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Good news from Beltsville?

After the recent worrying announcement about the USDA closing the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, there may now be some good news. US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has just announced a $180 million Seed Sovereignty Initiative to genotype collections of “major crops” in the National Plant Germplasm System, which holds more than 600,000 accessions of over 16,000 species. The two-year programme aims to reveal useful traits, identify gaps in the collections, and accelerate the development of new varieties. That’s a substantial investment in resources that are all too often taken for granted.

But the language is worth a closer look. This is framed as a matter of seed sovereignty and national security: the United States must not depend on “foreign adversaries” for its agricultural production, while foreign competitors are busy sequencing genetic resources. The emphasis is on turning America’s crop diversity collections, which are in the Multilateral System of the Plant Treaty, into a strategic national asset, and giving American farmers a competitive advantage.

None of that makes the investment unwelcome. Better genetic characterization could benefit researchers and breeders well beyond the United States, provided the resulting information is accessible. And understanding what genebanks hold, and what remains missing, is precisely the sort of work that should have been a priority all along.

Still, there is a difference between recognizing the strategic importance of crop diversity and treating it as a weapon in geopolitical competition. Will this initiative strengthen the shared knowledge base on which global crop improvement depends, or will national advantage determine what gets studied, shared and used? The $180 million investment is good news. The rhetoric, and the priorities it may signal, deserve rather more scrutiny.

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The chocolate formerly known as lost

The Quest to Save the World’s Most Coveted Chocolate is an engaging story in Smithsonian Magazine about Ecuador’s ancient, iconic Nacional cacao. It was published three years ago, but I only just came across it. It rang a bell, so I went back through the archive. And there was lots more there than I suspected. Again in celebration of our twentieth anniversary, let’s go through it.

It all started in 2009, when Jeremy first described how witches’ broom had devastated Nacional cultivation in the early 1900s, how breeders responded, and how farmers eventually widely adopted the more productive and resistant, but much less tasty, new variety known as CCN51. Nacional basically disappeared.

But not totally. In 2011, we Nibbled the rediscovery of Nacional populations in northern Peru by a USDA team, as reported in the N.Y. Times. A glimmer of hope, perhaps?

In 2015, Jeremy returned to the story. We learned that more than half of Ecuador’s cacao trees were then CCN51, which of course made the industry again vulnerable to the next disease. And, even worse, that the chocolate they produced tasted like “rusty nails.”

But now — thankfully — comes a much happier chapter, nicely described in the Smithsonian piece.

Encouraged by the discovery of Nacional in Peru, a motley crew of conservationists, chocolate makers and agricultural scientists went looking for it in Ecuador. In 2013, they found a grove of century-old trees in a coastal valley called Piedra de Plata. DNA showed that nine of 47 trees they sampled were genetically pure Nacional. They established them in a field genebank in 2018, and started producing planting material for interested local farmers.

More than 30 families are now working … to reforest their lands using seedlings from the nearly extinct tree. The rebirth of this once-lost treasure isn’t just a miracle for the chocolate-loving world — it’s also a milestone in reviving the rich heritage of Ecuador’s coastal forests and farming. And it may even offer hope for saving other endangered trees worldwide.

The plan was that within three years the nursery would be producing 5,000 Nacional seedlings annually. That would be about now. Alas, I was not able to find an update, but I do hope they’re on track.

The moral? Conservation pays — especially when what you’re conserving makes chocolate that doesn’t taste like rusty nails.

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There’s gold in that thar rice story

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.

Before the U.S. Civil War, Carolina Gold was the dominant rice of the South Carolina Lowcountry, grown on vast plantations by enslaved Africans and generating much of Charleston’s wealth. The war, emancipation and a series of hurricanes then shattered that cruel system; commercial plantings dwindled and the last U.S. harvest is usually dated to 1927. But that wasn’t the end of the story, as it turns out.

I first wrote about the variety in 2007, asking where it had actually come from. New genetic evidence from a USDA study complicated the conventional story that it had arrived from Madagascar, pointing instead toward a West African source that fit rather better with the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Check out the string of comments on the post too.

I came back to the story in 2010, linking to an IRRI piece about how cultivation was revived in Carolina thanks to — wait for it — genebank samples. In 2016, there was an update on the revival. And then friend-of-the-blog Mike Jackson picked up the thread in 2017 with an account of “Civil War destruction … genebank redemption”.

He did us all a great service by telling the whole story in detail all in one place: the decline of rice cultivation after the Civil War, Carolina Gold’s near-disappearance, and its rescue when Savannah doctor Richard Schulze discovered seed in the USDA collection. Fourteen pounds supplied to Schulze eventually became 10,000 pounds by 1988. Mike checked Genesys and found 19 accessions carrying the Carolina Gold name, raising the next questions: how different are they, and which one was actually used for the rescue?

