Organic agriculture

September 22, 2026September 21, 2026

Where have all the nutrients gone?

The “nutrient collapse” story has been doing the rounds for years, and we’ve been picking at it on the blog for almost as long.

Back in 2009, Jeremy looked at evidence that older crop varieties could contain more minerals, protein and other nutrients than newer ones, and discussed various possible reasons, including the intriguing possibility of a “genetic dilution” effect as breeders selected for yield.

By 2012, we were stressing that the evidence was more complicated than the headlines suggested, and in 2019 we linked to the latest critical review of the evidence by Robin Marles of the Bureau of Nutritional Sciences in Canada.

Now the latest episode of the BBC’s indispensable More or Less podcast asks again whether carrots are becoming less nutritious, prompted by a listener who clearly hasn’t been following our blog, and turns to Dr Marles, now retired, for the answer. Which hasn’t really changed much.

The bottom line is that breeding for yield and other commercially important traits can change the balance of what ends up in the harvest, and that we have historically been much better at measuring tonnes per hectare than what is actually in those tonnes.

September 22, 2026September 22, 2026

Organic roundup

I could have sworn I had at least Nibbled Our World in Data’s Is organic farming better for the environment than conventional farming? But it doesn’t look like it. Fortunately, Jeremy gets to grips with it in his latest newsletter. Along with that autumnal favourite, the apple, and lots of other interesting stuff.

August 24, 2026August 24, 2026

Brainfood: Biodiversity works through relationships

Plant diversity modifies multi-trophic interactions in croplands, grasslands and forests. Increasing plant diversity changes the interactions between plants, herbivores and their natural enemies, but exactly how depends on the ecosystem. Diversification’s pest-suppression magic looks like a farming-specific trick, not a universal law.
High-resolution carbon and biodiversity mapping shows correlated losses across space and agricultural products. Carbon loss and biodiversity loss from farming turn out to hit the same ground: two-thirds of both concentrated on one-third of agricultural land, with beef and milk alone responsible for 41% of the biodiversity damage. Good news for anyone hoping one policy lever could do double duty.
Harnessing agri-food system microbiomes for sustainability and human health. Soil to gut, it’s all one network, linking ecosystem function, food production and human health across the entire agri-food system.
Breeding for beneficial microbial associations. If microbiomes matter that much, why not breed for them? A proposed framework pairs crop traits that recruit good microbes (root exudates, architecture) with soil practices that keep those microbes around, since good genetics on ruined soil gets you nowhere. This means designing crops as participants in ecological networks rather than as isolated organisms.
Host genetics and social relationships jointly shape fitness-associated microbiome variation in a population of feral horses. Nature’s own microbiome-breeding program: seven years of horse poop from Sable Island shows gut microbes predict winter survival, and related horses share microbes more than chance allows. So the functional unit of adaptation is the animal plus its microbiome.

August 23, 2026August 23, 2026

Putting names and faces to organic seed diversity

LIVESEEDING is a project…

…to foster the growth of the organic sector and transition towards more sustainable local food systems by delivering high quality organic seed of diverse cultivars adjusted to organic farming for a wide range of crops.

It is funded by Horizon Europe (Innovation Action), the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation and UK Research and Innovation, and gathers 37 partners from 16 countries.

The project is producing some interesting resources, but the ones I like best are actually a little difficult to find on their website. So difficult, in fact, that I have to resort to linking to them via a search result on Organic Farm Knowledge.

They are plant genetic cards, each providing information on a specific cultivar, “supporting its identification, conservation, cultivation and use by farmers, seed practitioners, breeders, researchers and other stakeholders of the seed system.”

Here’s a little piece of one such card from Greece.

There’s also something called the EU Organic Seed Database “to create more transparency for the EU member states and for plant reproductive material suppliers regarding available offers of organic plant reproductive materials and to increase the supply of organic plant reproductive material in the EU member states and Switzerland.”

To be honest, I haven’t really played around with it enough to form a definitive judgement, but it does seem a little complicated to navigate at first blush. If anyone has a go, and has an opinion, please let me know in the comments. However, the plant genetic cards do have links to possible sources of seeds.

August 22, 2026August 22, 2026

Nibbles: Amaranth webinar, FARA on fonio, Maslin, Gaza genebank, Nepal seeds, Golden Triangle tea

New webinar series from the American Society of Plant Biologists will explore how underutilized (or is it opportunity) crops like amaranth can contribute to nutrition, food security and rural livelihoods.
FARA highlights the tiny West African grain fonio as another crop with potential to improve nutrition, strengthen food systems and create new opportunities for farmers and value chains.
Taiwanese tea has travelled an unlikely route into northern Thailand. It too was an opportunity crop at one time.
Ethiopian farmers may have been practising regenerative agriculture for millennia, mixing wheat, barley and other grains in the same field. The Rockefeller Foundation is on it.
Efforts to restore the Al Qarara Seed Bank in Gaza are offering a small but significant form of agricultural recovery.
In Nepal, indigenous seeds are losing ground to hybrids, but seed advocates are fighting back.