While I'm often left paralyzed by apple choice in Kroger, I know the breadth of options at grocery stores mask a far different reality: we've lost roughly 90% of the world's crop varieties in the past 100 years. This threat to future food security is referred to as genetic erosion and primarily attributed to the
The imposing structure of the Svalbard seed bank is familiar to many. This “doomsday†vault (ahem, already breached by climate change) is humanity's last resort for preserving the seeds of our crops and plants. But how did this bastion of biodiversity arise? Nikolai Vavilov, a 20th century Russian agronomist and geneticist, established the first modern
My particular confluence of knowledge (a blend of economics, environmental policy, and crop science) tends to leave me completely overwhelmed by the discordance among human nutritional needs, environmental health, and global agricultural systems. So, I let out a tiny gasp of elation when the Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious general medical journals, released
When confronted with the imprecise notion of “sustainability†in agriculture, most people's thoughts drift to ideas of ecologically-mindful land management practices. I'll dub these concepts “the classicsâ€: rotate your crops, use less fertilizer and pesticides, always employ cover cropping. While these ideas are not wrong, they are incomplete in that they tend to omit some
