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How to revive your landraces

How can we help get humble heirloom varieties of the humble potato back into cultivation? Well, fortunately, Potato News Today 1 has a handy step-by-step guide, which I reproduce verbatim below:

  1. Start with a story you can legally sell. In Europe/UK, use the conservation-variety route; in North America, lean on certified seed suppliers and Indigenous stewardship agreements.
  2. Source clean, traceable stock. CIP and the U.S. Potato Genebank maintain indexed, disease-tested material; combine with reputable local seed houses.
  3. Pilot with chefs and specialty retail. Early-season launches with menu credit and a farm feature move the needle.
  4. Package the provenance. PDO/PGI examples like Jersey Royal and Papas Antiguas de Canarias show how origin, agronomy, and micro-harvest rituals create value.
  5. Engineer storage for shape and use. Follow the curing/holding guidance above.
  6. Ride the calendar. Tie launches and media to the International Day of Potato (30 May) or to local potato festivals.

Sounds pretty sensible, and applicable to other crops as well, I suspect, with a little tweak here and there.

The article also has a list of case studies. This doesn’t include any examples from Italy, but coincidentally a recent paper describes just such a thing. Which maybe points to something that is missing from the Potato News Today playbook, and that is having lots of interesting characterization and other data on your heirloom landraces handy to help get them ready for prime time.

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Before the flood

So, three years back, I posted about the floods in Pakistan, and how genebanks could potentially help farmers recover any crop diversity they lost because of them. But wouldn’t it be even better if the danger of flooding could be predicted? That way crop diversity from at-risk areas could be collected, if not already in genebanks, and multiplied up ready to be distributed should disaster strike.

Well, a recent paper does just that, using AI, no less: “We use our model predictions to identify historically flood-prone areas in Ethiopia and demonstrate real-time disaster response capabilities during the May 2024 floods in Kenya.”

I’ve managed to geo-reference a screen grab of the Ethiopia map provided in the paper using MapWarper, import it into Google Earth, and add the locations of sorghum landraces as reported in Genesys. Here’s what I got.

Unlike in the Pakistan example, there’s not much in the way of genebank accessions from areas of Ethiopia that are particularly at risk from flooding, it seems from this. However, Genesys does not (yet) include geographic provenance data for sorghum from the national genebank of Ethiopia. The 4000-odd sorghum accession from Ethiopia currently in Genesys are conserved at ICRISAT.

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Brainfood: Defining domestication, Pig domestication, Archaeological orphan crops, Levant Neolithic causes, Altiplano agricultural origins, Irish cattle, Islamic Green Revolution, Ancient fish DNA, Ancient Chinese rice

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Who feeds the world anyway?

For decades, the mantra of “feeding the world” has dominated discussions about agricultural development and food security. The logic sounds straightforward: more food production equals less hunger.

Michael Grunwald, in his new book Feeding the World But Killing the Planet, acknowledges agriculture’s environmental toll but insists that industrial farming—backed by technological fixes—is necessary to meet humanity’s caloric demands. He doesn’t challenge the system, he documents ways to optimize it.

But others argue this is a dangerous simplification. In The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World”, which starts by quoting Grunwald, authors from the Agroecology Research-Action Collective contend that hunger isn’t primarily about food shortages — it’s about poverty, inequality, and political exclusion. The production-first mantra, they argue, legitimizes destructive farming practices that serve elites while leaving the root causes of hunger untouched. They come up with a slogan of their own for the alternative: “a world that feeds itself.”

One camp calls for systemic change — agroecology, local food sovereignty, and policies that tackle inequality. The other seeks to refine the existing model with new technologies that deliver efficiency gains. Both see the ecological risks, but diverge on whether to reinvent or retrofit the system. 2

It occurs to me that I could fall back on my own usual ploy of observing with a self-satisfied smirk that, either way, crop diversity will be needed. But maybe it’s time to do away with catchphrases altogether. It’s more complicated, and more important, than that.