- Cantabria is putting the Pasiega cow in the bank. Just in case.
- Spain’s “goat-cows” are fighting wildfires the old-fashioned way: by eating the fuel. I hope they’re in the bank too.
- India has made a Badri calf in a lab. Conservation meets IVF.
- Old apples are having a revival. Turns out forgotten apple varieties can taste pretty good. Well I never, is it that time of year already?
- Zimbabwe’s Mbire district celebrates seed, food and culture with a festival. What, no cows? Or apples?
- South Korea is looking for partners to save climate-resilient plants. A seed vault is better with friends.
- The marmottier can’t decide whether it’s a plum or an apricot. Botanists sympathise.
- In the atomic age, gardeners irradiated seeds and waited for something interesting to grow. Sometimes it did.
Brainfood: Opportunity crops, meet your constraints
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There’s a wave of groundwork being laid — genomic, cultural, and geospatial — for opportunity crops, but the governance, disease-pressure, market and environmental constraints that marginalized them in the first place are still very much active, and in some cases actively winning.
- Constraints on crop diversification under drought: Multi-scale evidence from California’s San Joaquin Valley. Consolidation, land tenure and water access limits farmers’ ability to switch crops.
- Fragmented urban food governance and impacts on the marginalisation of indigenous crops in Ghana. City plans sideline indigenous crops, and communities pay the price.
- Full Genome Characterization of the Causal Virus of Yellow Mosaic Disease in Mungbean Minicore Accessions. Technical barriers block the path from potential to harvest.
- Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav.: evolutionary history, domestication, genetic resources and future opportunities for an overlooked Andean crop. Genomic evidence reveals substantial diversity in this overlooked Andean pepper but also major conservation gaps, particularly in Bolivia, highlighting opportunities for both crop improvement and biocultural conservation.
- Bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia (L.) Willd.): current research advances and future perspectives for a neglected legume crop. It was dropped because of anti-nutritional quirks, but should, and could, return for marginal lands.
- Genetic characterization of a global collection of common buckwheat to harness genetic resources for agricultural diversity. Hidden diversity is still out there.
- Genotype-by-sequencing of global hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus) collections provides genomic resources for crop conservation and improvement. Diversity survives in farmer fields and genebanks.
- Wild Edible Greens Heritage in Western Crete and Its Resilience Across Greek Islands: The Role of Small-Scale Farming, Biodiversity, and Isolation. Small-scale farming sustains knowledge of wild edible greens across Greek islands, showing that opportunity crops depend on living farming cultures.
- African Crop Calendar: A geo-referenced dataset of crop growing seasons across diverse agro-ecological regions. Where (or should that be when) alternative crops might fit within agricultural systems.
Nibbles: Frafra, Seed multiplication, Quality seeds, Balearic genebank, Indigenous trees double, Bruno cart, Belgian wild yeast
- Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break.
- Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver found his own, swapping the wheel for seed multiplication and turning five acres into a livelihood, proof that sometimes the missing link in a seed system is just someone willing to do the unglamorous middle bit well.
- Which is, per Farming First, precisely Africa’s problem at scale: only 2.5% of smallholder seed in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from formal seed companies, so a few million more bus-driver-style multipliers wouldn’t hurt.
- Meanwhile in the Balearics, the opposite direction of travel: the local seed bank is expanding to rescue tomatoes, onions and broad beans, and is looking for farmers willing to take them back.
- Indigenous fruit trees in Malawi turn out to fight malnutrition and biodiversity loss at once. Happy coincidence?
- Getting those trees into the ground well needs the same unglamorous groundwork as any good crop seed system: a Mongabay commentary argues that restoration campaigns skipping Indigenous and local seed knowledge are optimising for trees planted, not trees that survive.
- And once you’ve got the saplings in the ground, you might want to monitor how they’re doing: enter Bruno, a pushcart rigged with mobile phones that can collect field data. And not just for breeders.
- Finally, proof that not all genetic-resource hunting needs a genebank: Brussels brewers are getting people to comb the city for wild yeast, because the raw materials for a proper lambic turns is hanging around in urban trees.
Brainfood: The diverse lives and times of crop diversity
- Herbaria viva: proto-genebanks of Mendel’s contemporaries in Moravia. The early 19th century living plant collections of Moravia (the world Mendel grew up in) were a kind of proto-genebank, systematically maintaining and circulating crop diversity decades before genetics had a name.
