- The Lebanese and Syrian genebanks in the news. For good reasons, for now at least.
- Wild American apples should be more in the news. And probably more in genebanks.
- Community seed banks could be good news in fragile states.
- Good news for India’s banana diversity. Yes, it now has a genebank!
- All those genebanks need breeders, like Mina Nešić.
- Genebanks are nice of course, but it’s even better news when the agrobiodiversity gets out and about.
Brassica on the brink
How did collards get to remote oases on the edge of the Sahara? That’s what ethnobotanists Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have been looking into for like 20 years now, and it’s a fascinating story. Which you can read about in detail in their paper in Economic Botany. They also present an abbreviated form of the argument in The Conversation. Which got Nibbled some months back, though without giving anything away. But actually what I recommend you do is listen to Jeremy interview the intrepid duo in the latest episode of Eat This Podcast.
Brainfood: Silk Road, Wheat domestication, Peanut domestication, Olive wild relatives, Pearl millet movement, Maori horticulture, Wild meat, Fermentation
- Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies. Different stages of adopting and intensifying the use of domesticates (livestock, horses, and later crops) reshaped economies, mobility, and social organization in north-central Asia, ultimately enabling the emergence of the Silk Road. So domesticated species were as active drivers of Eurasian historical development as of prehistory.
- Ancient grains illuminate the mosaic origin of domesticated wheat. Domesticated wheat arose through repeated hybridizations between distinct wild populations carrying complementary non-shattering spike mutations, followed by ongoing gene flow and regional adaptation, making domestication a prolonged and interconnected process. Long before the result got to the Silk Road.
- A single hybrid origin of cultivated peanut. Domestication of the peanut seems to have been easier than that of wheat.
- A synthetic eco-evolutionary proposal for the conservation of wild relatives of the olive tree. If we ever have to re-domesticate the olive, we should make sure these 53 wild populations are conserved.
- Westward expansion of pearl millet agriculture into the Lac de Guiers basin, Senegal, by c. AD 200. I wonder what the Sahelian equivalent of the Silk Road was.
- Horticultural intensification and plant-based diets of 18th century CE Waikato Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. At least some Maori ate predominantly sweet potato and taro during the Traditional Period. Which of course were brought to Aotearoa via the ara moana, which, stretching a point, is the South Pacific equivalent of the Silk Road.
- Increase in wild animal consumption across Central Africa. Yeah, but who needs domesticated species anyway.
- Fermentation as food pedagogy: insights into how teaching fermentation facilitates engagement with the food system. Are fermentation microbes domesticated?
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 supported farmers to establish community-level repositories of crop diversity that are turning out to be 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. Which 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.
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.