Genetic erosion

September 11, 2026September 11, 2026

Listening for genetic erosion

I came across a study that uses a particularly clever form of longitudinal visual ethnography. Researchers returned, after about 15 years, to the same Australian livestock producers and the same locations that had been photographed in the original study. They recreated the photographs and used the old and new images as prompts for interviews, asking nine graziers to explain what had changed, what had stayed the same, and how they now understood the landscape.

But what particularly caught my attention was what they did with the interviews. They constructed “I-Poems”: by extracting a farmer’s first-person statements from the transcript (I see…”, “I remember…”, “I notice…”, “I feel…”) and arranging them as a poem, they could crystallize how the farmer’s own sense of self and relationship with the landscape had changed over time. It struck me as a remarkably simple but powerful way of turning a mass of interview transcripts into something that vividly captures how people actually experience change.

I wonder whether something similar could add a new dimension to monitoring crop diversity on-farm. There is plenty of work documenting what landraces farmers grow, of course, and much research has explored why some are retained, abandoned or acquired. But imagine revisiting the same farmers and communities every five or ten years, recording their crop diversity alongside interviews and then constructing I-Poems from their own words.

Rather than simply showing that a landrace has disappeared, the poems might reveal how its role and meaning have changed: “I used to grow it, but now…”, “My mother really loved it because…”, “Nobody asks me for it now…”, “I still hang on to a few seeds…”, “I don’t know who has the seed anymore…” Read alongside inventories and photographs from successive visits, these could provide a very different kind of longitudinal record, one that explores not just changes in the amount of crop diversity, but in how farmers value, remember, use and make decisions about it. It could help us understand genetic erosion as the social and cultural process it is.

This wouldn’t be entirely without precedent. In Nepal, the “Gramin Kabita Yatra”, or Rural Poetry Journey, brought poets into farming communities to learn about local landraces and turn farmers’ knowledge and appreciation of them into poems and songs. The difference is that the Nepali poems were primarily a means of communicating the value of crop diversity, whereas I-Poems like the ones in the Australian study could be used as an analytical tool: capturing farmers’ own words to reveal how their relationships with particular crops and varieties change over time, and indeed space. An interesting possibility would be to bring these two traditions together, and use poetry not just to celebrate crop diversity, but to listen for the social processes through which it is maintained, transformed and unfortunately sometimes lost.

August 31, 2026August 28, 2026

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.

August 24, 2026August 24, 2026

Nibbles: Mango breeding, Cambodian peppers, Cold genes, Geechee cowpea, Navajo genebank

Blue mangoes.
Kampot pepper.
Antarctic flowering plant.
Sapelo Island red pea.
Navajo seed data.

August 22, 2026August 22, 2026

Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea

New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.

August 21, 2026August 17, 2026

Conserving the tangle of grapevines

I think we may have already pointed to Conservation gap analysis for wild grapevines (Vitis L.) of the Americas, the latest in a series of papers by our friend Colin Khoury and a rotating assortment of colleagues on the conservation status of the crop wild relatives of the Americas, genepool by genepool. The authors compiled occurrence records for 38 wild American grapevine taxa, and used fancy GIS to infer the overall distribution and environmental niche of each. They then assessed the degree of representation of each taxon in genebanks and protected areas, and hence any remaining conservation gaps. Here’s the headline finding:

We categorize 25 of 38 of the taxa as urgent priority and 10 as high priority for improving ex situ conservation representation. Three taxa are assessed as urgent and 29 as high priority for enhancing in situ conservation. Further action, with emphasis on conservation gap hotspots, is needed to more comprehensively conserve wild Vitis native to the Americas.

Which is pretty clear.

Or is it?

What if “taxa” are perhaps not always the best units of conservation to use in assessing conservation efforts?

That may in fact be one of the implications of a paper that came out just a few weeks after that of Colin and friends: The dynamics of introgression and parallel adaptation across North American Vitis species.

These authors show that introgression and hybridization are pervasive and evolutionarily important across North American Vitis, based on genomic analysis of 639 accessions representing 48 species. About 14% of the average genome shows evidence of introgression, particularly associated with areas where species come into contact. Some taxa usually regarded as hybrid species are in fact better understood as ever-changing hybrid swarms, rather than distinct evolutionary lineages. Most importantly, the authors find that introgressed genetic variants have repeatedly contributed to adaptation in different species. The paper therefore portrays Vitis diversity as a reticulate network — or tangle — of species, populations and gene flow, rather than a set of discrete species.

This has important implications for conservation: hybrid zones and admixed populations may be really significant reservoirs of adaptive diversity. The framework of the first paper might potentially underestimate the conservation importance of regions where these occur, if they contain substantial genetic variation but aren’t well represented by the taxonomic units used in the gap analysis. For example, it might happen that two neighbouring species are reasonably well represented ex situ, but not from the specific regions where they hybridize and introgression occurs.

This suggests a useful next, synthetic step: take the geographic gaps from the first paper and overlay them with the evidence for introgression and gene flow networks from the second. The resulting map could identify not just under-collected species, but under-collected (or under-conserved in situ) evolutionary processes and genetic mixtures. That could be valuable for designing the next Vitis collecting mission.