- Diversifying the UK Agrifood System: A Role for Neglected and Underutilised Crops. It’s really hard to pick potential NUS winners. So why even try? Support them all!
- Can markets for nature conservation be successful? An integrated assessment of a product label for biodiversity practices in Germany. Labelling agricultural products can support biodiversity conservation, but probably not on its own. Can it support NUS, I wonder?
- On-farm crop diversity, conservation, importance and value: a case study of landraces from Western Ghats of Karnataka, India. Plenty of diversity in these study sites, including of NUS, but ex situ conservation still needed.
- Revealing Ghana’s unique fonio genetic diversity: leveraging farmers knowledge for sustainable conservation and breeding strategies. Supporting NUS is going to need the knowledge of farmers…
- African indigenous vegetables, gender, and the political economy of commercialization in Kenya. …especially women farmers. Up to a point.
- Cultivating prosperity in Rwanda: the impact of high-yield biofortified bean seeds on farmers’ yield and income. Ok, beans are not a NUS, but you get the point.
- Increased farmer willingness to pay for quality cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) planting materials: evidence from experimental auctions in Cambodia and Lao PDR. NUS or not, clean planting materials and new varieties attract a price premium.
- Brown-top millet: an overview of breeding, genetic, and genomic resources development for crop improvement. Urochloa ramosa is definitely a NUS. And labelling will probably not be enough.
- Survival analysis of freezing stress in the North American native perennial flax, Linum lewisii. If you want to help your NUS, make it perennial?
Nibbles: SPAM2020, Pullman genebank, Svalbard, Olive plague, Rice diversity, Vanilla threat, Gum rockrose, VACS demand, AI double, Food & climate change
- The latest version of the SPAM global crop area distribution model is out. You can play with it here.
- Some bullet points on the USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System outpost in Pullman.
- Yes, the above references Svalbard, as does this piece on Spanish tomatoes.
- Pity we can’t put olives in Svalbard, but there’s a another way to protect olive diversity.
- A breakdown of rice colour diversity. A lot of this stuff will be in Svalbard, with any luck.
- Vanilla will also need attention.
- But gum rockrose seems to be taken care of, at least in Bulgaria. It’s what you make Holy Chrism with.
- So there’s bound to be demand for it, at least in some quarters. Unlike for other opportunity/orphan/neglected crops, but GAIN is on it.
- And if all else fails there’s always AI, be it to fight pests and diseases or find cool plants out in the jungle.
- Why does all this matter? Because of the climate F-word.
Nibbles: Seed info, Potato 101, Coffee 101, Rice repatriation, Iraq genebank, Use or lose, Teff breeding, Micronutrients, Agrobiodiversity, Plant a Seed Kit, WorldVeg to Svalbard, Seed Health Units
- Eastern and Southern Africa Small-scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF) launches SEED GIST, a quarterly repository of seed literature.
- A fun romp through potato history.
- A fun romp through coffee history.
- Hong Kong gets some rice seeds back from the IRRI genebank.
- No doubt Iraq will get some seeds back from the ICARDA genebank soon.
- Genebanks are only the beginning though.
- Breeding teff in, wait for it, South Africa.
- The possible tradeoffs of an environmentally friendly diet.
- IIED on the value of agrobiodiversity. Includes an environmentally-friendly and/or nutritious diet.
- Slow Food’s Plant a Seed Kit is all about agrobiodiversity and healthy diets. What, though, no teff?
- WorldVeg knows all about seed kits, and safety duplication.
- Gotta make sure those seeds are healthy, though. Here’s how CGIAR does it.
Brainfood: Yield gap, Domestication & breeding, TEK, Breeding gourds, Breeding pearl millet, Breeding peas, Banana seed systems, Breeding bees
- Global spatially explicit yield gap time trends reveal regions at risk of future crop yield stagnation. For 8 of 10 major crops, yield gaps have widened steadily from 1975 to 2010 over most areas, and remained static for sugar cane and oil palm. Time to turbo-charge the breeding?
- Domestication and the evolution of crops: variable syndromes, complex genetic architectures, and ecological entanglements. If you want to turbo-charge breeding, you need to understand (among other things) the ecological context of domestication.
- Including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in Agricultural Research: Guidelines and Lessons Learned. I suspect Traditional Ecological Knowledge can help with figuring out the ecological context of domestication.
- High levels of genetic variation and differentiation in wild tropical gourds provide a novel resource for cucurbit crop improvement. Ok, but ecological knowledge would like a word.
- Understanding genetic diversity in drought-adaptive hybrid parental lines in pearl millet. Any link to ecology of original collecting sites, I wonder?
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis of a Diverse Panel of Pea (Pisum sativum). Again, ecological knowledge conspicuous by its absence. Maybe the passport data just weren’t up to it?
- Banana seed exchange networks in Burundi – Linking formal and informal systems. Yes, yes, it’s not just about the breeding, the seed system also has to work.
- Editorial: Current status of honey bee genetic and breeding programs: progress and perspectives. Pollinators need breeding programmes too.
Forgotten crops in the limelight
The paper “Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa for healthy diets in a changing climate” by Maarten van Zonneveld, Roeland Kindt, Stepha McMullin, Enoch G. Achigan-Dako, Sognigbé N’Danikou, Wei-hsun Hsieh, Yann-rong Lin, and Ian K. Dawson has won the PNAS 2023 Cozzarelli Prize for the best paper of the year in Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. Here’s the abstract:
As the climate changes, major staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa becomes increasingly vulnerable. Underutilized traditional food plants offer opportunities for diversifying cropping systems. In this study, the authors used climate niche modeling to assess the potential of 138 traditional food plants to diversify or replace staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa by 2070. The authors report that staple crops may no longer be able to grow at approximately 10% of locations by 2070. Further, the authors identified 58 traditional crops that provide complementary micronutrient contents suitable for integration into staple cropping systems under current and projected climatic conditions. The results suggest that diversifying sub-Saharan African food production with underutilized crops could improve climate resilience and dietary health.
And here’s a video explaining the results: