I want to put up another quick post on the theme of innovative marketing of so-called “opportunity crops” in Kenyan supermarkets. Yesterday it was nicely packaged frozen amaranth leaves that struck me. Today it’s pre-cooked single portions of traditional dishes. No need to refrigerate. Just heat. And eat.
Frozen amaranth and warm memories
Coming across this new (at least for me) frozen amaranth product in a Nairobi supermarket yesterday…
…reminded me that the Amaranth Institute Symposium 2026 is coming up soon.
It really is amazing the progress in the marketing and consumption of traditional vegetables that Kenyans have made in the 30 years since I made my infinitesimal contribution.
Brainfood: Mapping edition
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We’re moving house so this might be the last post for a while. See you on the other side. In the meantime, enjoy this bunch of papers on different applications of spatial analysis to agricultural biodiversity and associated topics.
- Addressing global hotspots of drought-related crop production losses. A crop-specific drought sensitivity metric for 17 major crops finds rainfed production losses of 10% globally under historically observed extremes, enough to feed 2 billion people, with hotspots in the US Midwest, eastern Brazil, the Mediterranean and South Asia. Sustainable irrigation expansion and crop switching could avoid 60% of those losses. No word on varietal change, but I’m sure it would help.
- GEM-Forest: A Global satellite EMbedding–based map of forests and tree crops for 2020. Using Google DeepMind’s Alpha Earth Foundation embeddings, this 10 m global dataset classifies forest, non-forest and tree crop areas with 90% accuracy, showing that lightweight classifiers on satellite embeddings 1 can rival more complex forest-monitoring pipelines built to support things like the EU Deforestation Regulation.
- Global distribution of cattle, horses, goats, sheep and buffaloes at 1 km resolution for 2000–2022 based on subnational census data and spatiotemporal machine learning. Harmonizing 55,336 census polygons across 147 countries produces annual 1 km livestock headcount and density layers for five species, letting users track shifting grazing pressure over more than two decades rather than relying on single-year snapshots. 2
- A Spatial-Econometric Analysis of Fruit Tree Diversity in Lebanon: A contextual framework for supporting smallholder farmers. How geography, socio-economic conditions and local context shape fruit tree diversity in Lebanon, helping identify where interventions could best support smallholder resilience.
- High-resolution mapping of rice cropping pattern, intensity, calendar, and ecosystem type across Southeast Asia. Joins the growing pile of fine-resolution rice products for the region, this one distinguishing not just how many harvests a field gets but which rice ecosystem (irrigated, rainfed, upland) it belongs to. Is which variety is being grown next on the agenda?
- Entrenchment of cropping patterns reinforces climate exposure for certain crops in US. County-level analysis of US cropping decisions finds that climate risk has actually risen for some crops (like rainfed soybeans) even as it fell for others, suggesting economic and policy incentives are keeping farmers planted in increasingly climate-mismatched patterns rather than nudging them toward the drought-sensitivity-driven switching the first paper above models.
Indigenous people ask for genebanks
Great to see a new Conservation International study, led by Sushma Shrestha (an Indigenous Newar researcher from Nepal), on how Indigenous knowledge protects Earth’s ecosystems. Researchers interviewed 49 Indigenous leaders from six continents about how they steward their land, spanning territory from the Amazon rainforest to East African savannahs and Pacific Islands.
The study pushes back on an all-to-common assumption: that Indigenous lands are ecologically rich simply because they’re isolated or lightly populated. In fact, the health of Indigenous lands, the richness of their biodiversity, and their capacity to store carbon, come directly from active stewardship by the people living there. They’re the product of specific cultural practices, not a mere accident of remoteness.
What cultural practices? Things like avoiding overfishing, maintaining sacred spaces, watching for fires and other threats, and directly resisting extractive industries all contribute to the health of Indigenous territory.
Anything on agricultural biodiversity? Alas, that’s not a framing the paper uses explicitly. However, adaptation strategies that do get mentioned include sowing seeds that can be harvested in a short period to escape flooding, and planting crops in the shadow of trees to cope with rising temperatures. On support needs, there was a specific request for help with the conservation of Indigenous varieties. This is taken up again in the discussion section, which recommends, among other resourcing priorities, the establishment of community seed banks. With the appropriate links to national genebanks, it goes without saying.
Brainfood: Collaboration edition
- Dietary diversity, food security, and development projects in low- and middle-income contexts: Findings from 24 countries. Development projects are most effective at improving dietary diversity and food security when they bring together agriculture, nutrition and local communities.
- Enhancing farmers’ access to neglected crop seeds for healthy diets in a changing climate: six recommendations for policy action. Improving farmers’ access to opportunity crop seeds requires coordinated action across seed systems, with researchers, policymakers, seed producers and farming communities all playing complementary roles.
- The effects of seed policies, laws and regulations on farmers’ ability to access and use diverse, locally adapted farmers’ varieties and landraces. Seed policies shape collaboration between farmers, communities and formal seed systems, and regulations can either enable or constrain the exchange of locally adapted varieties that keeps agricultural diversity alive.
- Studying vanishing dietary diversity before it is lost: the World Diet Initiative. The World Diet Initiative brings together nutrition science, ecology and cultural knowledge to understand disappearing food traditions, showing that protecting dietary diversity requires collaboration across disciplines and communities.
- The Spanish Network of Genetic Conservation Units: a cooperative tool for the conservation and sustainable use of forest genetic resources under a changing environment. The Spanish Network of Genetic Conservation Units show how sharing expertise and responsibilities can strengthen forest conservation.
- Strengthening national genebanks through genomics and regional collaboration: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean. A regional community of practice is helping national genebanks overcome technical and institutional barriers through shared genomic approaches, turning isolated collections into connected systems for conserving and using crop diversity.