- The COUSIN project aims to conserve (trans situ, no less) and use crop wild relatives in Europe.
- That “use” part can be tough.
- But that doesn’t stop the fine people at Aardaia. At least where aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus) is concerned.
- From alternative potatoes in the Netherlands to alternative beans in Indonesia. All in the cause of diversification.
- No need to find an alternative to amaranth in the American SW. Not with devoted chefs on the job.
- The Iraqi Seed Collective is taking seeds from American genebanks to that country’s diaspora in the US, and eventually back to Iraq itself. Maybe chefs will help.
- Good thing there are genebank backups, eh?
Rice, rich folks, and (small) reasons for hope
How much trouble is agriculture facing because of climate change?
There are lots of studies out there that seek to predict the effects of changes in rainfall or temperature on the yield of this or that crop, in this or that part of the world. There are even plenty of studies that look at what might happen to a whole bunch of crops on a global scale.
But they pretty much all have the drawback that they don’t take into account that farmers could in fact adapt, whether by changing crop or variety, or the way they manage their crops, for example through more irrigation. They may end up doing ok, at least with some crops in some places.
That’s a pretty big drawback, because it makes it difficult to prioritize.
But it’s also difficult to know what do about it. Farmers could potentially do a million different things, and even neighbouring farmers might do quite different things. How do you figure out what the effect on yields will be of all these things, everywhere?
A major global study in Nature has just tackled the problem by forgetting about the “what” and focusing on the “how much.” 1
The authors looked at the yields over time of six staple crops — cassava, maize, rice, sorghum, soyabeans and wheat, or two thirds of global calories — across 12,600 regions of the world. They then calculated how well farmers have actually been coping with increasing temperatures, irrespective of what specifically they are doing, and then projected that level of success into an even warmer future.
The findings are striking. Adaptation is happening, but just not enough. It can maybe alleviate 23% of global losses in 2050 and 34% at the end of the century; or 6% and 12%, respectively, for a moderate-emissions scenario. That’s worth having, but still leaves us with a mountain to climb. We’re going to have to keep breeding better crops, faster, and we’ll need the diversity in genebanks to do that.
I see two bright spots of hope in the gloom. One is that rice is predicted to do ok. And the other is that while the world’s poorest are as usual predicted to take a big hit, so are the world’s richest. Which might encourage them to actually do something about it.
Noah? No way!
In the latest GROW webinar, Prof. Stef de Haan, of the International Potato Centre and more recently Wageningen University and Research, explains how genebanks alone won’t preserve crop diversity adequately unless linked with farmer custodians, local seed systems, and policy spaces. Sounds like he also falls squarely in the middle in the old Erna vs Otto bunfight.
To save you googling, the Rikuy Agrobio website he mentions, with the community-level tools for monitoring crop diversity, is here. And you can explore potato diversity in on-farm hotspots on wikiPapa here. Both only in Spanish so far, but well worth looking into. Fascinating stuff, and obviously valuable, but I do wonder how to scale up this sort of thing to all crops, everywhere.
Nibbles: Cherokee Three Sisters, Australian native grains, Ancient Peruvian irrigation, Indian apples, IFOAM Seed Platform, MSB, Chinese conservation, Protected areas, Soybeans breeding, Funding cuts
- Three Sisters rematriated to historical Cherokee Nation.
- Native grains returning to Indigenous land in Australia too.
- May need to bring back agricultural practices too, like in Peru.
- Meanwhile, in India, farmers are trying to grow apples in new places. Go figure.
- Anyway, seems like the IFOAM Seeds Platform might be able to help.
- And genebanks too of course, like the Millennium Seed Bank.
- As part of a comprehensive conservation systems, goes without saying, like in China.
- Which also include climate-proof protected areas.
- It worked for soybeans, after all.
- Well, for now anyway…
Brainfood: Rice breeding, Sorghum parents, Cowpea diversity, Sweet potato double, Lesser yam uses, Tomato breeding, Peanut hybrids, Rice wild relatives, Sorghum genetic erosion
- Future flooding tolerant rice germplasm: Resilience afforded beyond Sub1A gene. You want to make rapid breeding progress? You need the “Transition from Trait to Environment” approach. As far as I can tell, this means that you fix your trait of interest in a pool of elite parents before using it in proper yield breeding.
- Prioritizing parents from global genebanks to breed climate-resilient crops. Yeah but how do you find your trait of interest in the first place. You start with passport and genotyping data from genebank collections of course.
- Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) landraces in Mozambique and neighbouring Southern African countries harbour genetic loci with potential for climate adaptation. You see what I mean?
- Genetic diversity and population structure of Colombian sweet potato genotypes reveal possible adaptations to specific environmental conditions. Ok, now do you see what I mean?
- Genetic diversity analysis and duplicates identification of new sweetpotato accessions collected in China. Manage your duplicates though, right?
- The lesser yam Dioscorea esculenta (Lour.) Burkill: a neglected crop with high functional food potential. This doesn’t have decent collections, let alone duplicates.
- Molecular screening of wild and cultivated tomato germplasm reveals potential materials for multi-locus disease resistance breeding. Again, thank goodness for genebanks — plural.
- First report on trait segregation in F1 hybrids between the cultivated peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) and the wild incompatible species A. glabrata Benth. I wonder if this could be used in tomato.
- A blueprint for tapping the wild relatives for crop improvement: A success story of CWR-derived rice varieties, Nông Dân 1 and Nông Dân 2. No need for embryo rescue here. No word on the need for submergence tolerance.
- Genetic diversity in in situ and ex situ collections of sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] landraces. Diversity is still out there, at least in India. Which is great. But how would you know without genebanks? And you need genebanks for breeders to use it.
- And to cap things off, a new occasional feature: A ChatGPT-generated one-sentence summary of the week’s Brainfood. “To breed crops for climate resilience and future food security, you need to systematically mine, manage, and mobilize the diversity stored in genebanks—especially landraces and wild relatives—and integrate it into elite breeding pipelines using smart, trait-targeted strategies.”