In situ

October 3, 2026October 3, 2026

Two legends of agricultural transformation

Land sparing is a seductive story.

Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky land sharing business. Everybody wins.

A new paper in Agriculture and Human Values calls this a “policy legend”: a complicated and contested body of research gets turned into a simple, reassuring story about technology and intensification. The politics of who owns land, who benefits from intensification, what gets produced and where, and what happens to rural livelihoods very conveniently disappear from the equation.

But the other side of the debate has its own temptations. Agroecology as a movement is often explicit about context, politics and food sovereignty. Yet it too can occasionally shrink to something that’s cosily tidy: conventional agriculture is the problem, agroecology is the solution, here are some desirable practices, get farmers to switch.

Another new paper, this one in Ecological Economics, also makes that story look way too simple. And you know how we love that here. The authors look at 2,721 farms in six African countries and find very different starting points for the transition to agroecology, and different trajectories. The smallest farms tend to combine autonomy and income diversification; larger farms more often go for some crop-livestock integration; small and medium farms may put more land into legumes for soil health.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The way farmers make decisions is complicated. And I coincidentally came across a study in Food and Nutrition Bulletin that illustrates that rather well, albeit on a small scale. Surveys of 26 farmers in the Ecuadorian highlands found that they grew diversity for economic reasons, sure, but also for social, emotional or health and safety reasons. And, rather wonderfully, sometimes simply because they liked it.

Farm size, labour availability, markets, tenure, risk, access to inputs, knowledge, household objectives and yes, sheer aesthetics, all shape what farmers can do, are willing to do, and indeed eventually end up doing. Change one part of the system, and you can change the economics of the rest.

So why do we keep reaching for legends?

Simple stories are useful, I guess. They fit snugly into funding proposals, policy briefs and campaign slogans, and every camp needs something to organise around. Unfortunately, agriculture is way messier than the legends we tell about it.

September 30, 2026September 30, 2026

Nibbles: Historical photos, Belgian pears, Miombo fruits, Kenya seed treble, Nepal landraces, Women

Haga Hideo’s 1950s photos of Fukushima farming rituals are now being used to revive them: ex situ conservation, but for culture.
Long before photography, or “pre‑breeding” was a buzzword, Belgian pomologist Jean‑Baptiste Van Mons was running massive pear selection trials and gifting us Beurré Bosc and Doyenné Boussock.
As Southern Africa’s miombo woodlands shrinks, scientists are cloning wild trees so the fruit — and food security — outlive the forest. Now for the pre-breeding.
Greenpeace Africa’s Seed Project makes the case for indigenous seeds as a route to farmer independence. And you can help.
And oh so coincidentally, a network of community seed banks in Kenya is rescuing indigenous seeds so the diversity is still around when opportunity (or crisis) knocks.
Also in Kenya, the national genebank’s collectors are racing to secure opportunity crops.
Nepal’s indigenous crops and landraces are at the same time more needed than ever, and under threat. So, much like in Kenya.
The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT says women are at the center of sustainable food systems; the fine print adds: “as they have always been.”

September 26, 2026September 27, 2026

Restarting a relationship with seeds

Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently.

In her Ambrook piece, Emma Glassman-Hughes follows the return of ancestral corn to Wampanoag and Nipmuc communities in the northeastern US. While Rowen White, who is a Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, explores the cultural and spiritual meaning of seeds, farming and “fertile resistance” in a conversation with For the Wild. Now, I don’t think that formal genebanks were involved in either case, but together the two pieces raise an intriguing question for them: what happens to the knowledge that travels with a seed when the seed comes home?

White talks about seeds as relatives: carriers of relationships, cultural memory and knowledge. Glassman-Hughes’s story makes the problem more tangible, if less poetic. Metacom corn has returned to Wampanoag land after roughly 350 years, but the people, landscape and farming conditions have changed in the meantime. No complete set of instructions came with the seeds. But even if they had, they probably wouldn’t be much use now. People had to experiment, observe and learn again.

I think that’s an interesting lesson. We tend to think of traditional knowledge as something that can be documented when an accession is collected and then preserved and made use of, much like the seeds themselves. But information that was useful to a farmer even just a generation ago may no longer be relevant in changed circumstances. Some knowledge may have been lost, some may have evolved, and new knowledge emerges when people start growing the crop again.

