Genetic erosion

August 28, 2025August 28, 2025

How to revive your landraces

How can we help get humble heirloom varieties of the humble potato back into cultivation? Well, fortunately, Potato News Today ¹ has a handy step-by-step guide, which I reproduce verbatim below:

Start with a story you can legally sell. In Europe/UK, use the conservation-variety route; in North America, lean on certified seed suppliers and Indigenous stewardship agreements.
Source clean, traceable stock. CIP and the U.S. Potato Genebank maintain indexed, disease-tested material; combine with reputable local seed houses.
Pilot with chefs and specialty retail. Early-season launches with menu credit and a farm feature move the needle.
Package the provenance. PDO/PGI examples like Jersey Royal and Papas Antiguas de Canarias show how origin, agronomy, and micro-harvest rituals create value.
Engineer storage for shape and use. Follow the curing/holding guidance above.
Ride the calendar. Tie launches and media to the International Day of Potato (30 May) or to local potato festivals.

Sounds pretty sensible, and applicable to other crops as well, I suspect, with a little tweak here and there.

The article also has a list of case studies. This doesn’t include any examples from Italy, but coincidentally a recent paper describes just such a thing. Which maybe points to something that is missing from the Potato News Today playbook, and that is having lots of interesting characterization and other data on your heirloom landraces handy to help get them ready for prime time.

August 25, 2025August 25, 2025

Before the flood

So, three years back, I posted about the floods in Pakistan, and how genebanks could potentially help farmers recover any crop diversity they lost because of them. But wouldn’t it be even better if the danger of flooding could be predicted? That way crop diversity from at-risk areas could be collected, if not already in genebanks, and multiplied up ready to be distributed should disaster strike.

Well, a recent paper does just that, using AI, no less: “We use our model predictions to identify historically flood-prone areas in Ethiopia and demonstrate real-time disaster response capabilities during the May 2024 floods in Kenya.”

I’ve managed to geo-reference a screen grab of the Ethiopia map provided in the paper using MapWarper, import it into Google Earth, and add the locations of sorghum landraces as reported in Genesys. Here’s what I got.

Unlike in the Pakistan example, there’s not much in the way of genebank accessions from areas of Ethiopia that are particularly at risk from flooding, it seems from this. However, Genesys does not (yet) include geographic provenance data for sorghum from the national genebank of Ethiopia. The 4000-odd sorghum accession from Ethiopia currently in Genesys are conserved at ICRISAT.

August 18, 2025August 18, 2025

Brainfood: Agroforestry, Afro-descendant conservation, Opportunity crops, Off-farm income, Phureja conservation, European taro, Argania products, Honeybee intensification, Mycorrhizal hotspots

Effects of tree cover and crop diversity on biodiversity and food security in tropical agricultural landscapes. In tropical agricultural landscapes, modest tree cover in diverse cropping systems supports higher biodiversity and higher crop yields, demonstrating that agroforestry can deliver win-win synergy between conservation and food production.
Afro-descendant lands in South America contribute to biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation. I guess biodiverse landscapes managed according to traditional knowledge deliver superior environmental outcomes not just in farms with trees but also in forested territories under community management.
Science for Africa’s future food security: reimagining the histories and futures of underutilised crops. Reviving indigenous, underutilised crops in sub-Saharan Africa by restoring their historical and cultural significance can enhance nutritional diversity, climate resilience and food security, paralleling the evidence above that culturally rooted, biodiversity-rich systems are good for both the environment and communities.
Off-farm income and dietary diversity in subsistence farming in Burundi. Across rural and urban settings, from farms to forests to cities, culture-informed, biodiversity-rich food systems offer interlocking benefits: ecological resilience, climate mitigation, improved nutrition, and community empowerment. Or am I stretching a point here?
Cultivar loss and conservation of genetic resources of the phureja potato (Solanum phureja L., Phureja Group) in Peru. Traditional Andean farming communities are witnessing the disappearance of this culturally significant diploid potato group, which has rich genetic diversity and interesting adaptations, highlighting an urgent need for in situ conservation to preserve it. Oh wow, look, locally rooted, biodiversity-rich farming systems, anchored in cultural heritage, are key to sustaining ecosystem services, safeguarding genetic diversity, and building climate-resilient, equitable food futures. Again.
Taro (Colocasia esculenta) in Europe: a journey through fields, botanical gardens, ditches and city markets. This culturally important root crop was introduced in Europe in antiquity and now survives in fields, markets, and even city waterways as both ornament and food, but despite its genetic and cultural richness, it remains under-researched and requires both ex situ and in situ conservation to safeguard its long-term use. So yep, even this one says that conserving crop diversity through culturally embedded, multi-dimensional stewardship is essential for strengthening food security and preserving heritage in a changing climate.
Innovation of argan (Argania spinosa (L.) Skeels) products and byproducts for sustainable development of rural communities in Morocco. A systematic literature review. Innovative uses of argan tree products and by-products in Morocco, from bioplastics and biochar to livestock feed and natural repellents, offer promising pathways for conservation, cultural preservation, and rural economic development, provided local communities are actively engaged in participatory management. Where have I heard that before?
Negative ecological impacts of honeybees begin at densities below recommended levels for crop pollination. Too many honeybee hives can reduce wild bee abundance, species richness, and fruit yield on farms, even when wildflower strips are present, suggesting that ecological balance is disrupted when managed pollinators outcompete native species. Which can probably be cleverly connected with all of the above with a little more time than I have at the moment.
Global hotspots of mycorrhizal fungal richness are poorly protected. What can I tell you, we need in situ conservation for mycorrhiza too. And machine learning can help us figure out where best to do it. For all of the above, and more, naturally.

August 12, 2025August 15, 2025

Nibbles: SOTW report, Food prices, Rex Bernardo, Odisha landraces, Cyprus community seedbank, Haiti seed producers, Trees for the Future, Iraq genebank, Sudan genebank, Climate-Conflict-Vulnerability Index, India SDG2,

FAO explains why crop diversity matters.
Well, for one thing, there’s food prices, that’s why.
Ah, yes, crop diversity: “You gotta have it. You gotta use it. You gotta talk about it.”
Odisha mainstreams landrace diversity in its seed system.
Meanwhile, the Farmers Union of Cyprus is stashing seeds away in Community Bank of Cypriot Traditional Seeds.
Looks a bit like the Groupements de Production Artisanale de Semences in Haiti. If you squint.
If only there were some guidelines for managing such community seed banks.
Iraqi Kurdistan gets in on the genebank act.
Iraq used to have a genebank, but what happened to it has just happened in Sudan.
Ah, to have a Climate—Conflict—Vulnerability Index so that such things could be predicted and steps taken.
And a monitoring system and some targets would be good too.

June 16, 2025June 16, 2025

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.”