- 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.”
Where have all the nutrients gone?
The “nutrient collapse” story has been doing the rounds for years, and we’ve been picking at it on the blog for almost as long.
Back in 2009, Jeremy looked at evidence that older crop varieties could contain more minerals, protein and other nutrients than newer ones, and discussed various possible reasons, including the intriguing possibility of a “genetic dilution” effect as breeders selected for yield.
By 2012, we were stressing that the evidence was more complicated than the headlines suggested, and in 2019 we linked to the latest critical review of the evidence by Robin Marles of the Bureau of Nutritional Sciences in Canada.
Now the latest episode of the BBC’s indispensable More or Less podcast asks again whether carrots are becoming less nutritious, prompted by a listener who clearly hasn’t been following our blog, and turns to Dr Marles, now retired, for the answer. Which hasn’t really changed much.
The bottom line is that breeding for yield and other commercially important traits can change the balance of what ends up in the harvest, and that we have historically been much better at measuring tonnes per hectare than what is actually in those tonnes.
Nibbles: Pasiega cow, Goat-cow, Badri cow, Zimbabwe festival, Heirloom apples, South Korea genebank, Marmottier, Radiation breeding
- Cantabria is putting the Pasiega cow in the bank. Just in case.
- Spain’s “goat-cows” are fighting wildfires the old-fashioned way: by eating the fuel. I hope they’re in the bank too.
- India has made a Badri calf in a lab. Conservation meets IVF.
- Old apples are having a revival. Turns out forgotten apple varieties can taste pretty good. Well I never, is it that time of year already?
- Zimbabwe’s Mbire district celebrates seed, food and culture with a festival. What, no cows? Or apples?
- South Korea is looking for partners to save climate-resilient plants. A seed vault is better with friends.
- The marmottier can’t decide whether it’s a plum or an apricot. Botanists sympathise.
- In the atomic age, gardeners irradiated seeds and waited for something interesting to grow. Sometimes it did.
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.
Terere, in more ways than one
 |
Terere (amaranth) is mainly a traditional leafy green vegetable in Kenya of course… |
| …and readily available these days in supermarkets. |
 |
 |
But it’s interesting to see the grain also used… |
| …in lots of interesting products. |
 |
Quite the veggie revolution in the last 10 years1, but have we now reached peak terere?
I mean, how much more land is there?
