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There’s a wave of groundwork being laid — genomic, cultural, and geospatial — for opportunity crops, but the governance, disease-pressure, market and environmental constraints that marginalized them in the first place are still very much active, and in some cases actively winning.
- Constraints on crop diversification under drought: Multi-scale evidence from California’s San Joaquin Valley. Consolidation, land tenure and water access limits farmers’ ability to switch crops.
- Fragmented urban food governance and impacts on the marginalisation of indigenous crops in Ghana. City plans sideline indigenous crops, and communities pay the price.
- Full Genome Characterization of the Causal Virus of Yellow Mosaic Disease in Mungbean Minicore Accessions. Technical barriers block the path from potential to harvest.
- Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav.: evolutionary history, domestication, genetic resources and future opportunities for an overlooked Andean crop. Genomic evidence reveals substantial diversity in this overlooked Andean pepper but also major conservation gaps, particularly in Bolivia, highlighting opportunities for both crop improvement and biocultural conservation.
- Bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia (L.) Willd.): current research advances and future perspectives for a neglected legume crop. It was dropped because of anti-nutritional quirks, but should, and could, return for marginal lands.
- Genetic characterization of a global collection of common buckwheat to harness genetic resources for agricultural diversity. Hidden diversity is still out there.
- Genotype-by-sequencing of global hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus) collections provides genomic resources for crop conservation and improvement. Diversity survives in farmer fields and genebanks.
- Wild Edible Greens Heritage in Western Crete and Its Resilience Across Greek Islands: The Role of Small-Scale Farming, Biodiversity, and Isolation. Small-scale farming sustains knowledge of wild edible greens across Greek islands, showing that opportunity crops depend on living farming cultures.
- African Crop Calendar: A geo-referenced dataset of crop growing seasons across diverse agro-ecological regions. Where (or should that be when) alternative crops might fit within agricultural systems.
Nibbles: Frafra, Seed multiplication, Quality seeds, Balearic genebank, Indigenous trees double, Bruno cart, Belgian wild yeast
- Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break.
- Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver found his own, swapping the wheel for seed multiplication and turning five acres into a livelihood, proof that sometimes the missing link in a seed system is just someone willing to do the unglamorous middle bit well.
- Which is, per Farming First, precisely Africa’s problem at scale: only 2.5% of smallholder seed in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from formal seed companies, so a few million more bus-driver-style multipliers wouldn’t hurt.
- Meanwhile in the Balearics, the opposite direction of travel: the local seed bank is expanding to rescue tomatoes, onions and broad beans, and is looking for farmers willing to take them back.
- Indigenous fruit trees in Malawi turn out to fight malnutrition and biodiversity loss at once. Happy coincidence?
- Getting those trees into the ground well needs the same unglamorous groundwork as any good crop seed system: a Mongabay commentary argues that restoration campaigns skipping Indigenous and local seed knowledge are optimising for trees planted, not trees that survive.
- And once you’ve got the saplings in the ground, you might want to monitor how they’re doing: enter Bruno, a pushcart rigged with mobile phones that can collect field data. And not just for breeders.
- Finally, proof that not all genetic-resource hunting needs a genebank: Brussels brewers are getting people to comb the city for wild yeast, because the raw materials for a proper lambic turns is hanging around in urban trees.
Nibbles: Kurdish genebank, Ghana genebank, PABRA, Ubu, Beyond genebanks
- Kurdistan inaugurates a new genebank in Sulaymaniyah, which Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani calls one of Kurdistan and Iraq’s most important national projects.
- Ghana complements its national collection at Bunso. The new facility further north will improve drying, processing and conservation, while giving northern farmers and breeders closer access to crop diversity.
- Three decades of African bean research partnerships and networking have helped turn a staple crop into a vehicle for improved nutrition, livelihoods and climate resilience.
- In the Philippines, eight promising purple-yam accessions combine yield, sensory quality and market appeal, with Villasis 2 producing up to 60 tonnes per hectare in trials. Does it need a network next?
- However, executive director of Seed Savers Exchange Mike Bollinger’s call in Food Tank’s to carry seed diversity forward extends stewardship beyond formal institutions: Indigenous communities, farmers, gardeners and seed libraries all have a role in keeping crop diversity alive and used.
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.
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.