Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The UPLB Graduate School Admission Portal for the second semester of the 2025-26 school year is now open, so if you want to apply for the MSc in Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Management, you have until 30 September. There are apparently some scholarships available.
I feel maybe yesterday’s Nibble on the definition of a “breed” may have been a bit too laconic, even for me. So let me give a bit more context.
The link was to a YouTube playlist, which was described thus (link added):
The presentations in this playlist are from the webinar on “Genomic assessment of genetic variation and the future of the breed concept”, originally held on 12.12.2024 under the umbrella of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). This represents the culmination of collaborative work by a diverse group of experts from institutions from all around the world to prepare materials for a sub-chapter in the upcoming 3rd Report on the State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
It amounts to over an hour of talks, but if I had to summarize the point the playlist is making, it is that genomics is redefining a breed as a fluid, porous, genotypically-characterized population rather than a fixed, pedigree-based, phenotypic entity. Thus, it is shifting livestock conservation from saving labels (“Breed A”) to preserving genetic options.
Here’s a handy table I came up with to describe the change:
Interesting to juxtapose this to the post a few days ago on how to value and use Indigenous knowledge to solve today’s problems. Would Indigenous livestock keepers necessarily care about those genetic options more than their traditional breed?
It would be great to hear from people engaged in livestock conservation on this. It’s unfortunately not a community I interact with much.
The journal Plant Genetic Resources is planning a special edition on Unlocking the Potential of National Genebanks: Tools, Strategies and Impact Metrics for sustainable Global Conservation. Katherine Baum of the Australian Grains Genebank is the Guest Editor, and the deadline is 31 October 2025. Sounds like fun.
An excellent article by friend-of-the-blog Alex Chepstow-Lusty in The Conversation highlights how the Incas built resilience into their landscapes in ways that modern farmers — and policymakers for that matter — would do well to revisit. By combining dung-producing llamas, irrigated terraces and carefully placed trees, Andean communities developed agricultural systems that thrived for centuries in a very challenging, and changing, environment.
These practices weren’t stop-gaps. They were sophisticated, locally adapted strategies, tested and refined over generations, that now offer clues for how to face climate change, in the high Andes and beyond.
But here’s the challenge: how do we, in today’s world, decide which elements of Indigenous knowledge to adopt, and how to adapt them? That’s where Chad Orzel’s thoughtful essay offers a valuable perspective. He argues that subjecting traditional practices to the same rigorous scientific standards as modern innovations is not an act of dismissal: it’s an act of respect. To test Indigenous methods carefully and fairly is to take them seriously, on an equal footing with other forms of knowledge.
The Inca legacy so well documented by Alex and his collaborators shows us that ancient practices can hold real solutions for modern crises. Orzel reminds us that by evaluating them with rigour, we not only unlock their potential, but also honour the people who developed and sustained them.
Indigenous knowledge deserves both recognition and respect — and the best way to respect knowledge is to test it, and put it to work.