- Renaming Indigenous crops and addressing colonial bias in scientific language. Orphan is out, Indigenous is in.
- Vegetable Genetic Resources to Mitigate Nutritional Insecurity in India. How many of these Indian vegetables are Indigenous as opposed to indigenous though?
- Farmers using local livestock biodiversity share more than animal genetic resources: Indications from a workshop with farmers who use local breeds. Farmers using local breeds don’t share colonial bias, I suspect. Or do they? Has anyone checked?
- Because error has a price: A systematic review of the applications of DNA fingerprinting for crop varietal identification. Nobody’s perfect, even the colonially unbiased.
- What lies behind a fruit crop variety name? A case study of the barnī date palm from al-‘Ulā oasis, Saudi Arabia. Local variety names are complicated, no wonder mistakes happen.
- Food security and the cultural heritage missing link. Want to preserve cultural heritage AND boost productivity? Then support (1) preservation of genetic resources, (2) value addition, (3) traditional food processing, (4) preference matching, and (5) agritourism. What, no fighting colonial bias?
- Analysis of Innovation in Peru’s Gastronomic Industry. All of the above?
- Food sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa: Reality, relevance, and practicality. All of the above are well and good, but not enough. You also need modern varieties. Just get their names right, eh?
- Baladi Seeds in the oPt: Populations as Objects of Preservation and Units of Analysis. Whatever you do, don’t reduce cultural heritage to data.
- Reinventing a Tradition: East Asian Tea Cultures in the Contemporary World. No danger of reducing tea to data, judging by this collection of papers.
- Factors driving the tree species richness in sacred groves in Indian subcontinent: a review. Not religion, apparently, according to the data. Go figure.
- The role of traditional knowledge and food biodiversity to transform modern food systems. There is plenty of evidence out there that bringing greater biodiversity into food systems results in multiple socio-cultural benefits. As this Brainfood, as well as the case studies in this paper, tries to show.
- Complex agricultural landscapes host more biodiversity than simple ones: A global meta-analysis. Had enough?
Nibbles: GRIN-U, Canadian seeds, Jordan genebank, Green genebank, Millets everywhere, Saving livestock diversity, Sustainable smallholders, Uli Westphal, Eat This Tomato
- Lots of new stuff on GRIN-U. Check out the genebank success stories in particular. How many of the things below will be successes? Lots of luck to all of them…
- Showcasing seeds in Canada.
- Setting up a new genebank in Jordan.
- Let’s hope it will be eco-efficient like CIAT’s. Other GROW webinars here. Yes, they’ve started up again.
- Embracing millets in southern Africa and India.
- Why livestock should not follow the example of Charles II of Spain.
- Supporting traditional sustainable farming in Central America.
- More on Uli Westphal‘s cool illustrations of crop diversity.
- Which include tomatoes. Don’t forget to subscribe to Jeremy’s pod.
- And subscribe to the GRIN-U newsletter too while you’re at it!
Nibbles: New cassava, Community seedbank double, Rwandan beans, Knotweed et al., Seed systems, Adam Alexander, Uruguay genebank, Kelp biobank
- There’s a new cassava in town in Kenya.
- I wonder if it will end up in a community “seed” bank.
- …because they swear by them in Zimbabwe.
- Cassava is not the only American crops that’s important in parts of Africa: the cultural appropriation of beans in Rwanda.
- Some American crops didn’t make it very far out of America.
- Be it beans, cassava or sump/knotweed, what’s needed is a Quality-Declared Seed (QDS) system. Right?
- Well you also need someone to go around collecting the stuff in the first place.
- But don’t forget to back everything up in Svalbard, like Uruguay is doing.
- Well maybe not everything.
Brainfood: Diversity & stability, Diversity & profitability, Rotations, Food environments, Food system transitions, Deforestation & ag, Great Lakes priorities, Translational research, Field size, Genetic erosion
- Consistent stabilizing effects of plant diversity across spatial scales and climatic gradients. More species-diverse communities are more stable. Ok, what about agricultural systems though?
