Food, history and cultural heritage: the grass pea consumption in central Portugal (19th century)
In the District of Leiria, central Portugal region, some festivities revive gastronomic and rural traditions, as a way of reclaiming its intangible cultural heritage. Some of these celebrations praise the chícharo, a grain legume consumed mainly by the country's rural...
Fieldwork: meeting the living sources of agricultural knowledge and experience
The ReSEED Project’s research travels along a path that unfolds over several centuries, backwards but also forwards. What we see in the 21st century is its last stretch. We are facing the result of how historical processes, scientific advances, economic interests,...
Improve iodine and other human micronutrient content in crops
The World is facing drastic, rapid, and unpredictable challenges. To set an example, in just the past few years we have faced a global pandemic, worsening climate conditions, an energetic crisis, war conflicts, and terrorism. Such conditions impose serious constrains...
Modelling agricultural land changes: mobilise historical sources to gather past knowledge with geographic evidence
The agricultural land changes we observe today are the direct result of a combination of social, economic, and environmental factors, varying at a range of spatial and temporal scales. Thus, many land-change models based on geographic theory and reconstructions of...
Between dryland and irrigation in Alentejo: agriculture and population development in the long term
Located in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, the Alentejo is the largest of the Portuguese regions with more than 28 thousand square kilometres stretching from the coast to the Spanish border. This region lies within the dry Iberia being subjected to a...
Forgotten practices, techniques, and crops: recovery of agricultural memory in Galiza in the late 20th century
The Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agrarias, better known by its acronym in Spanish (INIA), was and still is the main agricultural research centre in Spain. Its origin dates to the Spanish Civil War and the immediate postwar period when it was founded in 1940...
Pulling the wool over our own eyes: agrarian historians, seed improvement, yields and productivity
Interest in old varieties of seeds, especially cereals, has grown in recent years for two main reasons. First is the risk to the genetic diversity that accompanies the loss of these varieties in a context of accelerated environmental change. Second is the considerable...
Pottery production as a significant part of the sugar production cycle
One can hardly trace a portrait of Portuguese economic history without considering the relevance of sugar’s production and trade since the late Middle Ages and during the Early Modern Age. Notwithstanding the number of research papers on the subject, it is still...
OASIS. Agrobiodiversity seedbeds
Baja California Sur is a territory colonised by the Jesuits, previously occupied by native peoples. With this colonising process in the desert territory, Misiones-Huertas were designed in which crops brought from Europe were planted, together with native seeds from...
Provincializing the Green Revolution
According to estimates by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), only a few Mexican states rely almost completely on commercial seed companies providing hybrid maize. The rest of the area under maize cultivation in Mexico is still mainly...
The Seeding Ideas blog was published monthly from November 2019 to October 2023. The Editorial Board was composed of ReSEED team members. Publication and editing were coordinated by Caroline Delmazo. We aimed to share ideas, discussions, and findings from our research. Besides the team members and collaborators, we invited researchers from diverse scientific fields to contribute to this amazing interdisciplinary journey. We thank all authors and readers!