- China does a census of crop diversity for its genebank.
- Getting birds to help replant forests in early modern Japan.
- Swapping seeds in Bristol.
- The complementary roles of fortification and biofortification.
Brainfood: Spatial data, Extinction risk, Improved lentils, Lentil collection, Ohia germination, Shea genomics, Wild olive, Cacao climate refugia, Cacao sacred groves, Italian winter squash, Nigerian yams, Bambara groundnut diversity
- CropHarvest: A global dataset for crop-type classification. 90,000 datapoints all over the world, nicely labelled with what’s going on there agriculturally speaking. Let the AI rip.
- Using publicly available data to conduct rapid assessments of extinction risk. Pretty much useless, but at least now we know why. Should have used AI.
- Plot-level impacts of improved lentil varieties in Bangladesh. About 15% higher yields and gross margins, resulting in lots of savings on imports.
- Agro-Morphological Characterization of Lentil Germplasm of Indian National Genebank and Development of a Core Set for Efficient Utilization in Lentil Improvement Programs. And a core subset to boot. Unclear if any were used to breed the above.
- Variation in Germination Traits Inform Conservation Planning of Hawaiʻi’s Foundational ʻŌhiʻa Trees. Germination was lower from some populations than from others, but not because of environmental factors.
- Genomic Resources to Guide Improvement of the Shea Tree. Ok, great, but now what exactly? And no word on germination…
- Current Status of Biodiversity Assessment and Conservation of Wild Olive (Olea europaea L. subsp. europaea var. sylvestris). When can we expect something similar for shea tree?
- Extreme climate refugia: a case study of wild relatives of cacao (Theobroma cacao) in Colombia. The forest areas where wild cacao has survived the longest, and is particularly diverse, will be cut in half in 50 years. I wonder what the figures are for wild olive.
- Soil biomarkers of cacao tree cultivation in the sacred cacao groves of the northern Maya lowlands. Maybe re-introduce it? More here.
- How to save a landrace from extinction: the example of a winter squash landrace (Cucurbita maxima Duchesne) in Northern Italy (Lungavilla-Pavia). It’s great to have ‘Berrettina di Lungavilla’ back, but 7 years for one landrace? No sacred groves involved. Shea harvesters unavailable for comment.
- Collection, characterizaton, product quality evaluation, and conservation of genetic resources of yam (Dioscorea spp.) cultivars from Ekiti State, Nigeria. At least it’s more than one landrace.
- Genetic Diversity and Environmental Influence on Growth and Yield Parameters of Bambara Groundnut. 95 landraces, no less. All safe from extinction. Right?
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).
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.
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.