- Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
- Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
- When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
- The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
- Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
- San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
- New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Eat this ravioli
Jeremy’s latest Eat This Newsletter tackles cassava, the chestnut, rice and pears. But his coolest find is a website called Flavour Lines, that allows you to find out, among other things, how far you are from a restaurant whose sign outside advertises biryani as opposed to pulao, or ravioli as opposed to pierogi.
Nibbles: Historical photos, Belgian pears, Miombo fruits, Kenya seed treble, Nepal landraces, Women
- 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.