In memory of Rainer Schultze-Kraft

Reproduced from Tropical Grasslands-Forrajes Tropicales with permission.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Rainer Schultze-Kraft, a friend, colleague and mentor, whose experience and in depth understanding of tropical forages made him an outstanding forage scientist. Rainer dedicated his career to tropical forage research and development, working at CIAT and University of Hohenheim. He was an avid germplasm collector and added almost 10,000 forage accessions to global collections. He was one of the original team to work on the tropical forages interactive selection tool to support use of forages and one of the founders of the journal, acting as managing editor and guiding the journal through the early years. His passing leaves a big gap in the tropical forages community that will be hard to fill and he will be sorely missed by his friends and colleagues.

There is also an obituary on the website of the Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT.

Brainfood: CGIAR impacts, Alternative ag, Landscape simplicity, Biocultural diversity, PPP, Bioversity & food security, Landrace legislation, Coffee ABS, Useful plants

The Coalition for Conservation Genetics is looking to grow

The Coalition for Conservation Genetics (CCG) brings together four field-leading organizations with a shared goal: Improving the integration of genetic information into conservation policy and practice.

If you think that sounds cool, consider applying to join. Deadline is 29 Feb.

This application is for potential new members of the Coalition for Conservation Genetics, or CCG. The CCG aims to better support policy and management of within-species genetic diversity globally, through outreach, coordination, dissemination, and engagement. We invite new members to help co-develop, plan and implement the future of the CCG as a global organization, and are excited to incorporate new vision, perspective, and leadership. We are seeking to expand our membership beyond high income and moderate-high income countries, and beyond mostly academic training, so we especially welcome applicants from, living in, and/or working in the Global South. Persons with government, non-profit, and indigenous and local knowledge or similar experience are also very welcome. Applicants do not need to be current members of the CCG founding networks (GEO BON, IUCN, SCB, and GBIKE).

Maroon rice destined for Svalbard

Really attentive long-time readers may remember us posting a video of an interview with Edith Adjako, a Surinamese woman of Maroon descent, recorded by ethnobotanist Dr Tinde van Andel. Dr van Andel and her colleagues have been studying Maroon agriculture and how it relates to African practices. Recall that the Maroons are the descendants of enslaved people who escaped captivity during colonial times and established communities in the interior of places like Suriname which survive to this day.

Well, as it happens, my colleagues and I recently checked out a project the Crop Trust is supporting in Suriname that involves the regeneration and safety duplication in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault of Maroon rice varieties. The project is coordinated by ADRON, the national rice research institute, but is a collaboration with Maroon communities, as well as with Dr van Andel’s institute. It has now been written up in The Guardian, no less.

Here you see farmers from the Saramaccan community visiting a demonstration plot of some 75 local rice varieties one of them established under the project.

And here’s a selection of recent papers on Maroon agriculture:

  1. The ‘Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed’ revisited: richness and significance of Old World crops grown by Suriname Maroons. “Spending time in the capital during childbirth or illness resulted in the loss of typical Maroon crops (e.g., Bambara groundnut), as seeds lost viability during the farmer’s absence. Motivation to grow specific crops and cultivars varied from tradition, food preference, seasonal spreading, rituals and traditional medicine.”
  2. The role of crop diversity in escape agriculture; rice cultivation among Maroon communities in Suriname. “Plots were farmed primarily by women and contained a broad range of different rice varieties. Naming and origin stories show a clear reference to the escape from plantations and the leading role of women in farming and food security. In some fields, a small patch was reserved for a rice type with very dark grains, used mostly for ritual purposes. Results also show adoption of more recently introduced rice varieties.”
  3. Vernacular Names of Traditional Rice Varieties Reveal the Unique History of Maroons in Suriname and French Guiana. “Maroon rice names are truly unique as they reflect the varieties that were available, the history of plantations and marronnage, climate aspects that influenced the selection of farmers, the many separate groups of runaways joining the Maroons, the adaptation to the Amazonian ecosystem, and their contacts with outsiders.”
  4. Maroon Women in Suriname and French Guiana: Rice, Slavery, Memory. “We combined information from ethnobotanical surveys, Maroon oral history, archival documents and published accounts to show how Maroon farmers today safeguard their agricultural diversity and cultural heritage by planting rice varieties that still carry the names of their female ancestors. We focus on a selected number of rice varieties named after the Saamaka ancestors Seei, Yaya and Paanza, Tjowa of the Matawai, Sapali, Ana and Baapa of the Ndyuka, and describe the stories attached to them.”

Nibbles: Cheese microbes, OSSI, Mung bean, Sustainable ag, Agroecology, Collard greens, African orphan crops, Olive diversity, Mezcal threats, German perry, Spanish tomatoes, N fixation

  1. A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
  2. The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
  3. The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
  4. 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.
  5. Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
  6. Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
  7. 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.
  8. There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
  9. The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
  10. Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
  11. 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.
  12. Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.