Along the way, I actually tasted the stuff! And Jeremy found a film featuring it.

By 2018, Carolina Gold had become the precedent for the comeback of another “lost” rice, this time in Trinidad.

For a blog about agricultural biodiversity, Carolina Gold, with its origin debates, near‑extinction, and then real‑world use of what genebanks kept alive, really is a near‑perfect subject. Can you find others in our archive?

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Not so plain vanilla

There’s a great interview on the History Extra podcast with Prof. Eric T. Jennings about his book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean. It really is a fascinating story, and you get quite a lot of it in the half hour of the pod. If it whets your appetite, as it were, you could do worse than follow it with the global conservation strategy for the crop. One quibble, though. The source of vanilla is definitely not the only edible orchid, as anyone who has had saleb will know full well.

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Cassava, revisited, and revisited again

Cassava has been a persistent thread through this blog since the beginning. It first appears as a staple with a dark side: capable of keeping people fed, but also of causing a nasty disease under some conditions. Over time, it resurfaced repeatedly, showing how one crop can illuminate many of the key issues in agrobiodiversity conservation and use. As part of our anniversary celebrations, let’s pull some posts out and see how that might work…

An early post we called Detoxifying cassava looked at the complex ways konzo epidemics in Africa are linked to the consumption of bitter cassava. A later Nibble pointed to a very digestible (sic) introduction to cassava and cyanide. And Manihot esculenta, I presume? widened the lens historically, drawing on Dr Livingstone’s Zambesi Expedition papers to show how he understood cassava’s diversity, its promise and its danger back in the day.

Several posts over the years have looked at how well we now know and conserve the diversity of the crop. Gaps in cassava collection in Africa highlighted sounded an alarm: eastern and southern Africa seemed to be under‑represented in international genebanks. Later, More on cassava germplasm from Brazil and an earlier post compared the geographic distribution of CIAT’s genebank holdings with the that of both accessions and cultivation in Brazil, illustrating how national and international collections overlap — and where they don’t.

A post on safety duplicating germplasm collections explained the mechanics of backing up diversity, using Embrapa’s genebank as a concrete example. It also included a reference to the global cassava conservation strategy, during the development of which I got schooled on the diversity of the crop. And a paper on sources of pest resistance in cassava we included in a Brainfood showed the value of genebank holdings, identifying landraces in CIAT’s global collection with resistance to thrips, mites, and whiteflies.

This particular arc culminates in a summary of two papers on 50 years of cassava conservation at CIAT, which looks at that genebank from both ends: what went in over five decades, and what actually came out in breeding. A recent Nibble notes that cassava’s diversity is spread across multiple genebanks, and why that’s a good thing, up to a point.

Then came the TME 419 saga: Is there more than one TME 419 cassava? unpacked confusion around an IITA genebank accession number; I say TME 419, you say TMe‑419 revisited the same named clone in Nigerian fields years later. Another intricate tale centred around how some modern varieties got their resistance to post-harvest rotting. Spoiler alert: a wild relative was involved.

Genebanks, however, are not the full story. Cassava’s diversity also has to survive in farmers’ fields, where diseases constantly test its resilience. An early post, Ho hum … another deadly disease, placed cassava brown streak virus (CBSV) alongside then emerging threats like Ug99 wheat rust. CBSV was duly much in the news a few years later in 2011, and we were of course all over it, though not always one hundred percent correct in our judgements. That’s what the comments are for.

A Nibble on cassava pests questioned the crop’s “indestructible,” Rambo-like image as new problems appeared in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. An experiment on cassava degeneration, Twitter‑style focused on what to do about the widespread viral infection of cassava planting material across Africa, which badly affects performance. And a Nibbles roundup on cassava bad and good news captured an apparent mismatch between FAO worry and CGIAR optimism back in 2011. Maybe we should do an update on that, now I think about it.

Another theme has been how the crop is promoted, produced, and woven into everyday food systems today. In Cassava on a roll? I traced production ups and downs in Kenya, intrigued by seeing new products in supermarkets on my return to the country. I followed that up with The flour of Kenyan agrobiodiversity marketing, which shows cassava (with finger millet) being used to diversify staple flour, connecting conservation to real products and diets. And a Nibble on Ugandan cassava from a couple of years back highlights local innovation in value chains, if you interpret it charitably. No doubt all part of the African cassava revolution touted by Forbes in a 2023 Nibble.

I hope this roundup of our past encounters with cassava, incomplete as it inevitably is, has given you a little taste of what twenty years of this blog have been about: following stories as they unfold, picking up old threads, occasionally digging really deep, other times not deep enough. Do search for your favourite crop in the archive, and tell us what you come up with.