- Climate change may outpace current wheat breeding yield improvements in North America. Breeders need to try harder, at least for spring wheat.
- Large-scale genotyping and phenotyping of a worldwide winter wheat genebank for its use in pre-breeding. But winter wheat could do with some help too, and genebanks are there for you, breeders.
- Exotic alleles contribute to heat tolerance in wheat under field conditions. Maybe wild relatives are the answer?
- Agronomic assessment of two populations of intermediate wheatgrass—Kernza® (Thinopyrum intermedium) in temperate South America. Even really, really wild, and perennial, relatives.
- Sustained productivity and agronomic potential of perennial rice. Maybe perennial wheat breeders can learn from perennial rice breeders.
- CGIAR Barley Breeding Toolbox: A diversity panel to facilitate breeding and genomic research in the developing world. Good to see barley is not being left behind. Perennial barley next, anyone?
- Developing drought-smart, ready-to-grow future crops. It’s not like breeders have no idea about what to do and how to do it…
- Molecular evidence for adaptive evolution of drought tolerance in wild cereals. …and there’s diversity out there in the wild relatives to play with. Even without getting into the weird perennial stuff.
- Impact of CGIAR maize germplasm in Sub-Saharan Africa. So let’s be optimistic, there are success stories. Although, cripes, I’d like to see perennial maize.
- Genomic prediction for the Germplasm Enhancement of Maize project. Which is not to say there’s no room for improvement too.
- Maize plants and the brace roots that support them. Yeah, like for example how many of these fancy CGIAR and GEM maize varieties have brace roots?
- Retrospective study in US commercial sorghum breeding: I. Genetic gain in relation to relative maturity. US breeders have been really successful for sorghum too, though maybe not successful enough.
- Evaluation of a Subset of Ethiopia Sorghum Collection Germplasm from the National Genetic Resources Program of the United States Department of Agriculture for Anthracnose Resistance. And that success may be spilling over to Ethiopia. Well I’d like to think so anyway, or the whole conceit of this Brainfood will go up in smoke.
- Genomics-based assembly of a sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench core collection in the Uganda national genebank as a genetic resource for sustainable sorghum breeding. And maybe Uganda too? Yes, I’m doubling down.
- GridScore: a tool for accurate, cross-platform phenotypic data collection and visualization. All these breeders need to store and manage their data, of course, and here’s a way to do that.
- The Impact of N.I. Vavilov on the Conservation and Use of Plant Genetic Resources in Scandinavia: A Review. Arguably all of the above is the result of the sort of international collaboration that Vavilov exemplified, perhaps even pioneered?
Brainfood: Sustainable diets, Resilient food system, IK in food systems double, Herbarium double, Ag research priorities, Fruits & vegetables, Cryopreservation, Diverse diets, Gene editing orphan crops, Ag revolution 4.0, Diversification, Monoculture, Agroecology, Regenerative ag, Plant health, Svalbard, Seed banking theory, Comms double
- Interventions for sourcing EAT-Lancet diets within national agricultural areas: A global analysis. Half the world’s population can eat healthily off the land in their own country, and 95% could.
- Reframing the local–global food systems debate through a resilience lens. Yeah, but there’s more to resilience than local vs global.
- Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems. Local people know all about sustainability and resilience.
- Global principles in local traditional knowledge: A review of forage plant-livestock-herder interactions. Yes, even — especially? — pastoral people.
- Using botanical resources to select wild forage legumes for domestication in temperate grassland agricultural systems. Not that said local people might not need a little help…
- The herbarium of the future. …for example from the herbarium of the future. Which actually sounds a lot like the genebank of the future.
- Multidimensional impacts from international agricultural research: Implications for research priorities. You want income growth? Invest in fruit and vegetables research and development. You want anything else? Cereals.
- Safeguarding and Using Fruit and Vegetable Biodiversity. Somebody mention fruit and vegetable R&D? Here’s how to start. Spoiler alert: the genebank of the future…
- In Vitro Conservation through Slow Growth Storage Technique of Fruit Species: An Overview of the Last 10 Years. …will need to be into cryo.
- Does the high dietary diversity score predict dietary micronutrients adequacy in children under 5 years old? A systematic review. This is why we need fruits and vegetables. But to eat them, not just to grow lots of them. How many of these kids are on the EAT-Lancet diet anyway?
- Integrating genomics and genome editing for orphan crop improvement: a bridge between orphan crops and modern agriculture system. And lots of fruits and vegetables are so-called orphan, and might need a helping hand, I suppose.
