Indigenous knowledge systems

September 11, 2026September 11, 2026

Listening for genetic erosion

I came across a study that uses a particularly clever form of longitudinal visual ethnography. Researchers returned, after about 15 years, to the same Australian livestock producers and the same locations that had been photographed in the original study. They recreated the photographs and used the old and new images as prompts for interviews, asking nine graziers to explain what had changed, what had stayed the same, and how they now understood the landscape.

But what particularly caught my attention was what they did with the interviews. They constructed “I-Poems”: by extracting a farmer’s first-person statements from the transcript (I see…”, “I remember…”, “I notice…”, “I feel…”) and arranging them as a poem, they could crystallize how the farmer’s own sense of self and relationship with the landscape had changed over time. It struck me as a remarkably simple but powerful way of turning a mass of interview transcripts into something that vividly captures how people actually experience change.

I wonder whether something similar could add a new dimension to monitoring crop diversity on-farm. There is plenty of work documenting what landraces farmers grow, of course, and much research has explored why some are retained, abandoned or acquired. But imagine revisiting the same farmers and communities every five or ten years, recording their crop diversity alongside interviews and then constructing I-Poems from their own words.

Rather than simply showing that a landrace has disappeared, the poems might reveal how its role and meaning have changed: “I used to grow it, but now…”, “My mother really loved it because…”, “Nobody asks me for it now…”, “I still hang on to a few seeds…”, “I don’t know who has the seed anymore…” Read alongside inventories and photographs from successive visits, these could provide a very different kind of longitudinal record, one that explores not just changes in the amount of crop diversity, but in how farmers value, remember, use and make decisions about it. It could help us understand genetic erosion as the social and cultural process it is.

This wouldn’t be entirely without precedent. In Nepal, the “Gramin Kabita Yatra”, or Rural Poetry Journey, brought poets into farming communities to learn about local landraces and turn farmers’ knowledge and appreciation of them into poems and songs. The difference is that the Nepali poems were primarily a means of communicating the value of crop diversity, whereas I-Poems like the ones in the Australian study could be used as an analytical tool: capturing farmers’ own words to reveal how their relationships with particular crops and varieties change over time, and indeed space. An interesting possibility would be to bring these two traditions together, and use poetry not just to celebrate crop diversity, but to listen for the social processes through which it is maintained, transformed and unfortunately sometimes lost.

September 10, 2026September 10, 2026

Nibbles: Frafra, Seed multiplication, Quality seeds, Balearic genebank, Indigenous trees double, Bruno cart, Belgian wild yeast

Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break.
Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver found his own, swapping the wheel for seed multiplication and turning five acres into a livelihood, proof that sometimes the missing link in a seed system is just someone willing to do the unglamorous middle bit well.
Which is, per Farming First, precisely Africa’s problem at scale: only 2.5% of smallholder seed in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from formal seed companies, so a few million more bus-driver-style multipliers wouldn’t hurt.
Meanwhile in the Balearics, the opposite direction of travel: the local seed bank is expanding to rescue tomatoes, onions and broad beans, and is looking for farmers willing to take them back.
Indigenous fruit trees in Malawi turn out to fight malnutrition and biodiversity loss at once. Happy coincidence?
Getting those trees into the ground well needs the same unglamorous groundwork as any good crop seed system: a Mongabay commentary argues that restoration campaigns skipping Indigenous and local seed knowledge are optimising for trees planted, not trees that survive.
And once you’ve got the saplings in the ground, you might want to monitor how they’re doing: enter Bruno, a pushcart rigged with mobile phones that can collect field data. And not just for breeders.
Finally, proof that not all genetic-resource hunting needs a genebank: Brussels brewers are getting people to comb the city for wild yeast, because the raw materials for a proper lambic turns is hanging around in urban trees.

