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Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
- tomoyoirl 2y agoOkay, I’ll eat it. I am sure it will be all flavorful and delicious. But how do I get it, to eat?
- fnordpiglet 2y agoApparently loot a seed bank ?
- resolutebat 2y agoFor most HN readers, the practical answer is to go to a farmer's market and pay $20 for a bag of weird-looking heirloom tomatoes.
- beyondreason 2y ago[flagged]
- cjk2 2y agoproceeds to eat humans I get the point but it's an extremely nuanced point to the point it might be a poor generalisation even with the content of the article considered.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- waynecochran 2y agoHow far are we from just saving the genetic code digitally and then synthesizing the seeds by arranging a sequence of amino acids to instantiate viable nucleotides? Is this still science fiction?
- cjk2 2y agoSeeds are more than just a program. They are more an embryo than a cell.
- waynecochran 2y agoHow far are we from instantiating the proper embryo then?
- ServiceNigga 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoIf you keep doing this, we will have to ban your main account as well, so it would be good if you would stop.
- margalabargala 2y agoQuite far. Not only do you need to synthesize the proper genomic sequence (barely possible), but it needs to be packed into a valid chromosome structure with a valid epigenome. Then that needs to be placed into a cell with valid RNAs, compatible chloroplasts and mitochondria, compatible proteins in a compatible configuration, etc. Creating all of that de novo for a plant is well beyond current capabilities. This is why when we clone e.g. a sheep, we transfer a nucleus from the cell of one individual into the cell of a different individual. It is much easier to mix and match pieces of different cells from the same species, than to create those pieces from raw materials.
- dflock 2y agoCreating artificial seeds, from scratch, based on a stored DNA sequence? Pretty far - that's still SciFi at this point.
- Suppafly 2y agoYou're making a distinction without a difference there.
- jacobolus 2y agoI recently came across the videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison, who is an amazingly clear presenter about permaculture: https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos For example, he has nice videos about chinampas in Mexico https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs , a medieval Indian canal tunnel of a style found throughout Iran https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kplvq0C-cdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kplvq0C-cdE , efforts to return a Hawaiian watershed to something like its historical state https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7q8friw1p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7q8friw1p8 , the Indian Paani Foundation's "water cup" to revitalize drought stricken villages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc , and the difficulty of using ancient iron-saturated aquifers for irrigation in western Egypt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBC5wOLF1hQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBC5wOLF1hQ
- dendrite9 2y agoI had some time several months ago and happened to look through a copy of Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism instead of reading on my phone. It has some good sections about the styles of permaculture you mentioned. But it is more of a collection of short chapters on each technique rather than a deep dive into any one. https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/julia-watson-lo-tek-design-by-radical-indigenism-julian-watson/4182592?ean=9783836578189 https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/julia-watson-lo-tek-design-b...
- thriftwy 2y agoInterestingly enough, the century XX saw a tremendous shift of agriculture from northern, wet lands to southern, sunny land. You could drain your aquifer but you could not add extra sun up north. I wonder if the trends reverses as aquifers are done with, and agriculture in places like US's original 13 colonies or middle Russian lands or Prussia or northern France becomes trendy again.
- affgrff2 2y agoPrussia?
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- ServiceNigga 2y ago[flagged]
- MostlyStable 2y agoHome gardeners seem like a pretty good option here. For more regular vegetables, this is already a thing that exists with seed libraries and exchanges, and programs that preserve heirloom varietals and sell the seeds to gardeners. Buying these seeds is basically just a way to help pay for the continued cultivation by the breeder (unfortunately, unless you really know what you are doing and are quite careful, preserving a specific variety on your own in a home garden is difficult-verging-on-impossible, despite what 1000 online guides to "seed saving" will tell you). The harder thing is the grains, since those typically require so much more work to get from the plant to the plate. I've looked into growing my own wheat before (I already have a large garden and have enough space that I could theoretically grow enough wheat to cover a substantial portion of my annual flour use), but the small scale/DIY options for threshing, sorting, grinding, and sifting are just not quite practical (for the level of effort I'm willing to put in, which I'm quite sure is higher than most home gardeners). If a small scale solution to harvesting and processing wheat can be made relatively cheap and simple, I'd bet you could get home gardeners to support the continued cultivation of these varieties in the same way that they frequently support heirloom tomatoes etc. Again, to be very clear, the gardeners themselves are (mostly) not doing the preserving. The plants home gardeners grow are a dead-end genetically (usually not being preserved at all, and even when they are, almost certainly representing mixes of several different varieties), but buy purchasing seeds from the larger scale growers, they are paying to support the continued cultivation of those varieties.
