Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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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.

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Brainfood: The diverse lives and times of crop diversity

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Nibbles: Kurdish genebank, Ghana genebank, PABRA, Ubu, Beyond genebanks

  1. Kurdistan inaugurates a new genebank in Sulaymaniyah, which Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani calls one of Kurdistan and Iraq’s most important national projects.
  2. Ghana complements its national collection at Bunso. The new facility further north will improve drying, processing and conservation, while giving northern farmers and breeders closer access to crop diversity.
  3. Three decades of African bean research partnerships and networking have helped turn a staple crop into a vehicle for improved nutrition, livelihoods and climate resilience.
  4. In the Philippines, eight promising purple-yam accessions combine yield, sensory quality and market appeal, with Villasis 2 producing up to 60 tonnes per hectare in trials. Does it need a network next?
  5. However, executive director of Seed Savers Exchange Mike Bollinger’s call in Food Tank’s to carry seed diversity forward extends stewardship beyond formal institutions: Indigenous communities, farmers, gardeners and seed libraries all have a role in keeping crop diversity alive and used.
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The plants that statistics forgot

FAO has just put out new guidance on capturing wild foods and neglected and underutilized species (NUS) in dietary surveys. It’s very much worth a look, even if your interest runs more to grain landraces on the farm than to greens gathered from the forest. The methodology is built to overcome a very real problem: standard dietary assessment tools are generally designed with the main staples in mind, so anything outside that narrow frame (think foraged, seasonal, localized, thinly documented) tends to fall straight through the cracks.

FAO’s fix is a set of very sensible, practical steps: engage local knowledge holders to compile inventories under their own names for things, survey markets to see what’s actually being sold and eaten, map harvest calendars against agroecological zones and seasons, and build simple identification tools (photobooks, reference databases) that let enumerators and communities work from a shared understanding of what they’re counting.

None of that machinery is specific to wild foods though. The same toolkit could easily be adapted to survey the diversity hiding in plain sight on farms: crops and landraces known only by a few, grown in a handful of villages, marginalized, on their way to be forgotten. And invisible to national crop statistics that only track the main crops and the most common named improved varieties, if that. A market survey designed to catch wild greens sold at the roadside works just as well for catching a local bean landrace in the same market. A harvest calendar built to track when forest foods peak works just as well for tracking when fonio gets planted or harvested, and why farmers still bother with it. Great for quantifying the opportunity presented by “opportunity crops.”

And there’s a useful downstream application: surveys built this way could help flag where crop diversity is thinning out on the ground, or where it’s abundant but under-represented in genebank holdings. In other words, the kind of gap analysis that ought to be steering germplasm collecting missions.

FAO’s framing kind of gestures at this already: wild, managed and cultivated aren’t three separate boxes but points on a continuum. A methodology built to navigate that blurriness for wild foods is also a methodology that ought to work for navigating the blurriness at the cultivated end. It would be a shame if this toolkit stayed confined to the wild-food side of the spectrum when the conceptual heavy lifting behind it applies just as well to neglected cultivated diversity.