Author: Luigi Guarino

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Seed libraries take a stand

Seed-sharing initiatives — which allow participants to “borrow” seeds from a library at the beginning of the gardening season and “donate” seeds back to the library after harvest — are cropping up all across the country. They have become a proven way to help build community, support local agriculture, and kickstart the sharing movement.

What’s not to like, right? Well, USDA had some objections, for one, leading to a bit of a crackdown last year.

…library officials received a letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture notifying them that their seed library was in violation of the Seed Act of 2004. The Department of Agriculture sent a top official and attorneys to meet with library representatives. They explained that, while the Seed Act’s main focus is the selling of seeds, the department is also tasked with keeping mislabeled seeds, invasive plant species, cross-pollinated varietals, and poisonous plants out of the state. As part of their discussions, the department further informed the library that all seeds had to be tested for purity and germination rates.

Well, it’s a year on now, and things are looking up.

In both Minnesota and Nebraska, bills that specifically exempt non-commercial seed sharing from commercial seed laws were recently signed into law.

And the Feds are on board, so there won’t be midnight knocks on the door from the Seed Police.

…“the Department of Agriculture itself worked with us to create the language that they were happy with. To that extent, it feels that there’s a really positive message that can be brought from Minnesota, that the leader of this organization, that his state supported it.”

But if you think that’s all very well, but not much comfort to seed enthusiasts in the other 48 States, there’s a petition you can sign. I wonder if this will make it to the Supreme Court, and if so how Scalia will vote.

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Genebanks misunderstood again

“Seed banks were set up primarily to preserve the seeds of economically important crops, to keep a living bank of tissue with which we can grow these plants again in the future. The genome project is to preserve the genomic history and content of these plants so we can understand how life works.”

Oh yeah, because places like the Millennium Seed Bank don’t help at all in preserving the genomic content of plants and “understanding how life works.” And of course this has never been thought of before.

Comprehensive repositories of this kind would be “cool to have”, says Henrique Miguel Pereira, head of biodiversity conservation at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig. “But is it really the most important thing?” he asks.

Good question.

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De-balkanizing crop genomics

Genomics has a data problem, according to Nature. Not perhaps as big as YouTube’s, but…

Nevertheless, Desai says, genomics will have to address the fundamental question of how much data it should generate. “The world has a limited capacity for data collection and analysis, and it should be used well. Because of the accessibility of sequencing, the explosive growth of the community has occurred in a largely decentralized fashion, which can’t easily address questions like this,” he says. Other resource-intensive disciplines, such as high-energy physics, are more centralized; they “require coordination and consensus for instrument design, data collection and sampling strategies”, he adds. But genomics data sets are more balkanized, despite the recent interest of cloud-computing companies in centrally storing large amounts of genomics data.
…
Astronomers and high-energy physicists process much of their raw data soon after collection and then discard them, which simplifies later steps such as distribution and analysis. But genomics does not yet have standards for converting raw sequence data into processed data.

Leave aside for a minute that last sentence, which is generating some heat on Twitter…

…it is certainly worthwhile highlighting the balkanization of genomics datasets. But then, why not mention that in at least one area — crop diversity — there are some useful initiatives underway, like DivSeek. Which Nature knows about.

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Invisible Angola

Kew botanist David Goyder had a thought-provoking blog post a couple of days back describing the relative lack of floristic data from Angola. Here’s his map of plant collection data for southern Africa, from GBIF:

GBIF Angola_2015_6a

Angola emerges quite clearly as a gap, particularly the interior. There’s lots of reasons for that, not least landmines, as Goyder points out, and there are also efforts underway to redress the situation. But the thought that the map provoked in me was, of course, whether the situation was similar for crops. So here’s what Genesys knows about crop germaplasm collections in southern Africa:

Angola genesys

It seems the answer is a pretty resounding yes. Again, you can clearly trace the borders of Angola by where the genebank accessions end. There is, in fact, though, a very active national genebank in Angola, which has been collecting the country’s crop diversity for years, landmines or no landmines:

A total of 441 accessions were collected during a mult-crop collection in Huila province, Namibi province and Malanga province in 2004. With these collections, NPGRC now has a representative sample from 55% of the total number of districts in the country and representing 60% of the recognized agricultural zones (MIIA).

But when will we be able to see the data?

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Climate smart agriculture = diverse agriculture, and vice versa

USAID is seeking feedback on the climate smart agriculture (CSA) strategy of its Feed the Future programme. Recall that CSA has three objectives 1

  • Sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes.
  • Adapting and building resilience to climate change.
  • Reducing and/or removing greenhouse gas emissions, where appropriate.

So it’s that triple-win we’re after, and it’s good to see diversification being highlighted in that context by the strategy document:

In general, Mission FTF programs work within diversified production systems that reflect farmer choice around crops, livestock or fish although one value chain may be the focus. Diversification includes not only the number of crops, but also using a wider range of improved varieties and staggered planting times for a given crop. Over a longer time period, crop choices by farmers may shift as risks with one crop rise while another crop option is viewed as a safer bet. Thus diversification can be a strategy for managing risk and optimizing returns, particularly when informed by information on potential shocks, seasonal forecasts and long term climate trends. Ultimately, it will be farmers who directly determine their risks, but FTF programs can help widen the array of appropriate options that confer greater resilience as well as more efficient production with a concomitant reduced GHG footprint.

But why a wider range of only improved varieties? Don’t landraces or varietal or other types of mixtures have any role to play at all? And why mention staggered planting times, but not intercropping, say?

And, most importantly, why no mention at all of conservation of crop diversity as a prerequisite for diversification, and the role of genebanks in that? After all…

…it is likely that some (if not all) countries will need germplasm that is currently grown elsewhere to adapt.

And where is that going to come from if not genebanks? You can let USAID know until noon on August 14, 2015.