Genetic erosion

February 25, 2022

Millet, anyone?

…But millet, a major crop in both Africa and Asia and one of the world’s most nutritious cereals, is now under threat. Production is decreasing and many families have flattened the wooden granaries where they used to store the crop, using them as firewood. A dish of millet bread and pigeon peas-groundnut stew is no longer a common traditional meal in many households.

That’s from a recent BBC Follow the Food feature by Pascal Kwesiga entitled Why we need to expand our crop menu. In addition to finger and pearl millet in Uganda and Kenya, the piece looks at the diversity of grapevine in Portugal, cacao in Brazil and avocado in the USA. There’s also a bit on coffee cryo at the National Laboratory for Genetic Research Preservation at Ft Collins.

Follow the Food is a multimedia series by BBC Future and BBC World News that investigates how agriculture is responding to the profound challenges of climate change, environmental degradation and rapidly growing populations that face our global food supply chains. Follow the Food traces emerging answers to these problems – both high-tech and low-tech, local and global – from farmers, growers and researchers across six continents.

All in association with Corteva (sic).

February 9, 2022February 16, 2022

Nibbles: Food flows, Olive collection, Sweet potato breeding, Global Bean Project, Open Source Plant Breeding, Saladino book

You can explore food flows among US counties. If you have lots of time.
Studying a huge olive collection. To fight climate change.
Improving sweet potatoes in Cambodia. Somehow.
There’s a meeting of the Global Bean Project. Tomorrow.
Speaking of sweet potatoes and crowd-sourced breeding (well, sort of). The Open Source Plant Breeding Forum.
Apparently there’s nobody talking about the food extinction crisis. Nobody.

January 31, 2022January 31, 2022

Brainfood: Genebanks, Covid, Sustainable intensification, Anthropocene, Biodiversity value, Cropland expansion, Better diet, Biodiversity indicators, Climate change impact, Soil fertility, Agroecology & GMOs

Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security. Resilience, but at a cost.
Avenues for improving farming sustainability assessment with upgraded tools, sustainability framing and indicators. A review. How to measure an important aspect of the above-mentioned resilience.
Envisaging an Effective Global Long-Term Agrobiodiversity Conservation System That Promotes and Facilitates Use. To effectively guarantee the resilience of farmers and the food system, genebank accessions for likely future use need to be distinguished dynamically from those for immediate use on the basis of the best available data, and then managed differently.
Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene. Naturalization of phylogenetically diverse exotic plants from Australia, the Pacific and Europe is leading to a more homogeneous world flora. Much the same could be said of diets, come to think of it, except maybe for the geographic source of the plants, which is interesting in itself.
Identifying science-policy consensus regions of high biodiversity value and institutional recognition. And less than a third of the bits of the Earth that everyone thinks are important in terms of biodiversity are protected, including from the above exotics.
Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. There was a 9% increase in cropland area in 2003-2019, mainly in Africa and South America, half of it replacing natural vegetation.
Include biodiversity representation indicators in area-based conservation targets. Needed because of the above exotic invasives and cropland expansion, among other things.
Climate impacts on global agriculture emerge earlier in new generation of climate and crop models. Those new cropland areas will soon be in trouble. Unless genebanks and plant breeding, I guess.
Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty. Could that cropland grow gene-edited crops in an agroecological setting? Yes, but that will require recognizing that agroecology is not a setting.
Plant biodiversity and the regeneration of soil fertility. Restoring biodiversity restores soil fertility too.
Small targeted dietary changes can yield substantial gains for human health and the environment. Replace just 10% of meat calories with fruit and veggies for the win-win. Is this the answer to all of the above? Well, maybe, maybe not.

January 28, 2022

Nibbles: Aurochs, Horse domestication, Tanzanian seeds, Legume portal, MGIS, ISF, Mexico & Philippines

A wild relative making a comeback in Europe.
Can wild horses be far behind?
An effort to bring back traditional foods in Tanzania.
A new data portal on legumes.
An old data portal gets an update.
ISF resources on plant genetic resources.
Mexican coconut and beverage resources are really Filipino resources.

January 24, 2022February 8, 2022

Brainfood: Transformation, Diet diversity, Millets, European wheat, European phenotyping, Maize NDVI, Brazil soybean, Wild wheat quality, Macadamia genome, Domestication, Cacao genebanks, Camelina, W African cooking

An analysis of the transformative potential of major food system report recommendations. Most recommendations are nudges rather than transformative. But is that such a bad thing?
Linking farm production diversity to household dietary diversity controlling market access and agricultural technology usage: evidence from Noakhali district, Bangladesh. Farm diversity is associated with dietary diversity, but less if markets and irrigation are to hand. Phew, that’s good.
Leveraging millets for developing climate resilient agriculture. Never mind the yield, feel the stability. Plus they’re good for you.
Exploring the legacy of Central European historical winter wheat landraces. Not great that breeding has narrowed the genepool. Will it happen to millets next?
A European perspective on opportunities and demands for field-based crop phenotyping. Would be good to have more sites in Central Europe, no?
Genetic dissection of seasonal vegetation index dynamics in maize through aerial based high-throughput phenotyping. 1752 accessions fall into 2 phenological groups. Do it in Europe next?
Changes in soybean cultivars released over the past 50 years in southern Brazil. Yield has gone up, but protein concentration down. No word on stability. Nor overall diversity. Good and bad.
The grain quality of wheat wild relatives in the evolutionary context. Breeders should focus on the timopheevii lineage if they want to do some good.
Signatures of selection in recently domesticated macadamia. Further evidence for the one-step domestication of clonal crops.
Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process. One-step is precisely how domestication did NOT happen for seed crops in the Neolithic though.
Conservation and use of genetic resources of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) by gene banks and nurseries in six Latin American countries. Not a great situation for such a financially important crop. Makes you think.
Chloroplast phylogenomics in Camelina (Brassicaceae) reveals multiple origins of polyploid species and the maternal lineage of C. sativa. Such a lot of work, and they still don’t know in which landscape domestication took place.
Making the invisible visible: tracing the origins of plants in West African cuisine through archaeobotanical and organic residue analysis. 3500 years of continuity in West African cooking investigated via lipid profiles on pottery. And fast forward…