Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Ancient farmers didn’t have to invent the genetic diversity that made domestication possible.

We used to link quite a bit to Plant Cuttings, Nigel Chaffey’s monthly column in the international scientific journal Annals of Botany.

Good news for those who want to learn more about opportunity crops, aka neglected and underutilized species: This seven-course series curriculum equips participants with competences required to transform Neglected and Underutilized Species (NUS) into sust…

Jeremy’s latest newsletter includes a link to a piece on the domestication of cucurbits1 that reminded him of a classic of evolutionary biology and reminded me that I meant to link to The Botanist in the Kitchen’s own autumnal foray into Halloween pumpkins

WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions.

I think I vaguely knew that USDA had a hemp collection, but I would definitely not have been able to tell you that it was located in Geneva, NY, that it may be the largest in the world, or that it only started in 2021.

Farmers conserve and improve the crop diversity around them.

The African Union Commission organized a Seed Summit under the theme “Resilient Seed Systems for a Food Secure Africa”, hosted by the Kingdom of Eswatini from 5-7 October 2026.

I’ve been celebrating 20 years of the blog with deep dives into its past, focusing on my favourite recurring themes.

Are eucalyptus plantations good or bad?

Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s painting records the arrival of American crops in early modern England.

The League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogenous Livestock Development has taken the FAO global livestock distribution maps and added information on the pastoralist groups that keep each species.

Carolina Gold is another one of those stories that we kept coming back to, and that I now want to recap as part of our anniversary celebrations.

There’s a great interview on the History Extra podcast with Prof.

Cassava has been a persistent thread through this blog since the beginning.

I’ve been following the vineyards of Pompeii for quite a while, it turns out.

Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.

Twenty years ago this month, the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog was born.

Jeremy’s latest Eat This Newsletter tackles cassava, the chestnut, rice and pears.

Role of indigenous foods in addressing malnutrition and diet-related diseases in Africa: a systematic review.

We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation is done, in its different ways, both on farms and in genebanks.

Land sparing is a seductive story.

Theo van Hintum, is moving on from his gig as Head of the CGN-Plant group, and the job is being advertised, albeit under a slightly different name.

Haga Hideo’s 1950s photos of Fukushima farming rituals are now being used to revive them: ex situ conservation, but for culture.

Brian Ford-Lloyd is excited about a recent Nibble, and who can blame him: Brilliant BBC piece on the famous mangelwurzel of Somerset and a tribute to Adge Cuttler and the Wurzels.

Editorial: Food matters.

Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently.

We have access to more kinds of food plants, yet the world’s diets and production systems have never been more alike.

Seeing the new Tree Seed and Seedling Field Guide Series from the Landscape Alliance reminded me that I’d also meant to write about the International Principles and Standards for Native Seeds in Ecological Restoration.

China is building its germplasm collection at the National Frigid Zone Crop and Soybean Germplasm Resources Mid-term Bank in Harbin.

The “nutrient collapse” story has been doing the rounds for years, and we’ve been picking at it on the blog for almost as long.

I could have sworn I had at least Nibbled Our World in Data’s Is organic farming better for the environment than conventional farming?

A three-decade-long analysis shows rising threatened species and responsibility gaps in global supply chains.

Looks like all those factsheets came through…

The 2026 ʻUlu Hoʻolauleʻa and Global Breadfruit Summit is taking place in South Kona, Hawaiʻi, from 19-24 September 2026.

Seventeen years after we first blogged about the sad fate of the Iraqi national genebank at Abu Ghraib, it has re-opened.

There’s a paper out that’s worth getting to grips with if you are interested in genebanks having an impact, even though it never actually mentions genebanks.

Cantabria is putting the Pasiega cow in the bank.

The USDA has decided to close its iconic flagship site, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Maryland.

There’s a wave of groundwork being laid — genomic, cultural, and geospatial — for opportunity crops, but the governance, disease-pressure, market and environmental constraints that marginalized them in the first place are still very much active, and in so…

In an earlier post I argued that the crop diversity conservation and use system has a missing middle: someone whose job it is to get the whole way from an agricultural problem to a diversity-based solution.

I came across a study that uses a particularly clever form of longitudinal visual ethnography.

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.

Genebank data seems to be in the air.

Helen Anne Curry and Sabina Leonelli’s chapter in Agricultural Science as International Development: Historical Perspectives on the CGIAR Era, entitled “Crop Descriptors and the Forging of ‘System-Wide’ Research in CGIAR,” advances a provocative argument:…

The potential effect of megafaunal extinctions on modern conservation of horse chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum.

Mike Jackson’s account of the early molecular work at IRRI’s International Rice Genebank is a nice reminder that the idea of the “genomic genebank” (as he calls it) is not as new as it may sounds.

When we think about crops moving around the world — and we often do around here — the Columbian Exchange is the canonical example, and why not?

There is nothing particularly new about the idea that the stuff genebanks conserve should be used.

At least, not in any biological sense.