Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 8, 2023

The Seed Information Database is back!

Readers may remember a post from about a year ago announcing with sadness the imminent demise of Kew’s Seed Information Database (SID).

Well, cheer up. It seems SID is back.

The Seed Information Database (SID) is now hosted by the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (RBGK). SID is a compilation of seed biological trait data, with records derived from measurements and observations on seed collections held in Royal Botanic Garden Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank and from other unpublished and published sources, through donation or abstraction.

Good news for genebanks everywhere.

February 6, 2023February 7, 2023

Ingathering of the seed faithful

The Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty Programme has an annual Seed Gathering, and the one for 2023 is coming up fast.

On 11th and 12th of February 2023, we will host our second Seed Gathering – a space for our seed networks to come together to share, learn, and celebrate all the incredible work going on throughout our lands. Join us!

Here’s the programme, and how you can follow on social media and snag merch.

February 6, 2023February 5, 2023

Brainfood: Sulawesi Warty Pig, Neolithic violence, Early cotton, Livestock poop, Pontic millet, Bronze Age opium, Sami shamanism, Wild chickens

Pigs as Pets: Early Human Relations with the Sulawesi Warty Pig (Sus celebensis). You don’t need to be a sedentary agricultural society to domesticate an animal as a pet. There was the dog, and also the Sulawesi Warty Pig.
Conflict, violence, and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe. Early sedentary agricultural societies were not exempt from violence, pets or no pets.
The earliest cotton fibers and Pan-regional contacts in the Near East. At least early sedentary agricultural societies did all that fighting wearing comfortable cotton garments.
How animal dung can help to reconstruct past forest use: a late Neolithic case study from the Mooswinkel pile dwelling (Austria). In between spells of fighting, early sedentary agricultural societies let their livestock roam the forest during the day but kept them in their settlements in winter, and that accumulates a lot of dung that can come in useful thousands of years later in working out what said livestock ate in said forest.
Between Cereal Agriculture and Animal Husbandry: Millet in the Early Economy of the North Pontic Region. You didn’t need to be a completely sedentary agricultural society to grow Panicum miliaceum in the Pontic steppes.
Opium trade and use during the Late Bronze Age: Organic residue analysis of ceramic vessels from the burials of Tel Yehud, Israel. There comes a time when a sedentary agricultural society will start growing, and then selling, drugs.
A Sacred Tree in the Boreal forest: A Narrative About a Sámi Shaman, her Tree, and the Forest Landscape. You don’t need to be a sedentary agricultural society and grow drugs to have a rich spiritual life, but it’s harder — though not impossible — to document it.
Historic samples reveal loss of wild genotype through domestic chicken introgression during the Anthropocene. Sedentary agricultural societies are polluting the genetics of wild species related to domesticates. The chicken in this case, the Sulawesi Warty Pig unavailable for comment.

February 3, 2023February 24, 2023

Celebrating beans, by sharing beans

With World Pulses Day coming up on 10 February, there is probably no better time to sign up for the INCREASE Project’s citizen science experiment, Share the Bean.

You can register your participation until 28 February. What will you do? I’ll tell you what you’ll do:

receive a packet with a few different bean varieties to grow in your garden, terrace or balcony
plant and grow these seeds following the specific instructions provided by the project
nurture your beans, and collect and record information about them using a handy app
suggest, and receive, tips and best practices, also via the app
harvest the seeds and offer them for exchange, and cook and taste them too if you like
send your assessments and recipes for inclusion in “Thousands of traditional and innovative recipes to cook beans,” to be published on the project website

February 1, 2023January 30, 2023

Food diversity, every day

Yet another thoroughly satisfying Eat This Newsletter from Jeremy. Here are two snippets on crop diversity, but there’s lots more…

Talking about Eating to Extinction

Dan Saladino’s book Eating to Extinction has justifiably won all sorts of awards since it came out about 18 months ago. Capitalising on that and the interest more generally in vanishing foods and ingredients, Dan and his chums put together a Food Diversity Day on 13 January. I was unable to watch any of it for a host of reasons, but a post by Patricia Bixler Reber on her marvellous Researching Food History website reminded me that all of it is now online. There’s probably enough there to keep you busy for a good long while, and if there isn’t, Researching Food History is always good for a suggestion or two. I’d already booked for one on 31 January that promises to be a bit of a myth-buster (and that may yet become an episode).

Preserving Potato Diversity

Dan Saladino doesn’t devote an awful lot of space to the always-humble potato, which is by no means a criticism; there is so much more to be concerned about. But I suspect he is well aware of some of the more exotic potatoes of the Andes and beyond, with their colourful flesh and skin. Diverse efforts to promote these varieties, by encouraging high-end restaurants as much as low-grade snacks, have had some success in Peru. The latest brings Ecuador into the fold, with crisps/chips made from ancestral varieties known locally as black heart and red heart. The tubers are grown by a collective of 180 small farmers, who are guaranteed a stable price for their crop. I hope they use some of that cash to improve their family nutrition.

And if you’re a gardener with a hankering for some creative potato diversity of your own, I highly commend true potato seed; read a bit about it thanks to Modern Farmer.