- 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.
Nibbles: Kurdish genebank, Ghana genebank, PABRA, Ubu, Beyond genebanks
- Kurdistan inaugurates a new genebank in Sulaymaniyah, which Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani calls one of Kurdistan and Iraq’s most important national projects.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
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.
Nibbles: Mango breeding, Cambodian peppers, Cold genes, Geechee cowpea, Navajo genebank
- Blue mangoes.
- Kampot pepper.
- Antarctic flowering plant.
- Sapelo Island red pea.
- Navajo seed data.
Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea
- New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
- FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
- Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
- Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
- Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
- In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.