- Saving evolutionary time: Conflicting planetary temporalities in the genetic diversity debate, 1967–1980. Looking back 50 years, and 50 years after the Moravian proto-genebanks, a historian of science traces how Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett, sounding the alarm on genetic erosion in the 1960s-70s, articulated two competing visions of time and responsibility for safeguarding crop diversity, one rooted in development, the other in collective stewardship of evolution itself.
- Utilization and conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in China: a systematic review of genebanks and farmers’ seed systems. From history to present-day infrastructure. In China, genebanks and farmers’ seed systems have developed together, but gaps between formal and informal conservation remain. Otto and Erna unavailable for comment, alas.
- The effect of crop genetic diversity to food security among smallholder farmers in the global south and the role of community seed banks: a narrative literature review. Here’s the evidence on how community seed banks shape food security for smallholders, but could do more. That’s the informal system at work for you, Erna would say.
- How community seed banks contribute to climate-resilient seed systems: evidence from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nepal. Speaking of which, a companion study looks at how community seed banks function in practice, finding they do bolster local seed security and climate adaptation, but with real limits: patchy variety availability, uneven quantities, and occasional genetic erosion of their own.
- Varietal development and rice yield growth in India: assessing IRRI’s germplasm contribution. A new assessment of the contribution of IRRI germplasm to Indian rice breeding comes in at around 11% of annual rice yield growth from 1966 to 2021. That’s the formal system at work for you, Otto would say.
- Improving low-pH and high-aluminum field tolerance in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.). Also on the breeding front, screens of genebank collections and their derivatives for field-level tolerance to difficult soils bear fruit. Or rather, leaves.
- FAIRness at all costs? Practical limitations in applying the FAIR principles to plant genetic resources data. And finally, a reality check for the data side of all this. Applying the FAIR principles to plant genetic resources data isn’t as straightforward as the mandate suggests, with a number of practical friction points standing between the ideal and actual implementation.
What is maize good for?
Two pieces of work on maize I recently came across are unconnected as to aim and place, but nevertheless make for an interesting combined story. One asks how far maize yield can actually be pushed by the environment; the other, how far we should define its success by yield anyway.
The first study is a systematic analysis of more than 14,000 yield observations across sub-Saharan Africa. It finds that maize generally produces more grain than pearl millet, even in relatively dry environments. That complicates the familiar story that the traditional, hardy millet simply “beats” the relative newcomer, more pernickety maize in marginal conditions. And you know how much we love complicating a conventional story here.
But, heaping complication upon complication, there is a catch: maize’s performance is much less consistent. Its high yields are associated in part with hybrids and the input packages that accompany them, whereas pearl millet produces yields that are lower, sure, but also more stable. And grain weight leaves quite a lot out anyway: millet brings higher levels of iron, zinc and protein. The authors therefore argue that comparing cereal crops by yield alone can obscure their actual advantage to farmers, under their own conditions. That’s been a recurrent theme with us here, actually, come to think of it.
The Philippine experience described in the second study makes a similar point from the farmer’s side of the equation. In Laguna, farmers evaluating maize varieties did not rank them simply by how many tonnes they produced. They cared about taste, culinary uses, familiarity, nutritional value, market prospects and climate resilience as well as yield. The authors recommend involving farmers in local testing and breeding efforts, rather than treating them as merely the final recipients of fancy new varieties.
Put together, the two stories suggest a useful way of thinking about the potential, and the limits, of maize — and indeed any other crop for that matter. Maize is remarkably productive and adaptable, and the evidence does not support writing it off completely in dry conditions. But its apparent superiority depends strongly on what we measure, where we grow it, and what we put into the system.
A tonne of maize produced with expensive hybrid seed and inputs is not necessarily a better outcome than a more modest but more dependable harvest of millet; nor is a variety that comes out on top in a yield trial necessarily the variety a farmer most wants to eat, sell or grow next year.
Maize can do a great deal, but its real potential emerges only when yield is considered alongside stability, inputs, nutrition, markets and, ultimately, what the people growing and consuming it really want.
Sometimes, in some places, even maize can be an opportunity crop. Other times, not so much. And that goes for millet too.