- Global map and indicators of food system sustainability. Includes crop diversity, based on Khoury et al.
- Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers. Mostly comes down to good experimental design.
- The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes. Intensification and upward movement, while maintaining diversity.
- Diversity of a Large Collection of Natural Populations of Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) Revealed by Agro-Morphological and Quality Traits. Lowish diversity, but not so low as to fail to provide year-round production.
- Intraspecific diversification of the crop wild relative Brassica cretica Lam. using demographic model selection. Diverse populations do not necessarily mean diverse adaptation.
- Crop Origins and Phylo Food: A database and a phylogenetic tree to stimulate comparative analyses on the origins of food crops. When and where current crops were domesticated.
- The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? When and where future crops will be domesticated.
- Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. 56 million deaths.
- Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013. Animal-source foods + sugar up in the East, down in the West. Everybody’s eating their vegetables.
- Exploring solution spaces for nutrition-sensitive agriculture in Kenya and Vietnam. Could grown more, and different, vegetables.
- Evaluation of early vigor traits in wild olive germplasm. Potential as dwarfing rootstocks.
- Agronomic and biochemical evaluation of cassava clones with roots that have pink pulp. 2 of 9 from the Embrapa collection have potential.
- Management Practices and Breeding History of Varieties Strongly Determine the Fine Genetic Structure of Crop Populations: A Case Study Based on European Wheat Populations. Landraces show more intra-sample diversity than modern varieties. Wait, there must be more to it than that…
- High-resolution and bias-corrected CMIP5 projections for climate change impact assessments. 7 TB of data for your delectation, thanks to CGIAR.
Nibbles: Genebanks & CC, Cherokee seeds, CWR art, Chefs & diversity, Plant Treaty, Beer!
- Another pean to genebanks from Mike Jackson.
- Cherokee Nation shares seeds.
- Mitsuaki Tanabe’s wild rice sculptures.
- Weird menus are the best menus.
- Despite everything “…the International Seed Federation (ISF) says the ITPGRFA remains the preferred tool for access- and benefit-sharing of genetic resources for plant breeders.”
- The proteomics of beer. And beards.
Nibbles: Risks & solutions edition
- How nature-related risks matter to business.
- Exhibit A: beer.
- Exhibit B: wine and wine.
- Looking at it the other way, some infographics to sum up the impact of food production on the environment.
- And then there are nature-based solutions…
- Sometimes companies do good just for the hell of it: e.g. ohia conservation in Hawaii.
- And sometimes it just takes family.
- “Despite the challenges of climate change and state fragility in parts of Africa, the continent has the potential to not only achieve food and nutrition security, but to leverage the food sector for its overall development.”
- Some tips on how to communicate all the above.
Brainfood: AnGR treble, Livestock aDNA, Wild cucurbit gaps, Indian crop diversity, Wild Argentinian spuds, Wild wheat, Tomato domestication, Enset systems, Duckweed collections, Peanut hybrids, Sweet potato leaves, Adaptation pathways, Golden Rice
- Enhancing the functioning of farm animal gene banks in Europe: results of the IMAGE project. Lots going on, but avian species in particular need more work.
- Conservation and Utilization of Livestock Genetic Diversity in the United States of America through Gene Banking. Over 1,000,000 samples from over 55,000 animals, representing 165 livestock and poultry breeds, collected over 60 years, more than 50% of rare breeds.
- Cryoconservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Europe and Two African Countries: A Gap Analysis. Out of the 2949 breeds registered in DAD-IS, 16% have material in genebanks, but only 4% have enough to allow breed reconstitution.
- Unlocking the origins and biology of domestic animals using ancient DNA and paleogenomics. How we got to the above.
- Distributions, conservation status, and abiotic stress tolerance potential of wild cucurbits (Cucurbita L.). 13 out of 16 taxa need in situ and ex situ work.
- Wild potato Genetic Reserves in Protected Areas: prospection notes from Los Cardones National Park, Salta, Argentina. Nice combination of in situ and ex situ.
- Agricultural intensification was associated with crop diversification in India (1947-2014). But only at country level, and not by much. At district level, crop diversity went down in rice/wheat areas and up in the south and west as oilseeds and vegetables replaced millet and sorghum. Doesn’t strike me as positive overall, diversity-wise.
- From population to production: 50 years of scientific literature on how to feed the world. Time for a bit of holism.
- Unlocking the Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of a Wild Gene Source of Wheat, Aegilops biuncialis Vis., and Its Relationship With the Heading Time. 5 ecogeographic clusters, 4 related heading time groups.
