Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Interesting to see the Dutch national genebank outsource the regeneration of some of its vegetables to the private sector:
…CGN is looking for greenhouse growers who have expertise and greenhouse space available for the paid cultivation of vegetables (e.g. tomato, lettuce, spinach, melon) for seed production. The number of plants to be grown per seed sample varies per crop and ranges from 10-80 plants per seed sample.
Will be interesting to see if the market is there.
Great piece from the always reliable Gastro Obscura on Chile’s white strawberry. It truly has all the canonical agrobiodiversity tropes: interdependence for diversity, the importance of wild relatives, the downside of reforestation, genetic erosion and how chefs can help. Oh, and biopiracy. The only thing that’s missing, in fact, is genebanks. Can’t have everything. But it could be used to teach the subject.
I’m recycling this from Jeremy’s latest newsletter, with permission. So I don’t have to write something on the paper in question myself, as I originally planned.
I’m honestly not sure what to make of this recent paper: Global cropland could be almost halved: Assessment of land saving potentials under different strategies and implications for agricultural markets. The gist of it seems to be that if we were able to grow crops more productively (closing the yield gap, as it is known) we would need less land, reduce crop prices, and cure the common cold.
Not quite, obviously, but this kind of model-based approach to transforming global agriculture seems to me to be long on possibilities and short on practicalities. Of course, the modellers could point out that they are merely showing the way and that others will have to make the decision to take us down the road. Points, too, for figuring out how all this might affect prices and global trade flows. However, I remain befuddled and bemused, as I was when I first encountered this sort of study in 2009 and then again in 2017.
Are you interested in populations that happen to be hybrids between common beans and some other species? Well, so are our friends at CIAT, and they’re involved in a project with NIAB in the UK to study these hybrid populations from their genebank:
The idea is to see if they could be used in breeding for climate change adaptation.
Researchers will be exploring common bean hybrid populations to learn more about their physical characteristics, genetics, responses to disease and ease of use for breeding programmes.
You can catch up on the latest findings on the NIAB website, but also in an online workshop on March 1.