We’ve talked about this here before. Back in 2010, I wrote about a social media exchange between taro breeders in Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. A video posted by breeder John Cho sparked a conversation in which people translated results, identified promising hybrids, compared performance in different countries and even discovered discrepancies in the identity of some material. I asked then whether this kind of open-ended discussion might be more useful for encouraging the use of crop diversity in genebanks than conventional accession-by-descriptor tables.

A week later, I pushed the idea further, asking whether genebank documentation needed a “social networking makeover.” My point wasn’t that we should abandon databases. (Although…) I was trying to put the people using and evaluating germplasm at the centre, allowing their observations, questions and experiences to accumulate around the accession, while still feeding validated information into structured databases.

If knowledge about a seed changes as people grow it, select it, use it and adapt it, then a genebank accession’s record is just a starting point. When material is returned to cultivation, what people learn about it should have a way of flowing back into the conservation system. So it can be used by the next in line.

Rematriation is not just returning seeds, it is restarting a relationship with those seeds. That doesn’t mean every genebank needs a community liaison officer. (Although…) Nor should genebanks romanticise traditional knowledge or assume that a community’s current practices are frozen remnants of the past. It does mean recognising that seeds have a social life, and that the knowledge surrounding them changes too.

The practical challenge is to build conservation systems that can value not only what we know about an accession when we put it away, but what people learn about it when we bring it back. And that, fundamentally, means recognizing that those people should have a stake in the genebank documentation system. That’s far from the case now.

September 23, 2026September 21, 2026

Nibbles: China genebank, China blueberries, PhilRice, Italy olive genebank, GIAHS, Mangelwurzel, Papaw, Bean AI

China is building its germplasm collection at the National Frigid Zone Crop and Soybean Germplasm Resources Mid-term Bank in Harbin. Cool.
Driscoll’s helped build China’s blueberry industry, then discovered that knowledge, infrastructure and genetics have a habit of escaping. Not so cool.
Meanwhile, the Philippines wants its rice collection to hit 21,000 varieties by the end of the year. IRRI unavailable for comment.
Italy is establishing a major global olive genebank. Unclear where it fits in with other major global olive genebanks, but some redundancy is good.
FAO showcases Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, where crops, landscapes and traditional knowledge have survived together. Like olives in Italy, I guess.
The mangelwurzel is making a comeback, because apparently forgotten root vegetables just need better publicity, and not a fancy GIAHS.
Ohio growers are trying to save the pawpaw just as Americans are discovering it, partly because of better publicity.
BeanGPT is bringing AI to breeding and farming beans. Maybe it can help the mangelwurzel and pawpaw too?

September 21, 2026September 20, 2026

Brainfood: From data to action

A three-decade-long analysis shows rising threatened species and responsibility gaps in global supply chains. Data says that we must make responsibility for biodiversity traceable from production to final demand.
Development of an evidence-based integrated germplasm prioritization framework for conservation and breeding. Data says: here’s how to extract some defensible conservation and breeding priorities from this large collection.
A methodological framework for the standardised evaluation of olive genetic resources: GEN4OLIVE harmonized protocols. Data says that we should standardise phenotyping across countries to make olive germplasm more useful in breeding.
High-throughput phenotyping of Bambara groundnut [Vigna subterranea (L.) Verdc.] seed morphometrics using videometer. Data says that we should use multispectral imaging to really speed up seed characterization and breeding in Bambara groundnut.
Predicting the cross-continental spread of the cassava brown streak disease epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Data says that we must strengthen surveillance and delivery systems for clean planting material before cassava brown streak disease reaches Nigeria.
The Sustainability of Robusta Coffee Under Global Change—A Review. Data says that we must match robusta production to genuinely suitable environments, plus invest in lower-input cultivation and alternative coffee species.
Borassus Akeassii Facing Societal and Environmental Challenges: Case Study of the Gouin Society of Southwestern Burkina Faso. Data says that we need to conserve this multipurpose palm once central to Gouin livelihoods together with the local knowledge and practices that make it useful.