- Genomic Evidence for Complex Domestication History of the Cultivated Tomato in Latin America. Domestication of northerly migrating wildish material in Mexico rather than 2-step domestication in S America and then Mexico.
- Enset‐based agricultural systems in Ethiopia: A systematic review of production trends, agronomy, processing and the wider food security applications of a neglected banana relative. Better data needed, for a start.
- Worldwide Genetic Resources of Duckweed: Stock Collections. 36 species, no less. Need more?
- Realizing hybrids between the cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) and its distantly related wild species using in situ embryo rescue technique. You need to apply growth substances to the pollinated flowers.
- The remarkable morphological diversity of leaf shape in sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas): the influence of genetics, environment, and G×E. Genetics controls shape, environment size.
- Adaptation and development pathways for different types of farmers. Watch your context, and don’t forget governance.
- Golden Rice and technology adoption theory: A study of seed choice dynamics among rice growers in the Philippines. They forgot context. And governance. But let the author spell it out in a tweet thread.
What should OneCGIAR do?
David Lobell of Stanford University, whose work we have featured here in the past, has a think-piece out called “Principles and priorities for one CGIAR.” For the uninitiated…
OneCGIAR is a dynamic reformulation of CGIAR’s partnerships, knowledge and physical assets – building on an energized, interconnected, and diverse global talent pool. It aims to drive major progress in key areas where innovation is needed to deliver on the SDGs by 2030, anchored in more unified governance, institutions, country engagement, and funding.
And yes, there’s a hashtag. ((But is it all too little, too late?))
Anyway, David thinks the new, improved OneCGIAR should focus on just two things. The first is kind of obvious:
…continued investment in breeding, a longstanding strength of the system. Progress on flagship crops such as wheat and rice will be needed, especially in the face of climate change. For example, maintenance breeding to protect against evolving diseases and pests will be ever more important, as will finding varieties that can withstand heat extremes. Equally important, however, will be to expand work on the many other crops that are grown by poor farmers throughout the world. Historically, these “orphan” crops have received far less attention than major internationally traded crops, but many compelling reasons exist to expand efforts on these crops, including (i) their potential value in addressing micronutrient deficiency (“hidden hunger”), for which less progress has been made than for calorie deficiency in many regions (Gödecke et al., 2018); (ii) the ability of nitrogen-fixing legumes to reverse soil degradation in a cost-effective way (Vanlauwe et al., 2019), a critical need for improving productivity and fertilizer responsiveness in many smallholder fields; (iii) the ability of many orphan crops, such as pigeonpea, cowpea, and cassava, to withstand increasingly frequent extreme heat and drought conditions, and (iv) the prospects that new technologies like genomic selection and gene editing will dramatically reduce the cost of working on orphan crops, especially given recent progress in sequencing many of their genomes (Dawson et al., 2019).
Nice to see orphan crops being highlighted in this way, as we often do here. And of course the international genebanks underpin the CGIAR’s breeding, although David doesn’t mention them. David’s proposed second priority is perhaps more surprising:
…precision agronomy, often also referred to as site-specific or digital agronomy. In food insecure regions, productivity gains from improved management are often far greater than from improved genetics. Yet spurring adoption of a new seed has typically been easier than a new set of practices (Stevenson et al., 2019). Part of the reason is that the ideal management depends a lot on local soil, weather, plot history, and economic conditions, and many “best-practice” recommendations fail to deliver profits for a large fraction of farmers (Jayne et al., 2018).
However, new technologies will help to much more quickly diagnose the major needs at subnational and even field scales. For example, spectrometers can be used to rapidly measure soil deficiencies (Viscarra Rossel and Bouma, 2016), photos from mobile phones can be used to diagnose canopy stresses (see Fig. 1), and satellite imagery can be used to identify fields most likely to benefit from specific inputs or practices (Jain et al., 2019). These existing examples, many of which involve CGIAR scientists, are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As the different data streams grow and become integrated, it is plausible that every smallholder in the world could have access to recommendations with a high probability of boosting yields and profits. Although some of this can be achieved by the private sector, my view is that a major investment by CGIAR, along with national partners, would help to ensure that poor farmers can quickly benefit from these technologies.
Again, this is an area that we have occasionally discussed here, in particular the usefulness of high-resolution spatial datasets. ((I’ve unashamedly used my mother-in-law as a guinea pig when exploring some of these.))
I haven’t seen any replies to David’s suggestions yet, but I’m sure they’re in the works and we’ll be on the lookout for them.