- The old, the new, or the old made new? Everyday counter-narratives of the so-called fourth agricultural revolution. A helping hand from technology you mean? Maybe, but best to mistrust grand narratives.
- Achieving win-win outcomes for biodiversity and yield through diversified farming. Adopting orphan crops can be route to farming system diversification, which can be good for both yields and biodiversity. How’s that for a grand narrative?
- Rapid transgenerational adaptation in response to intercropping reduces competition. Staple crops bred are adapted to monoculture? Not necessarily.
- Agroecology in the North: Centering Indigenous food sovereignty and land stewardship in agriculture “frontiers”. All this diversification is beginning to sound a lot like some kind of agroecology. Even in the Global North. And I mean very North.
- Regenerative food systems and the conservation of change. Ok, but agroecology is not about the practices employed, but rather how the system is organized. Always good to occasionally step back and theorize.
- Sustainable management of transboundary pests requires holistic and inclusive solutions. None of the above is going to work if we’re knee-deep in pests.
- The eternal return: Imagining security futures at the Doomsday Vault. Apocalypse. Hope. Escape. No grander narrative than that for the most iconic genebank of the present.
- Carrier Seeds: A Cultural Analysis of Care and Conflict in Four Seed Banking Practices. Genebanks (maybe even Svalbard?) conserve more than just seeds: the theory and the practice deconstructed.
- Why facts don’t change minds: Insights from cognitive science for the improved communication of conservation research. Ok, but how to communicate all the above for maximum impact? Spoiler alert: forget about disseminating scientific facts widely to change individual minds. Instead, target the behaviour of strategic groups through values and emotions…
- Spread the word: Sharing information on social media can stabilize conservation funding and improve ecological outcomes. …using social media. Wait, does that mean I have to TikTok all this stuff now?
Happy Food Diversity Day!
On Friday January 13th, from 9am to 7.30pm, some of the UK’s leading scientists, writers, chefs, farmers, campaigners and entrepreneurs will be taking part in a continuous feed of discussions, storytelling and information sharing – all about the wonders and importance of food diversity. These discussions will be made available for free via Eventbrite, live-streamed on YouTube and available to view after the event. Explore the resources for each of the sessions here.
This seems to be the brainchild of Dan Saladino, who recently published the wonderful Eating to Extinction.
LATER: And then there’s this talk from the Seed Detective on the 25th to round things off.
Liberating seeds — and climate matching tools
I hit “publish” too soon yesterday. If I had waited a couple of hours, I could have done a deeper dive into how Jeremy spent his holidays, by adding his just-dropped podcast on the “Let’s Liberate Diversity” Forum held in Budapest back in October to his last newsletter of 2022.
In the podcast, Jeremy muses on the new EU Organic Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2018/848), which finally allows the marketing of organic heterogeneous material (OHM), and interviews two beneficiaries of this welcome change in the law. Spoiler alert: Belgian beer is being re-Belgianized, and everybody seems very happy about it.
Incidentally, if you’re interested in doing the kind of climate matching Jeremy mentions in his third note, you could check out this website, though it only covers Europe. If you want global coverage, you might have to brush up on your R. ((Thanks, Julian.))
Mo’ better agrobiodiversity graphics
Wouldn’t want you to miss out on this nice find from Jeremy’s last Eat This Newsletter of 2022, just because we’re in a new year now. But why not subscribe, eh? Incidentally, since we’re talking about the movement of crops around the world, and fancy graphics, you might as well also check out Bloomberg’s cool re-visualizations of the data in the 2014 paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.”
In the decades after 1492 “a massive multidirectional transfer of biota, diseases, technology and humans occurred between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas”. But if you look at the standard maps of these movements, collectively known as the Columbian Exchange, you miss almost all the complexity and context of what moved, where, why, and what else was going on.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper: (Re)Mapping the Columbian Exchange. Suggestions for an Updated Cartography. The paper itself is behind a paywall, although one of the authors is a friend of the podcast so I may well invite him on to discuss the story in more detail. Thankfully, the maps themselves are available to download, and even a superficial glance shows that the story is much more interesting than the standard maps imply.
Each of them overcomes the “overly constrained geographic scope, chronological compression, non-depiction of the contemporaneous movement of important cultural, technological and biological elements of each product, ethnocentrism and the obscuring of human consequences” of the standard map, and I look forward to reading the new plant biographies just as soon as I get hold of the paper.