- “What is the essence of cultivating a crop that does not yield enough to feed my family?” Farmer agency and the management of agrobiodiversity in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Farmers balance subsistence needs and market opportunities when deciding which crop varieties to maintain. Well I never.
- Reassessing the economic returns of diverse traditional agricultural systems for smallholder farmers: a case study of the milpa in Mexico. Diverse traditional farming systems can generate significant economic value; so no, agricultural diversity is not necessarily less profitable than specialization for market production.
- Farmer participatory evaluation of Amaranthus cruentus L. breeding lines for marketable vegetable yield and organoleptic quality under on-farm and on-station conditions. In any case, farmers can work with researchers to select amaranth varieties with traits that improve both marketability and consumer appeal, linking crop improvement directly to market demand.
- Novel soybean type with improved volatile and sensory characteristics of raw soy slurries. Breeding soybean varieties with enhanced sensory qualities can hopefully increase consumer acceptance and create new market opportunities for soy-based foods. Unclear if farmers were involved, but they could have been..
- Can the digital long tail effect in farmers’ markets increase crop diversity on farms and in diets? Yes. Digital platforms can connect niche producers and consumers, creating markets for a wider range of crops, thereby encouraging agricultural and dietary diversity. How about linking seed producers to farmers?
- Preserving crop genetic diversity through traditional seed systems: insights from farmer-saved fonio (Digitaria exilis) landraces in Northern Ghana. Farmer-managed seed systems support the conservation of crop diversity while maintaining access to locally adapted varieties with potential market value. But maybe they could use a digital platform?
- Seeds and social norms: sorghum seed exchange among smallholder farmers in Northern Ethiopia. Cultural practices shape how farmers share seeds, influencing the circulation of crop diversity and farmers’ participation in local seed markets. Good luck with those digital platforms.
Nibbles: Fit for Biodiversity, Food value chains, FAO, SeedTracker, Morocco genetic erosion, Pastoralists, Cannabis seedbanks
- A conference on biodiversity in agri-food systems. Including agrobiodiversity?
- A photo essay about food value chains in India. Including agrobiodiversity?
- A few examples of FAO’s work on how agriculture sustains biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
- An app to track seeds. And therefore agrobiodiversity.
- A warning that 75% of the agrobiodiversity of Morocco’s wheat and barley has been lost in the past 50 years. Ah, so that 75% number is true of something after all. Maybe they could use SeedTracker.
- A reminder that pastoralists guard biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
- A Genesys for weed. Well, I guess it’s agrobiodiversity.
Nibbles: Svalbard prize, Rice breeding, Coffee geography, Biodiversity loss monitoring, Spatial data
- The Svalbard Global Seed Vault gets the Princesa de Asturias Prize for international cooperation. Time to celebrate.
- Celebrating Pamela Ronald and scuba rice.
- Celebrating Ohsoon Yun and the geography of coffee.
- I’ll certainly celebrate if the approach of the NATURE-FIRST project can be applied to loss of agricultural biodiversity one day.
- The World Bank is in a celebratory mood with regards to geospatial and Earth observation data. I’ll join them when they fund a NATURE-FIRST for crop diversity.
Humble crop beats superfood
Two articles about the contrasting fortunes of Andean crops came out last week. They describe different sides of the same broad story: Indigenous agricultural systems are highly biodiverse and increasingly positioned as climate adaptation strategies, but they are also under pressure.
In Peru, potato farmers in places like the Parque de la Papa are actively conserving thousands of native potato varieties as a form of insurance. This is climate change adaptation: maintaining agrobiodiversity, preserving traditional knowledge, and using resilient crop varieties and farming practices to buffer against warming temperatures, erratic rainfall, and pest and disease pressure. The message is that crop diversity itself is a survival strategy, both ecological and cultural.
The recent history of quinoa in Bolivia shows the same system under a different kind of stress: global demand drove a commodity boom that incentivized monoculture expansion and mechanization, which in turn contributed to soil degradation, erosion and reduced resilience. Coming back from that is proving difficult.
Together, the two cases show that when Indigenous agroecosystems are treated as living repositories of diversity, they can enhance resilience, including to climate change; and that when they are pulled into boom-driven export specialization, that resilience can be undermined. The shared lesson, at least for me, is that climate adaptation in mountain agriculture depends on maintaining ecological and genetic diversity embedded in Indigenous land management systems.
A point that I suspect is highlighted in the book Andean Potatoes and Quinoa: Origin, Current Status and Recipes of Ancestral Crops, also recently announced.
Brainfood: Spatial data edition
- The ClimSat classification system—a global climate classification map based on long-term satellite-derived data. There’s a new global climate classification system in town, and it’s better ecologically than Köppen’s.
- The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10 m resolution. Combined with the above, we can now characterize the climate of every agricultural field in the world.
- GEM-Forest: A Global satellite EMbedding–based map of forests and tree crops for 2020. Do any of those fields have tree crops? And how far is the forest?
- Global annual cropland dynamics 2015–2024. The next time we map agricultural field boundaries, there will probably be more of them.
- Climate-induced range shifts support local plant diversity but don’t reduce extinction risk. Those new agricultural fields will be bad for wild plants.
- ‘SiteTool’: a ‘Shiny’ application for field site selection and evaluation. Cool new tool helps you select geographical sites based on ecological characteristics. Could be used to help decide where to collect or evaluate germplasm. Lots of opportunities for combining with some of the above, I suspect.
- Current and future potential of cassava (Manihot esculenta) in Southern Africa: a scoping review. An example of what you can do when you combine different types of spatial (and other data). The area suitable for cassava in Africa will increase, and there’s lots of scope for higher yields too. If we can combine datasets, soon we’ll know which specific fields to grow it in, for higher production, to protect wild biodiversity…
- Global and regional climate modes modulate armed conflict risk. …and to mitigate the risk of conflict.