- greetings 2y agoWowa, something I have experience with. I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread. I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube. The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well, I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build something that would help mechanically. I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills are fantastic. There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do this kinda stuff. In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood chipper which would be incredibly effective. [1] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/small-scale-grain-raising/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/small-scale-grain-raisi...
- favorited 2y agoWhat's with the 5-digit year format? Premature prep for y10k?
- collinmcnulty 2y agoThat’s longnow’s whole deal. Getting people to think about the future far beyond a human lifespan.
- VelesDude 2y agoIt is such a simple thing but it works so well.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoThe Long Now Foundation's mission is "Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now." The leading zero is a way to trigger people to think about the next 10,000 years.
- damnesian 2y agoA conclusion I reached while reading this article that I can't shake is Adolf Hitler was more forward-thinking, and compassionate, in a way, than Vladimir Putin.
- evan_ 2y ago[flagged]
- genman 2y ago[flagged]
- Nzen 2y agoTo salvage this sow's ear: damnesian referred to the framing story of this article. Namely, that the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine threatened the world supply of wheat in general and specifically destroyed the Plant Genetic Resources Bank in Kharkiv. Grescoe contrasts this with the World War 2 invasion, which spared the research facility.
- karaterobot 2y agoIf there are hundreds of thousands of plant varieties in that massive seed bank in Svalbard, and only 150 plants are cultivated for consumption today, how the heck is eating a more diverse range of plants supposed to replace seed banks? Is it that everyone on earth is going to eat 1000x more plants than we do now, or is it that there will be 1000x more farms, each making 1/1000th as much money? I know the author is not arguing to tear down all the seed banks, they're saying we should keep plants alive by growing them. But I don't see how it pencils out. To me, this article makes the case for seed banks stronger by pointing out how that proposition is just impossible in reality.
- citruscomputing 2y agoIf I understand correctly, it's that everyone will still eat < 100 plants, but they'll be different ones from everyone else. Maybe every grocery store won't have the exact same kinds of squash in it. Maybe we'll have more region-specific crops! The example given about olive trees is illustrative, I think.
- karaterobot 2y agoThat's where the economics question comes in. How do you make a living as a farmer selling a very specific variety of squash, when there are now (let's say) 9000 varieties of squash on the market, and the same number of people out there buying squash?
- Retric 2y agoThe same way you make a living when there is 1 type of squash in the market and 9000 farmers planting it. Mostly through government subsidies sometimes supplemented by selling actual food eaten by actual people. That’s perhaps overstating things, but remove biofuels and we would have an even larger surplus even as everyone gets fat from excess production. Western farming has no real need for increased efficiency unless we get rid of a lot of farmland.
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- genman 2y agoE.g. make it distributed and live.
- neonate 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240502200255/https://longnow.org/ideas/to-save-it-eat-it/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240502200255/https://longnow.o... https://archive.ph/lmdjF https://archive.ph/lmdjF
- brevitea 2y ago[flagged]
- just_1_comment 2y agoWhy are the years in this article preceded by a zero? For example instead of writing the year as 2011 it’s written as 02011.
- 0xTJ 2y agoFrom the homepage of the site: > The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking. Seems that it's adding a zero to make you think of the future, and thinking over long periods of time. Looking at scales of thousands of years instead of tens or even hundreds.
- sratner 2y agoIt's a Long Now thing - emphasizing that they are thinking/talking about problems on millennia timescales. They also did the 10000yr clock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
- aeternum 2y agoTo subtly imply that the articles are of such sublime quality that they will still be referenced in 10,000 years.
- 8372049 2y ago"Svalbard Island" isn't an island, it's a Norwegian archipelago. None of the islands are called Svalbard, and the vault is located on Spitsbergen.
