Event Details

A key horticultural crop, tomatoes star in cuisines globally. Mexico hosts hundreds of varieties, which face new threats from climate change, commercial agriculture and loss of traditional knowledge. Learn about transdisciplinary efforts to characterise, protect and celebrate tomato agrodiversity.

Tomatoes are one of the world’s largest horticultural crops, and a staple ingredient globally. Mexico is the global centre of their domestication: Hundreds of ancestral varieties have been developed over >1300 years, across a range of climatic conditions. However, this agrodiversity is threatened—a small number of commercial varieties now dominate markets, while traditional varieties are being rapidly lost and forgotten. Concurrently, climate change is presenting new threats tomato production, including small-scale subsistence farmers in Oaxaca, to commercial greenhouses in Mexico and Europe. This talk will present our emerging network, “Tomatoes for Tomorrow”. We are a growing group of plant scientists, farmers, agronomists, conservationists, chefs and tomato enthusiasts in Mexico and the United Kingdom. We work identify, characterise, protect, responsibly use and celebrate Mexico's unique tomato agrodiversity. This joint talk will tell the story of how our efforts began, and report on initial findings from the lab, kitchen and farm. We will describe our efforts to strike a balance between the demands of British academia and the needs of our diverse collaborators.

Project website: tomatoes4tomorrow.wixsite.com/website.

Project funded by N8 AgriFood: www.n8agrifood.ac.uk/