In situ

May 1, 2026May 1, 2026

When the levee breaks

A piece in The Tribune, an English-language daily out of Punjab, reminded me that we have discussed crop diversity and flooding quite a bit here over the years. The article, entitled “Community seed banks help flood-hit Punjab farmers restore crop productivity,” discusses how an initiative of Punjab Agricultural University helped farmers establish community-level repositories of crop diversity that are coming in useful in recovering from recent flood.

Sharing his experience, Paramjeet Singh, a farmer from Baopur Jadid, said that timely access to quality seeds through the community seed bank enabled him to sow his crop without delay and achieve a yield of around 23 quintals per acre.

Farmers acknowledged that the initiative has significantly reduced reliance on outside seed sources, minimised sowing delays, and improved overall crop outcomes. They are also retaining seed of the new wheat variety PBW 872 for the next season. The initiative has strengthened local seed exchange systems and enhanced community preparedness against climate-related challenges. By ensuring the availability of quality seeds within villages, the Community Seed Bank initiative is contributing to sustainable agricultural development and improving the livelihood security of farmers in flood-affected areas.

A couple of points about this are worth noting.

First, only improved varieties are mentioned in the article, but normally community seed banks will also conserve local landraces. I don’t know if this is the case in Punjab, but I do hope so. As Jeremy put it here all of 15 years ago, in a post on a study of rebuilding cowpea cultivation after flooding in Mozambique, that and similar experiences support “the more general conclusion that seeds already in the local system offer the best chance of restoration.” Although do read the comments to that post. It seems that in another case some farmers weren’t particularly interested in recovering the exact varieties they had lost.

Which brings me to the second point. And that is that I also hope that those community seed banks have good links with the national genebank. This can act both as back-up and as a source of new diversity, as I suggested myself in a more recent post after floods in Pakistan.

April 27, 2026

Brainfood: Clonal crops edition

Ancient DNA reveals 4000 years of grapevine diversity, viticulture and clonal propagation in France. Vegetative propagation of grapevines has been going on since the Iron Age.
High-throughput olive germplasm classification using morphological phenotyping and machine learning. Olive may be generally vegetatively propagated, but you still have to characterize the fruits.
Varietal Diversity Analysis of Date Palm and Identification of High Agro-Economic Genotypes in Middle Draa. About half of of the date palms in the middle Draa of Morocco are actually from seed. That makes their diversity difficult to conserve.
Genebank tools for efficient management of viral infections in tropical clonal crops. All those clonal crops need to be kept clean in genebanks. Here’s how.
Genome degradation in plant tissue culture. All those clonal crops also need to be kept genetically stable in genebanks, and it can be tricky.

April 21, 2026April 20, 2026

Nibbles: Peruvian agrotourism, RSA heirloom apple, Wild tea in China, Native American seeds, Indian chiles, Genebanks, Kenyan tree planting

Agrobiodiversity inspires tourism in the Andes of Peru.
South African fruit exporters does its (small) bit for heirloom apple conservation.
Wild tea doing just fine in the Shunhuangshan National Nature Reserve in Hunan Province, China. Even when harvested by local communities. Looks great for tourism too.
Native communities in Nebraska getting some support for saving and exchanging seeds.
Women are in charge of chiles in Tamil Nadu.
Popular Science does genebanks. At least one genebank has tourism potential, I’d say.
Want to support forest landscape restoration through native tree planting in Kenya? Go to MyFarmTrees, and help keep Kenya a tourism hotspot.

April 20, 2026April 20, 2026

Brainfood: Animal diversity edition

Livestock grazing boosts plant diversity in the Greater Serengeti–Mara Ecosystem. Livestock can be good for biodiversity conservation. But can its diversity be conserved too? Let’s see.
Conservation and Management of Animal Genetic Resources in the Context of African Livestock Production Systems: The Case for In Situ and Ex Situ Conservation. “The multi-stakeholder breeders-researchers-decision-makers approach remains the most robust solution for sound management and preservation of biological units.” What, no farmers and local communities? No, that’s unfair: community-based conservation is discussed. But it doesn’t feel as central to the whole thing as it should be, somehow.
Genetic Diversity, Adaptation, Wild Introgression, and Coat Color Mutation of Golden Yak. After all, local communities have maintained the golden yak reasonably well.
Caprine dairy exploitation on the Iranian Plateau from the seventh millennium BC. Not to mention goats in Iran, and for thousands of years…
Old goats: 3,000 years of genetic connectivity of the domestic goat in Ireland. …and in Ireland, though for not quite as long, admittedly.
Dogs were widely distributed across western Eurasia during the Palaeolithic. And local communities have been managing dog populations since way before farming even.
The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago. Also, local communities managed early cats separately in the Levant and Egypt. Much later than dogs, but that’s cats for you.
A microbiome catalog of Chinese traditional artisanal cheeses provides insights into functional and microbial diversity. And don’t forget to conserve the associated microbiome too. I wonder what golden yak cheese is like.

April 19, 2026April 20, 2026

We need diverse farms, and genebanks can help

A LinkedIn post by CGIAR stalwart Dr Carlo Fadda convinced me I should give a bit more exposure to a recent paper than the brief Brainfood entry I wrote about it a few weeks ago. The paper is Long-term agricultural diversification increases financial profitability, biodiversity, and ecosystem services: a second-order meta-analysis. Its authors are Estelle Raveloaritiana and Thomas Cherico Wanger, and it was published in Nature Communications this past January.

In that Brainfood, I tried to bring together in a logical thread various studies on different aspects of farm diversity and its benefits. In particular, its effects on diet diversity, and hence health outcomes.

But better diets and human health are not the only pluses of diverse farms, and the paper in question in fact suggests that intercropping, organic farming, and other diversification strategies also increase incomes, biodiversity, pollination, soil quality, and carbon sequestration significantly over 20 years. With, importantly, no downward hit on crop yields. So going diverse — organic, if you will — has many advantages that are not overall associated with a yield tradeoff. And that’s from a meta-analysis of 184 meta-analyses and 120 years of data, so it’s a pretty robust result.

As Dr Fadda points out in his excellent summary of the paper, good evidence that diverse — including agrobiodiverse — farms are good for farmers, consumers and the planet is clearly there. The challenge is to find the institutional will to act on it.

I’d like to add that genebanks around the world are ready, willing and able to do just that. It’s literally their job, or at least a big part of it. I hope they are given the chance — and the resources — to do it.