- WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
- Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
- Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
- Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
- An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
- Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
- Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
- Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?
Nibbles: Bacon kitchen garden, Bison diversity, African herbaria, Mycorrhiza, China wild rice genebank, African seed laws
- Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s painting records the arrival of American crops in early modern England. And the cookmaid gets equal billing.
- North America’s bison survived near-extinction, but how much of its genetic diversity is left? Past and present DNA is helping reconstruct what was lost, with implications for how what remains is conserved and managed.
- China’s wild rice collection in Hainan now holds more than 15,000 samples. A genetic treasure trove, but its value ultimately depends on what breeders can make of it. Much like what’s left of bison diversity.
- Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that support plant life and store carbon. A new global map begins to show their extent, and just how much of this biodiversity remains overlooked.
- Africa’s herbaria hold centuries of botanical history, much of it still effectively invisible. Specimens can reveal shifting plant distributions and overlooked species. First, though, someone has to do the painstaking work of getting the data online.
- Africa has done painstaking work on seed laws, but getting good seed to farmers remains hard in practice. The gap between policy and delivery is stark, and commercial companies need to work alongside farmer-managed seed systems, not pretend they don’t exist.
Brainfood: Nutrition edition
- Role of indigenous foods in addressing malnutrition and diet-related diseases in Africa: a systematic review. Traditional foods contribute to dietary diversity, micronutrient intake and food security. Nutrition policy should pay more attention to what people used to eat.
- Regenerative agriculture for dietary diversity and food security in Zambia. Soil-focused regenerative practices are associated with more diverse diets, through a mixture of production, income and market effects. Soil health has a dietary dimension.
- The Relationship among Food Environment Types, Diet, and Nutrition Outcomes in Women, Children, and Adolescents from Low- and Lower-Middle Income Countries. What surrounds people matters as much as what they grow: food environments influence dietary diversity and nutrition in complicated ways, but access to wild foods is usually a good thing.
- Allele-specific expression reveals complex regulatory divergence underlying fruit phenotypic differences between cultivated and wild tomato species. Wild tomato relatives harbour genetic variation for sugars, volatiles and other flavour traits that domestication left behind. A reminder that “improvement” can be a process of subtraction. Not nutrition you say? I bet flavour is connected with nutrition — in complicated ways.
- Large-scale phenotyping and multi-trait selection identify low-methane Napier grass accessions under contrasting environmental conditions. Napier grass accessions differ substantially in methane yield, digestibility and other traits. Feed diversity could help reduce livestock emissions without sacrificing everything else. Cows need better nutrition too.
Nibbles: China genebank, China blueberries, PhilRice, Italy olive genebank, GIAHS, Mangelwurzel, Papaw, Bean AI
- China is building its germplasm collection at the National Frigid Zone Crop and Soybean Germplasm Resources Mid-term Bank in Harbin. Cool.
- Driscoll’s helped build China’s blueberry industry, then discovered that knowledge, infrastructure and genetics have a habit of escaping. Not so cool.
- Meanwhile, the Philippines wants its rice collection to hit 21,000 varieties by the end of the year. IRRI unavailable for comment.
- Italy is establishing a major global olive genebank. Unclear where it fits in with other major global olive genebanks, but some redundancy is good.
- FAO showcases Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, where crops, landscapes and traditional knowledge have survived together. Like olives in Italy, I guess.
- The mangelwurzel is making a comeback, because apparently forgotten root vegetables just need better publicity, and not a fancy GIAHS.
- Ohio growers are trying to save the pawpaw just as Americans are discovering it, partly because of better publicity.
- BeanGPT is bringing AI to breeding and farming beans. Maybe it can help the mangelwurzel and pawpaw too?
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.