Talk:On-farm conservation

Talk

Discussion for: On-farm conservation • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

On-farm conservation covers on-farm conservation as a method: its definition, the difference between farmers' own practice and projects that support it, the decisions by which farmers shape a crop population, seed lots and farmer seed networks, the ways of supporting farmers, how the outcome is measured, and the records of cannabis seed kept and exchanged on farms. It takes in farmer participation, community-based conservation and support for traditional cultivation. In situ conservation in general, protected areas and the evolutionary case for keeping populations in the field belong to In situ conservation. What a landrace is, inventories and the European record belong to Landrace conservation. Loss of diversity belongs to Genetic erosion, and the rights of farmers to seed to Farmers' rights. Stored samples belong to Ex situ conservation and Gene bank.

Data verification

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Discussion

Sources

• Brush (ed.), Genes in the Field: On-Farm Conservation of Crop Diversity (2000): chapters by Brush (pp. 3–26), Louette (pp. 109–142), Worede, Tesemma and Feyissa (pp. 143–161) and Jarvis and Hodgkin (pp. 261–278). The copyright page gives 2000; the Library of Congress cataloguing data carry 1999, and some catalogues date the book 1999.
• Coomes and colleagues (2015), Food Policy 56: 41–50: farmer seed networks.
• Dyer, López-Feldman, Yúnez-Naude and Taylor (2014), PNAS 111: 14094–14099, with the letter of Brush and colleagues (2015), PNAS 112: E1. A reply by Dyer and colleagues follows the letter (p. E2).
• Maxted, Magos Brehm and Kell (2013), resource book for the Food and Agriculture Organization: the 1997 definition (p. 18), which it quotes from Maxted, Hawkes, Ford-Lloyd and Williams, "A practical model for in situ genetic conservation", in Maxted, Ford-Lloyd and Hawkes (eds), Plant Genetic Conservation: The In Situ Approach (1997), pp. 545–592. The judgements on elderly maintainers and the handful of projects (pp. 8–9) are its summary of Negri and colleagues (2009).
• Clarke (1995), Journal of the International Hemp Association 2(2): seed production in Tai'an, pp. 61–65.
• Down to Earth (28 January 2025): Himachal Pradesh.

Works cited through other sources

The figures on the Cuzalapa seed lots come from Louette's chapter of 2000, which reports the same survey as Louette, Charrier and Berthaud (1997, Economic Botany 51: 20–38). The Turkish wheat example is Brush and Meng (1998) as Brush (2000, pp. 3–4) gives it. The ranges of 80–90 per cent and under 10 per cent are estimates that Coomes and colleagues cite from other work (Sperling and McGuire 2010 and others) and accept as reasonable.

Cannabis

Clarke's account describes one district in the early 1990s, from visits and interviews with farmers and officials. It gives no count of plants or seed lots per farmer, no measure of how much seed passes between farmers, and no measure of diversity over time. The Down to Earth statements are those of two campaigners in a news report. None of the sources describes a project set up to conserve a cannabis landrace on farms, or applies the methods of Louette or Jarvis and Hodgkin to cannabis.

Images reserved in the article

One image has a place in the article but is not yet uploaded:

• File:On-farm-conservation-Cuzalapa-maize-seed-sources.jpg (Seed lots and seed flow), a diagram to be drawn: three arrows, with widths in proportion, into a box "Seed lots sown: 484": "Farmer's own harvest: 53%", "Another farmer in the valley: 36%" and "From outside the valley: 11%", under the title "Cuzalapa, Jalisco: 39 farmers, six seasons, 1989–1991". No shares by area and no variety names.