Category: History

Posted on

In Memoriam

Sad to report that two giants of our field have passed on.

Dr Melaku Worede helped establish the national genebank of Ethiopia in 1976 and led it for 14 years. He was a champion for the equal participation of farmers and local communities in the conservation and management of crop diversity.

Dr Miguel Holle was a teacher and plant explorer, a world expert on wild tomato genetic resources.

Both made indelible contributions to the conservation and use of plant genetic resources, on both the technical and policy side, over many years. They will be missed.

Posted on

Brainfood: PGRFA prioritization, Endangerment value, Geo-genetic visualization tool, USDA quinoa collection, Wild sesame conservation, USDA genebanks & climate change, Clover genetic changes, Collecting Comoros cassava, Sunflower breeding history, Durum breeding, Rice genebank tools

Posted on

Nibbles: Milpa revival, Cretan olive, Lost apples, Moche meals, African agroecology, Global Tree Knowledge Platform, Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity

  1. Marketing the milpa.
  2. Marketing a traditional Cretan olive variety.
  3. Finding lost apples in New England. Now to market them.
  4. Taking new passion fruit varieties to market in Australia.
  5. Deconstructing Moche history, society and culture through compost and struggle meals. No sign of markets.
  6. Reviewing the state of agroecology in Africa. Does “economic diversification” count as marketing?
  7. The Global Tree Knowledge Platform must have stuff on marketing somewhere.
  8. The books series ISSUES IN AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY, now free to download, has lots on marketing.
Posted on

Tracing the spread of a map of the spread of the olive

There’s a nice map of the spread of the olive doing the rounds on Twitter.

But where does it come from?

As best as I can make out, the ultimate source seems to be an article on Vivid Maps. All the other maps and illustrations in the article are credited, but this one is not, so I’m thinking the author — Alex — made it him or herself, and a fine job they did too if so.

Where did they get the data? Difficult to say, but there’s a very similar map, though not nearly as nice, in an Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems article entitled Olive Growing in a Time of Change. And that has the following credit (slightly cleaned up, and link added):

Olive diffusion in the Mediterranean Basin. (Adapted from Morettini. 1950. Olivicoltura. REDA, Roma, Italia, by Rallo, L. 2005. In Rallo, L., Barranco, D., Caballero, J. M., Del Río, C., Martín, A., Tous, J. Trujillo, I. (Eds.). (2005). Las variedades de Olivo en España. Junta de Andalucia. Ministerio de Agricultura Pesca y Alimentación. Ediciones Mundi-Prensa, Madrid, España. We acknowledge the permission by authors, scientific editors and publishers).

Which doesn’t really help clarify things an awful lot. Recent work adds an eastern dimension to the spread of the crop.

Posted on

Nibbles: SDG funding, GBIF RoI, Food system revitalisation, Bean Power, British baked beans, Cock beer, Access Agriculture, SCANR, Nuts, Hawaii, USDA livestock, Norway livestock, SPC, and WorldVeg genebanks, Millet ambassador, Mango orchards, Wild foods, Degraded lands, Orphan crops, PPB, Biofortification, Ugali, Variety ID, Variety definitions

  1. The SDGs need proper long-term financing, say Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and co-authors. Maybe he’d like to have a look at the the Crop Trust’s endowment fund for SDG 2.5?
  2. There’s a 15x return on investment from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)? Ok, do Genesys next.
  3. Want to revitalize the food system? Think lentils, bananas, kale and walnuts. My take? Why stop there?
  4. I mean, there’s all sorts of cool pulses besides lentils, nice as they are.
  5. Really no end to them.
  6. Want some cock beer with your Lincolnshire beans? I bet you do.
  7. Shout out for the Access Agriculture farmer-to-farmer educational video platform from the Seed System Newsletter. Nothing on walnuts, alas. Or cock beer.
  8. As we’re on online resources, there’s also the Support Centre for Agriculture and Nutrition Research (SCANR). It “connects researchers with resources and guidance for carrying out interdisciplinary research related to agriculture, food systems, nutrition, and health.” I wonder what it has to say about walnuts.
  9. Nut genebank gets an upgrade in Oregon. No, not walnuts, alas. It’s Miller time!
  10. Lots of genebank action in Hawaii too.
  11. Livestock also getting the genebank treatment in the US.
  12. But not just in the US: Norway too. Love these back-from-the-brink stories.
  13. The regional genebank for the Pacific is one of my favourites.
  14. It’s up there with that of the World Vegetable Centre, which is getting a write-up in the New Yorker, of all places.
  15. Of course you can have community-level genebanks too. Here are two examples from India: conserving millets and mangoes.
  16. Maybe there should be more genebanks for wild food species, but these cool in situ conservation stories will do for now.
  17. Investing in community farming projects can revitalise degraded lands.
  18. Those farming project don’t have to involve orphan crops, but it wouldn’t hurt.
  19. You could do participatory plant breeding on them, couldn’t you. This book says that be just the ticket for rural revitalisation. Lots of revitalisation in these Nibbles.
  20. They would help with malnutrition where maize biofortification hasn’t worked so well, for example.
  21. Maize? Maize needs to be decolonized, not biofortified.
  22. Extension workers need to be better at identifying different crop varieties. IITA is on the case, but doesn’t seem to have thought about putting the data on GBIF. Walnuts next?
  23. Wait, what’s a variety?