Neglected species

October 26, 2026October 26, 2026

Wild silk found in the archives

Readers will be familiar with the domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori, munching mulberry leaves, and only mulberry leaves, and obligingly spinning the fine thread that has dressed the rich for millennia. But how many of you know about alternative, wild sources of silk? Quite a few, perhaps, if you’ve been following us for a while and your memory is better than mine.

Because, as it turns out, though I’d totally forgotten about it, we’ve blogged about this a few times before. I linked to silk-making in the drylands of Mwingi in Kenya back in 2007, which I followed up the following year. And Jeremy also chipped in, twice in fact.¹ Wild silk was one of our most popular topics at the time, if comments are anything to go by.

Anyway, this trip into the archives was prompted by a recent piece in The Hindu about how the Central Sericultural Germplasm Resource Centre (CSGRC) in Hosur has been teaching students at the Forest College and Research Institute of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University all about non-mulberry sericulture. Apparently as part of the “exploration of opportunities for integrating forest-based silk production into forestry ecosystems.”

The best introduction to the beauty and diversity of wild silks I’ve found is the website of the Florida Museum’s wonderful collection. But no doubt there are other useful resources out there on this fascinating subject.

October 21, 2026October 21, 2026

Nibbles: Standing variation, Indigenous dogs, Austrian apples, Jordanian olive oil, Island foods

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.

October 20, 2026October 19, 2026

A seven-course meal of neglected crops

Good news for those who want to learn more about opportunity crops, aka neglected and underutilized species:

This seven-course series curriculum equips participants with competences required to transform Neglected and Underutilized Species (NUS) into sustainable careers, commercial enterprises, and resilient food systems. Developed by African university experts and global partners, and hosted asynchronously on the RUFORUM e-Learning Platform (REP), each self-paced course awards its own certificate of completion and offers flexible adoption options for higher education institutions, whether deployed as standalone credentials, embedded into degree programmes, or used as core supplementary resources.

You do have to register, but I’ve tried it and it’s fairly painless.

I can’t say I like those images much, but the contents of the courses themselves do not betray use of AI. Here are the topics that are treated by each:

Climate and biodiversity
Nutrition and health
Business development
Postharvest and processing
Production and agronomy
Foundations and systems
Policy and food systems

October 19, 2026October 17, 2026

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?

October 6, 2026October 6, 2026

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?