The Foundations of the Global Genetic Resources Movement, 1926-1980 by Derek Byerlee. Or the earlier but still canonical Scientists, Plants and Politics: A History of the Plant Genetic Resources Movement, by Robin Pistorius.

But there’s something satisfyingly protean about Bennett and Frankel — and indeed their sort-of-rivalry. So I’m going to say that it is indeed helpful — at least to get you started understanding this history.

And speaking of protean: where would Vavilov stand? If I read another recent paper correctly, by Jeffrey Wall of the University of Turku, somewhere in the middle. Probably a good place to be.