Luigi Guarino

May 14, 2024May 14, 2024

Happy birthday ILRI genebank

The genebank of the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa is 40 years old. There’s an online celebration tomorrow. See you there.

Photo credit: Shawn Landersz, Consultant at The Global Crop Diversity Trust

Oh, and probably coincidentally, you can read about ILRI’s forage work in Somalia in the latest newsletter from the Seed Systems Group.

May 13, 2024May 8, 2024

Brainfood: Yield gap, Domestication & breeding, TEK, Breeding gourds, Breeding pearl millet, Breeding peas, Banana seed systems, Breeding bees

Global spatially explicit yield gap time trends reveal regions at risk of future crop yield stagnation. For 8 of 10 major crops, yield gaps have widened steadily from 1975 to 2010 over most areas, and remained static for sugar cane and oil palm. Time to turbo-charge the breeding?
Domestication and the evolution of crops: variable syndromes, complex genetic architectures, and ecological entanglements. If you want to turbo-charge breeding, you need to understand (among other things) the ecological context of domestication.
Including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in Agricultural Research: Guidelines and Lessons Learned. I suspect Traditional Ecological Knowledge can help with figuring out the ecological context of domestication.
High levels of genetic variation and differentiation in wild tropical gourds provide a novel resource for cucurbit crop improvement. Ok, but ecological knowledge would like a word.
Understanding genetic diversity in drought-adaptive hybrid parental lines in pearl millet. Any link to ecology of original collecting sites, I wonder?
Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis of a Diverse Panel of Pea (Pisum sativum). Again, ecological knowledge conspicuous by its absence. Maybe the passport data just weren’t up to it?
Banana seed exchange networks in Burundi – Linking formal and informal systems. Yes, yes, it’s not just about the breeding, the seed system also has to work.
Editorial: Current status of honey bee genetic and breeding programs: progress and perspectives. Pollinators need breeding programmes too.

May 10, 2024May 13, 2024

Leaders of crop diversity conservation land World Food Prize

Great to see a couple of my former bosses recognized for their exceptional contributions to the conservation of crop diversity.

I like this quote from Geoff:

This is really a chance to get that message out and say, look, this relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that we’re going to be able to feed the world in 50 years.

May 3, 2024May 3, 2024

Forgotten crops in the limelight

The paper “Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa for healthy diets in a changing climate” by Maarten van Zonneveld, Roeland Kindt, Stepha McMullin, Enoch G. Achigan-Dako, Sognigbé N’Danikou, Wei-hsun Hsieh, Yann-rong Lin, and Ian K. Dawson has won the PNAS 2023 Cozzarelli Prize for the best paper of the year in Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. Here’s the abstract:

As the climate changes, major staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa becomes increasingly vulnerable. Underutilized traditional food plants offer opportunities for diversifying cropping systems. In this study, the authors used climate niche modeling to assess the potential of 138 traditional food plants to diversify or replace staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa by 2070. The authors report that staple crops may no longer be able to grow at approximately 10% of locations by 2070. Further, the authors identified 58 traditional crops that provide complementary micronutrient contents suitable for integration into staple cropping systems under current and projected climatic conditions. The results suggest that diversifying sub-Saharan African food production with underutilized crops could improve climate resilience and dietary health.

And here’s a video explaining the results:

May 3, 2024May 3, 2024

A world farm, illustrated

Benjamin Nowak, a “French lecturer in agronomy with teaching and research activities focused on soil sciences and remote sensing for crop monitoring,” has a nice infographic showing “what a large farm would look like, growing all the world’s crops.” Pretty cool. But where’s all the ganja?

A high-resolution version is available.