- Ancient farmers didn’t have to wait for the genetic diversity that made domestication possible. They selected from variation already present in wild plants, including the ancestors of rice and maize. Domestication was as much about spotting (or happening upon) useful differences as creating new ones.
- English colonists in America called Indigenous dogs “wolves,” revealing as much about colonial perceptions as about the animals themselves. This history of Indigenous dogs shows how unfamiliar animals were classified through peculiarly European ideas about wildness.
- Austria is bringing forgotten apple varieties back to life. Saving old varieties in genebanks is one thing: getting people to grow, sell and eat them is another, but it can be done. Or at least tried.
- Jordan’s olive-oil heritage centres on traditional varieties such as Nabali and ancient Rumi trees, but most production is consumed locally, leaving exports limited and making provenance, cultivar and harvest date important indicators for buyers. Compare and contrast with Austrian apples.
- Small island developing states have distinctive food cultures and ingredients, but face particular challenges in building sustainable and resilient food systems. FAO’s A Taste of SIDS explores the connections between island food, biodiversity and culinary heritage. Nice to see diversity within crops considered, though a few local variety names would have been nice.
Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives
- WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
- Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
- Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
- Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
- An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
- Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
- Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
- Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?
The chocolate formerly known as lost
The Quest to Save the World’s Most Coveted Chocolate is an engaging story in Smithsonian Magazine about Ecuador’s ancient, iconic Nacional cacao. It was published three years ago, but I only just came across it. It rang a bell, so I went back through the archive. And there was lots more there than I suspected. Again in celebration of our twentieth anniversary, let’s go through it.
It all started in 2009, when Jeremy first described how witches’ broom had devastated Nacional cultivation in the early 1900s, how breeders responded, and how farmers eventually widely adopted the more productive and resistant, but much less tasty, new variety known as CCN51. Nacional basically disappeared.
But not totally. In 2011, we Nibbled the rediscovery of Nacional populations in northern Peru by a USDA team, as reported in the N.Y. Times. A glimmer of hope, perhaps?
In 2015, Jeremy returned to the story. We learned that more than half of Ecuador’s cacao trees were then CCN51, which of course made the industry again vulnerable to the next disease. And, even worse, that the chocolate they produced tasted like “rusty nails.”
But now — thankfully — comes a much happier chapter, nicely described in the Smithsonian piece.
Encouraged by the discovery of Nacional in Peru, a motley crew of conservationists, chocolate makers and agricultural scientists went looking for it in Ecuador. In 2013, they found a grove of century-old trees in a coastal valley called Piedra de Plata. DNA showed that nine of 47 trees they sampled were genetically pure Nacional. They established them in a field genebank in 2018, and started producing planting material for interested local farmers.
More than 30 families are now working … to reforest their lands using seedlings from the nearly extinct tree. The rebirth of this once-lost treasure isn’t just a miracle for the chocolate-loving world — it’s also a milestone in reviving the rich heritage of Ecuador’s coastal forests and farming. And it may even offer hope for saving other endangered trees worldwide.
The plan was that within three years the nursery would be producing 5,000 Nacional seedlings annually. That would be about now. Alas, I was not able to find an update, but I do hope they’re on track.
The moral? Conservation pays — especially when what you’re conserving makes chocolate that doesn’t taste like rusty nails.
Nibbles: African food systems, Uganda cassava, Uganda pastoralists, Butternut conservation, Seed transfer zones webinar, Frozen Zoo, India fish genebank
- 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?
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.”