- Financial profitability of diversified farming systems: A global meta-analysis. Total costs, gross income and profits were higher in diversified systems, and benefit-cost ratio similar to simplified systems. No word on stability, alas.
- Global systematic review with meta-analysis reveals yield advantage of legume-based rotations and its drivers. Integrating a legume into your low-diversity/low-input cereal system can boost main crop yields by 20%. I wonder if this meta-analysis was included in the above meta-analysis. Again, no word on stability though.
- The influence of food environments on dietary behaviour and nutrition in Southeast Asia: A systematic scoping review. It’s the affordability, stupid. Should have gone for more diversified farming I guess :)
- Global food systems transitions have enabled affordable diets but had less favourable outcomes for nutrition, environmental health, inclusion and equity. Well according to this, industrialised farming (ie simplification) has led to more affordable diets. But we know from the above that diversification can be profitable. So it was the wrong kind of simplification? Can we diversify now and maintain affordability while also improving nutrition, environmental health, inclusion and equity? Wouldn’t that be something.
- Disentangling the numbers behind agriculture-driven tropical deforestation. Ending deforestation is not enough. The resulting agriculture must be diversified in the right way too, I guess.
- Strategizing research and development investments in climate change adaptation for root, tuber and banana crops in the African Great Lakes Region: A spatial prioritisation and targeting framework. Diversifying with drought-tolerant bananas and heat-tolerant potatoes is all well and good, but you also have to know where exactly to diversify, and here’s how.
- Translational research in agriculture. Can we do it better? Difficulty developing drought-tolerant bananas and heat-tolerant potatoes? Get more diverse peer-reviewers.
- Increasing crop field size does not consistently exacerbate insect pest problems. When you diversify, don’t worry too much about making fields bigger.
- Genetic diversity loss in the Anthropocene. You can predict change in genetic diversity from change in range size, and the average is about a 10% loss already. Ok, what about agricultural systems though? Wait, isn’t this where we came in? My brain hurts…
Brainfood: GIAHS, Austronesian ag, Neolithic Scotland, Livestock origins, Iroquoia maize, Maya drought, Agave diversity, Coffee diversity, Breadfruit cultivation
- Agricultural heritage systems and agrobiodiversity. FAO’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) work just fine.
- A northern Chinese origin of Austronesian agriculture: new evidence on traditional Formosan cereals. The precursors of the Austronesians took foxtail millet, broomcorn millet and rice to Taiwan from around Shandong in northeastern China in the second half of the 4th millennium BCE. That was quite a globally important agricultural heritage system (note lower case) in its day.
- Neolithic culinary traditions revealed by cereal, milk and meat lipids in pottery from Scottish crannogs. At roughly the same time as the above, farmers in Scotland were eating a gruel made of wheat and milk. Maybe not so globally important, but still.
- Epipalaeolithic animal tending to Neolithic herding at Abu Hureyra, Syria (12,800–7,800 calBP): Deciphering dung spherulites. That wheat and milk came from far away and long ago. In fact, maybe 2000 years longer ago than is usually thought.
- Tracing Maize History in Northern Iroquoia Through Radiocarbon Date Summed Probability Distributions. Maize really took off in NY/Ontario/Quebec between 1200 and 1450 AD.
- Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya. Towards the end of the above period there was real strife in the Maya lands, but also local resilience. Makes you wonder whether whatever was happening among the Iroquois and Maya was somehow connected.
- Genomic and Morphological Differentiation of Spirit Producing Agave angustifolia Traditional Landraces Cultivated in Jalisco, Mexico. Whatever happened in Mesoamerica 600 years ago, Indigenous knowledge of agave diversity survived.
- Vernacular Names and Genetics of Cultivated Coffee (Coffea arabica) in Yemen. Indigenous knowledge of coffee diversity doesn’t correspond with genetic data in this globally significant agricultural heritage system.
- Advanced and emerging agricultural innovations for securing food, climate and ecosystems in Moroccan oasis. Even globally important agricultural heritage systems need innovation.
- Potential of breadfruit cultivation to contribute to climate-resilient low latitude food systems. Breadfruit can be important globally, not just in its current agricultural heritage system.