Farmers’ motivations for landrace cereal cultivation in Sweden

Ortman, Tove; Sandström, Emil; Bengtsson, Jan; Watson, Christine; Bergkvist, Göran

doi:10.1080/01448765.2023.2207081

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 69 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Importantly, LRs are often maintained by smallholders and indigenous farmers because of the multiple cultural, provisioning, and regulating ecosystem services they provide ( de Haan, 2021 ). These may include diverse benefits such as cultural and local identities, superior organoleptic properties, and relative yield stability in marginal and/or variable environments, among other factors ( Perales et al., 2005 ; Fliedel et al., 2013 ; Ortman et al., 2023 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a practical threat assessment methodology for crop landraces

Almeida,

Barata,

De Haan

et al. 2024

Front. Plant Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Crop landraces (LR), the traditional varieties of crops that have been maintained for millennia by repeated cycles of planting, harvesting, and selection, are genetically diverse compared to more modern varieties and provide one of the key components for crop improvement due to the ease of trait transfer within the crop species. However, LR diversity is increasingly threatened with genetic erosion and extinction by replacement with improved cultivars, lack of incentives for farmers to maintain traditional agricultural systems, and rising threats from climate change. Their active conservation is necessary to maintain this critical resource. However, as there are hundreds of thousands of LR and millions of LR populations for crops globally, active conservation is complex and resource-intensive. To assist in implementation, it is useful to be able to prioritise LR for conservation action and an obvious means of prioritisation is based on relative threat assessment. There have been several attempts to propose LR threat assessment methods, but none thus far has been widely accepted or applied. The aim of this paper is to present a novel, practical, standardised, and objective methodology for LR threat assessment derived from the widely applied IUCN Red Listing for wild species, involving the collation of time series information for LR population range, LR population trend, market, and farmer characteristics and LR context information. The collated information is compared to a set of threat criteria and an appropriate threat category is assigned to the LR when a threshold level is reached. The proposed methodology can be applied at national, regional, or global levels and any crop group.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a practical threat assessment methodology for crop landraces

Almeida,

Barata,

De Haan

et al. 2024

Front. Plant Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Saving, sharing and shaping landrace seeds in commons: unravelling seed commoning norms for furthering agrobiodiversity

Sandström,

Ortman,

Watson

et al. 2024

Agric Hum Values

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One of the major challenges facing agricultural and food systems today is the loss of agrobiodiversity. Considering the current impasse of preventing the worldwide loss of crop diversity, this paper highlights the possibility for a radical reorientation of current legal seed frameworks that could provide more space for alternative seed systems to evolve which centre on norms that support on-farm agrobiodiversity. Understanding the underlying norms that shape seed commons are important, since norms both delimit and contribute to what ultimately will constitute the seeds and who will ultimately have access to the seeds and thus to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported. This paper applies a commoning approach to explore the underpinning norms of a Swedish seed commons initiative and discusses the potential for furthering agrobiodiversity in the context of wider legal and authoritative discourses on seed enclosure. The paper shows how the seed commoning system is shaped and protected by a particular set of farming norms, which allows for sharing seeds among those who adhere to the norms but excludes those who will not. The paper further illustrates how farmers have been able to navigate fragile legal and economic pathways to collectively organize around landrace seeds, which function as an epistemic farming community, that maintain landraces from the past and shape new landraces for the present, adapted to diverse agro-ecological environments for low-input agriculture. The paper reveals how the ascribed norms to the seed commons in combination with the current seed laws set a certain limit to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported and discusses why prescriptions of “getting institutions right” for seed governance are difficult at best, when considering the shifting socio-nature of seeds. To further increase agrobiodiversity, the paper suggests future seed laws are redirected to the sustenance of a proliferation of protected seed commoning systems that can supply locally adapted plant material for diverse groups of farmers and farming systems.

show abstract