September 7, 2026September 7, 2026

Brainfood: Tree conservation from assisted migration to cryo

The potential effect of megafaunal extinctions on modern conservation of horse chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum. The extinction of large seed-dispersing mammals (i.e. elephants) may explain why horse chestnut failed to recolonise Europe after the last ice age, pointing to assisted migration as a conservation option.
Mapping melliferous tree species in Kenya via one-class classification with hyperspectral unsupervised domain adaptation. Hyperspectral remote imagery and fancy maths can accurately identify and locate Kenya’s honey trees, potentially supporting both conservation and beekeeping. Brave new world. Elephants not involved.
Everyday agroecologies in the Mixteca Alta, Mexico: gendered knowledge and practices in homegarden agroecosystem management. Women’s knowledge helps sustain homegardens as reservoirs of agrobiodiversity and climate-adaptation spaces, embedding many interesting wild and cultivated trees, along with much else, in wider systems of knowledge and resource management.
Integrative DNA barcoding and multimethod species delimitation reveal marker performance in the genus Ficus L. (Moraceae). Takes on the old taxonomic problem of where one fig species ends and another begins. Ficus is an especially resonant group for today’s tree-themed roundup: taxonomically challenging, ecologically consequential, economically and culturally important, tied to famously specialised pollination relationships. “Integrative” means the usefulness of a DNA marker must be tested against other evidence and against the particular boundaries one is trying to recognise.
Chloroplast phylogeographic analysis guides the source tracing and conservation strategies of the endangered Magnolia kwangsiensis Moving down one biodiversity level, mapping maternal genetic structure helps identify appropriate seed sources for conservation and restoration, rather than treating all populations as genetically equivalent. Next comes feeding the seeds to passing elephants.
Development of a simple and easily interpretable cultivar identification system using 18 insertion/deletion (InDel) markers in Japanese pummelo (Citrus maxima). Really simple markers can identify Japanese pummelo cultivars, and even reveal clues about their parentage.
К 100-летию отдела генетических ресурсов плодовых культур ВИР. (On the 100th Anniversary of the Fruit Crop Genetic Resources Department of VIR). A century-long institutional case study in tree (ok, and shrub) conservation at scale: some 19,000 fruit, nut and berry accessions now held in field genebanks across ten Russian field stations, each sited in the climate zone that suits what it conserves.
Cryopreservation strategies for trees: Leveraging organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis for effective conservation. Combining ultra-low-temperature storage with making shoots or roots from an explant tissue and making embryo-like structures from non-reproductive cells offers ways to emulate seeds when the real things cannot be easily stored in the usual way, field genebanks cannot be guaranteed to last 100 years, and there are no elephants around.

September 4, 2026September 9, 2026

When farming worlds collide

When we think about crops moving around the world — and we often do around here — the Columbian Exchange is the canonical example, and why not? The transatlantic movement of maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, and chili peppers to Europe, Africa and Asia, and of wheat, sugar, coffee, and livestock to the Americas, was profoundly transformative. It reshaped global agriculture and diets more dramatically than any single event in human history after the Neolithic.

But similar, if maybe smaller-scale, “exchanges” happened long before 1492. The deep history of agriculture features several ancient “mixing bowls,” let’s call them, where traditions from different geographic origins met and interacted in fascinating ways. These are natural experiments in how new crops become part of diversified farming systems, and I think they can be especially useful in thinking about “opportunity crops.”

Usually, by opportunity crops we mean local or regional crops that were perhaps once more important, and then declined. Or, even if they were never very important, they could still do more, given the chance, whether for diets or incomes, or resilience: indigenous fruits and vegetables, forgotten grains, traditional tubers, you know the kind of thing. Their local resurgence is a crucial path to diversification, for sure. But those agricultural mixing bowls suggest that crops from the outside also have a role in enriching local farming.

Continue reading “When farming worlds collide”

August 31, 2026August 28, 2026

Brainfood: The diverse lives and times of crop diversity

Herbaria viva: proto-genebanks of Mendel’s contemporaries in Moravia. The early 19th century living plant collections of Moravia (the world Mendel grew up in) were a kind of proto-genebank, systematically maintaining and circulating crop diversity decades before genetics had a name.
Saving evolutionary time: Conflicting planetary temporalities in the genetic diversity debate, 1967–1980. Looking back 50 years, and 50 years after the Moravian proto-genebanks, a historian of science traces how Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett, sounding the alarm on genetic erosion in the 1960s-70s, articulated two competing visions of time and responsibility for safeguarding crop diversity, one rooted in development, the other in collective stewardship of evolution itself.
Utilization and conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in China: a systematic review of genebanks and farmers’ seed systems. From history to present-day infrastructure. In China, genebanks and farmers’ seed systems have developed together, but gaps between formal and informal conservation remain. Otto and Erna unavailable for comment, alas.
The effect of crop genetic diversity to food security among smallholder farmers in the global south and the role of community seed banks: a narrative literature review. Here’s the evidence on how community seed banks shape food security for smallholders, but could do more. That’s the informal system at work for you, Erna would say.
How community seed banks contribute to climate-resilient seed systems: evidence from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nepal. Speaking of which, a companion study looks at how community seed banks function in practice, finding they do bolster local seed security and climate adaptation, but with real limits: patchy variety availability, uneven quantities, and occasional genetic erosion of their own.
Varietal development and rice yield growth in India: assessing IRRI’s germplasm contribution. A new assessment of the contribution of IRRI germplasm to Indian rice breeding comes in at around 11% of annual rice yield growth from 1966 to 2021. That’s the formal system at work for you, Otto would say.
Improving low-pH and high-aluminum field tolerance in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.). Also on the breeding front, screens of genebank collections and their derivatives for field-level tolerance to difficult soils bear fruit. Or rather, leaves.
FAIRness at all costs? Practical limitations in applying the FAIR principles to plant genetic resources data. And finally, a reality check for the data side of all this. Applying the FAIR principles to plant genetic resources data isn’t as straightforward as the mandate suggests, with a number of practical friction points standing between the ideal and actual implementation.