- surfingdino 2y agoI thought Svalbard was a safe place to keep the world's seeds before I checked who were the neighbours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barentsburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barentsburg
- anonbanker 2y agoDo you think irrational xenophobia is on the rise? And if so, what you would suggest to counter it?
- brandonsherrick 2y agoThat was so amazing.
- doubloon 2y agoyup this is the same conclusion people come to when they talk about long term data storage. the only thing that actually stores data is people, and the only reason they store it is because they care about it and still use it, but also they must live in an environment, social, physical, and governmental, that enables them and allows them to care.
- davem8 2y agoThis is something we as a society can easily fix. “farmers have come to rely on a few varieties of olive…these trees, some of them over 2,000 years old, are succumbing to a bacterium, imported on ornamental coffee plants“ The global transport of random pants just to be pretty in our gardens is a major factor in the spread of infectious diseases and invasive species. We (EU) need to legislate to stop garden centers encouraging people to plant infected/invasive species in our gardens which then spreads to our important food crops. Especially as there’s an abundance of native species that will not only brighten your garden but also support our ecosystem? This is an issue that the colonies of Europe dealt with 100’s of years ago as European settlers brought seeds and livestock to the Americans and Australia which got a foot hold in the new world and still to this day cause havoc. It’s speculated that invasive plant species flourished Australia and the Americas because of the initial advantage of seed arriving on the hoofs of livestock. It took much longer and even to this day less voracious, for species of the New World to invade Europe. An interesting cavet of human interference is the introduction of the Cane Toad to Australia in the 1930’s to combat an accidentally introduced beatle which was decimating the sugar cane harvest. It was only realised after the toad’s introduction that the beetle spent most of its life up high on the sugar cane while the toad living its life on the ground couldn’t reach it. The toad to this day causes havoc to the native species of Australia and has spread rapidly with no natural predators. Most interesting of all there is relatively recent evidence of Australias native fire ants adapting their behaviour and as a social species carry an entire toad back to their nest and consume it!
- romanivl 2y agoKharkiv’s seeds bank was not destroyed in 2022 since it was moved to the west Ukraine in 2023. Let the google help you.
- thriftwy 2y ago> Russian shells hit the Plant Genetic Resources Bank in Kharkiv. Founded in 01908, the gene bank preserved the seeds of 160,000 varieties of crops and plant seeds Founded by Russian Empire, propped forward by the USSR. Both of these entities see so much undeserved slander from Ukrainian state and the whole world, so that neither deserve to inherit it. Have your own Mickey Mouse Decolonial seed bank, use that one. Same story with Syria which was purposefully destroyed by the US/EU. They didn't dislodge Assad but they did loot and then lose the seed bank.
- kubb 2y agoThis is some next level muddled thinking, does the Russian propaganda talk about “slander” and former territories of the empire “deserving” to be destroyed for not wanting to be an imperial province anymore?
- thriftwy 2y ago[flagged]
- kubb 2y agoHow the hell are you offended about people saying that Russia is following an imperialist policy? That’s a plain fact. And you’re blaming the victims of that policy saying that they had it coming because they hate it! A seed bank is not something that can be started from one day to another. It requires decades of continuous work from thousands of people, in this case most of them were Ukrainians. And you would have it destroyed because you’ve decided they don’t deserve it. Do you want anything that used to be a part of the Russian empire to be burned to the ground as punishment?
- thriftwy 2y agoI don't view the creation of Russian Empire in a bad light - quite contrary, most other historical options would likely been worse, up and until 1917 at least. And as a Russian I believe that Russian Empire is a part of essential legacy of the humankind. Same with USSR despite its tragic and cruel history. With the assumption that "imperialistic" policy is an inherently bad thing you should not be entitled to those seeds, which it seems you've stolen anyway. With regards to burning stuff to the ground, I'd like to hear the Syria story first.
- vfclists 2y agoCorporations and supermarkets impose uniformity on what can be produced by farmers through patenting seeds and restricting purchases to those they consider acceptable to customers. Instead of putting a significant proportion of the blame squarely where it belongs the author just beats about the bush. https://regenerationinternational.org/2020/11/01/one-empire-over-seed-control-over-the-worlds-seed-banks/ https://regenerationinternational.org/2020/11/01/one-empire-...