- On the occasion of Thanksgiving, The Botanist in the Kitchen explains the difference between potato, sweet potato and yam — inimitably. And thanks for the shout-outs!
- A tour of the wild fruits of Goa. Their sourness has been culturally and economically marginalised in much the same way that extractive systems marginalise the people, landscapes and food traditions associated with it. Well, maybe.
- How Charity Mueni Ndivo built her own seed bank in Kenya, and then wrote about it for FAO. No sourness in sight.
- Dr P K Mishra, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister of India, celebrates genebanks, plant breeding, and farmers like Charity.
The plot thickens
I’m slowly making my way through the open access book “Sustainable Agroecology: Actors, Practices, Experiences and Perceptions,” edited by Javier Becerril García, Paulina Martínez Isidro, Praveen Jha, Elisabeth Tuider, and Andreas Thiel. It’s like 300 pages, so I may be some time.
The book brings together 15 case studies from different authors around the world exploring how agroecological approaches can support rural livelihoods and nutrition, while sustaining agricultural diversity, local knowledge and cultures. Several chapters highlight the role of farmers, particularly women, in maintaining traditional varieties through seed selection, saving and exchange.
One describes the Maya milpa system in Yucatán, where the Three Sisters — maize, beans and squash — are grown alongside other crops and managed as part of a wider landscape of home gardens, fallows and forests. Another examines the remarkable diversity of Mexican home gardens, which can contain more than a hundred plant species and serve as reservoirs of useful plants, many of them threatened.
A particularly interesting example comes from Chiapas, where a group of Indigenous women, the “Guardians of the Seeds”, established a community seed store and organised the conservation and exchange of native crops, combining traditional knowledge with technical support. The book also looks at the revival of underutilised crops in Europe, including bere barley in Orkney and local bean and wheat varieties in Italy and Greece, showing how new markets can help bring neglected diversity back into cultivation.
The authors have relatively little to say about formal genebanks — but that’s ok. The contribution of the book is to underline what genebanks cannot do alone: maintain the knowledge, seed systems, markets and farming practices that keep crop diversity in use and allow it to continue evolving.
Brainfood: Ancient Madagascar cattle, American bison, Tibetan yaks, Korean silkworms, European cattle genomic selection, Slovenian cattle footprint, Nigerian ponds, African swine fever in Asia
- Past rapid spread of introduced livestock coincided with vegetation clearance on Madagascar. Ancient sheep, goat and cattle bones show livestock racing across the island about 1,200 years ago, in step with forest clearance and the loss of elephant birds and pygmy hippos. People had arrived long before, so hunting alone is an insufficient culprit. Also I can’t imagine pygmy hippos being all that nice to eat.
- Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison. 115 ancient and 45 modern genomes show that past bison populations were widely connected, which means that today’s herds, while more fragmented, retain more diversity than was feared. Also, many modern bison lack the cattle ancestry long assumed to be ubiquitous, but wood bison do carry plains bison ancestry from 1920s translocations. So, swings and roundabouts.
- Whole-genome resequencing reveals genetic diversity, population structure, and selection signatures in tibetan yak. Three recently recognised Xizang populations (Chawula, Jila and Niangya) prove genetically richer than many others and cluster with Yushu and wild yak. Selection signals turn up at coat colour genes such as MC1R and at candidates for meat production. Has anyone done selection signals in bison?
- Selection of a phenotypic and functional core set for South Korean silkworm genetic resources, Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae). A core set is distilled from a larger collection on multiple morphological, physiological and quality criteria, a manageable shortlist so the genebank’s holdings can be more easily used rather than merely admired. What would a core collection for the bison look like, I wonder?
- Impact of genomic selection on genetic diversity in 5 local European cattle breeds. Genomic selection uses DNA information from across an animal’s genome to predict its breeding value, allowing breeders to select animals likely to pass desirable traits to their offspring earlier and more accurately than relying on observed characteristics or pedigree alone. But can it be bad for genetic diversity if applied to a small local breed? Well, it shortened sire generation intervals and evened out top-sire contributions, but inbreeding rose in two breeds and fell in three. Genetic management mattered more than genomic selection, so the lesson is to monitor, and adjust as needed. Possibly relevant to the bison?
- Adoption of support tools for biodiversity conservation: a mixed-methods analysis of ecosystem services awareness among Slovenian cattle farmers. Livestock farmers who are younger and with more positive attitudes to biodiversity and the European Green Deal are more likely to adopt biodiversity-supporting practices. Knowing this could have saved many pigmy hippos 1,200 years ago in Madagascar.
- A national fish pond dataset for Nigeria generated using automated detection and segmentation. A segmentation model run over imagery, with a Random Forest classifier filtering the candidates, yields an openly released map of aquaculture production that was previously hard to see, let alone manage.
- Pathways to recover Asian wild pigs from African swine fever. Since 2018 the virus has caused huge mortality in naive wild pig populations, and the authors set out eight priority actions, with early-warning surveillance, captive breeding and emergency financing the ones that can’t wait. Free-ranging domestic pigs and thin biosecurity at the wildlife-livestock interface keep kind of bring us back to where we began on Madagascar.
Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives
- WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
- Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
- Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
- Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
- An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
- Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
- Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
- Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?
Nibbles: Bacon kitchen garden, Bison diversity, African herbaria, Mycorrhiza, China wild rice genebank, African seed laws
- Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s painting records the arrival of American crops in early modern England. And the cookmaid gets equal billing.
- North America’s bison survived near-extinction, but how much of its genetic diversity is left? Past and present DNA is helping reconstruct what was lost, with implications for how what remains is conserved and managed.
- China’s wild rice collection in Hainan now holds more than 15,000 samples. A genetic treasure trove, but its value ultimately depends on what breeders can make of it. Much like what’s left of bison diversity.
- Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that support plant life and store carbon. A new global map begins to show their extent, and just how much of this biodiversity remains overlooked.
- Africa’s herbaria hold centuries of botanical history, much of it still effectively invisible. Specimens can reveal shifting plant distributions and overlooked species. First, though, someone has to do the painstaking work of getting the data online.
- Africa has done painstaking work on seed laws, but getting good seed to farmers remains hard in practice. The gap between policy and delivery is stark, and commercial companies need to work alongside farmer-managed seed systems, not pretend they don’t exist.