Can the food processing industry contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity? Of course it can. Even in genebanks? Sure, why not. There’s no reason beyond a failure of the imagination to think that genebanks can’t participate directly in the food value chain as innovation partners, supporting sustainable products and market differentiation. Too bad there’s not a ton of examples. A pretty good one is NordGen’s partnerships with the food company Oatly. Oatly funded trials of more than 800 oat accessions, generating phenotypic and genomic data that identified traits valuable for taste and processing. The collaboration provided industry with suitable varieties while enriching NordGen’s documentation of its collection. This and a few — too few — other examples can be found in From seed to shelf: Models for integrating agrobiodiversity in food processing activities, from FAO and the Plant Treaty. I hope one day soon the coffee industry wakes up and smell the genebanks.
Nibbles: Online seeds, Yam breeding, Rice genebanks, Indian commmunity seed banks, Sikkim banana, Cassava disease, ICARDA genebank, Tajikistan women
- The perils of dematerialization play out in India.
- Is YamHub dematerialization?
- Rice genebanks in Bangladesh and at IRRI are pretty solid.
- There’s a pretty solid platform for India’s community seed banks.
- I hope Nagaland’s wild bananas end up in genebanks.
- Cassava’s diversity is in multiple genebanks, and that’s a good thing, CBSD and all.
- ICARDA’s genebank back in the Syrian news, though in a good way for once.
- Tajikistan’s women farmers are bringing back crops with not a worry about dematerialization. Or genebanks, it seems.
Brainfood: Genetic erosion edition
- Crop diversity trends captured by Indigenous and local knowledge: introduction to the symposium. A whole symposium on how Indigenous knowledge reveals widespread loss of traditional crops and landraces, and the increasing adoption of high-yielding varieties, driven by economic, political, climatic, and sociocultural forces.
- Landraces and climate change: global trends through the lens of political agroecology. Structural forces (markets, policies) and unequal power in seed systems drive the decline of traditional varieties and marginalize Indigenous and local knowledge about crop diversity; climate change not so much.
- Smallholders farmers defying global genetic erosion: documenting 60 years of peanut landrace conservation in a South American diversity center. Well, not everywhere. I wonder why…
- Farmers hold diverse and connected values towards crops. The global literature shows that farmers value crops not just for yield and profit, but for a wide range of interconnected economic, agronomic, ecological, social, and cultural reasons that vary across farming systems, and recognizing these diverse values can improve research and policy on agricultural sustainability and crop diversity. So that’s why.
- Towards a holistic framework: Exploring the relationship between seed security and food security dynamics among smallholder farmers in Chimanimani, Zimbabwe. The link between smallholder seed and food security is complex, non-linear, and shaped by socio-economic, environmental, and policy factors, showing that having secure access to seed does not automatically translate into food security and that context-specific, systemic approaches are needed to understand and strengthen both.
- The local crop varieties (farmers’ varieties) registration system in Nepal: Past, present and future. It may all be very complex, but legally recognizing and protecting farmer-developed landraces within a formal seed regime can empower farmers, conserve agrobiodiversity, and strengthen seed system resilience.
- Leveraging Earth Observation Technologies to Monitor Essential Genetic Diversity. Nah, we can do it from space.
Brainfood: Crop (species) diversity edition
- Small farms contribute a third of the food consumed in high-income nations. And those small farms are disproportionately diverse…
- The Global Spatial Co-Variation Between Crop Diversity and Landscape Heterogeneity. …and crop diversity on farms goes with landscape diversity.
- Beyond Crop Hotspots: Why Overlooked Marginal Agricultural Lands Deserve Urgent Attention. I’m willing to bet landscape diversity is often associated with marginality, but that’s not the end of the world.
- Food Biodiversity and its Association with Diet Quality and Health Outcomes-A Scoping Review. Why should we care about diverse farms? Because diversity in your food is associated with nutritional adequacy, a reduced risk of mortality, or a reduced risk of gastrointestinal cancers. Ok, I know, I missed a step there. There was nothing in the past few weeks in the literature specifically linking farm diversity and food diversity, but you know the link is there. At least sometimes.
- Long-term agricultural diversification increases financial profitability, biodiversity, and ecosystem services: a second-order meta-analysis. Diversity on farms is not just good for (ok, maybe) diets.
- Global evidence that plant diversity suppresses pests and promotes plant performance and crop production. Another way farm diversity is useful is via pest control. Well, actually, this could count as an ecosystem service, and so an example of the above.
- Ecological drivers of intercropping performance for enhanced global crop production. Ah, that explains how those farm ecosystem services actually works.
- Crop rotations synergize yield, nutrition, and revenue: a meta-analysis. Rotations are diversification too, and good for you too.
- Revitalizing orphan crops to combat food insecurity. But of course the diversification strategy de jour is opportunity crops.
- Value chain research and development: The quest for impact. And for that revolution to happen, we’ll need a better grip on value chains.
- Cultural innovation can increase and maintain biodiversity: A case study from medieval Europe. Yes, agricultural revolution can lead to increased biodiversity.
- Household vegetable agro-biodiversity in northern Vietnam requires diversity in seed sources. Any revolution is going to need good sources of good seeds though.
Nibbles: Restoration, Monitoring, CARDI, Margot Forde, Warwick, Slow Beans 2025, Lonicera
- Africa needs good forest seeds.
- And genetic monitoring of the resulting plantings, probably.
- The Caribbean also wants quality seed, and thinks a mobile seed bank is the way to get it.
- The only mobile things about New Zealand’s genebank are its collectors.
- A very mobile donation to the UK’s vegetable genebank.
- Nothing very mobile about Slow Beans 2025, but that’s the point.
- The long journey of honeysuckle.