New project to raise awareness of forgotten crops
Do you remember the last time you ate buckwheat, lupin or vetch? How about flaxseed pudding or a hummus made with broad beans? The newly launched FUnCrop project focuses on nutritious but somewhat forgotten crops. The idea is that increased knowledge and awareness of these crops will eventually contribute to increased self-sufficiency and more resilient food systems. The project, coordinated by NordGen, includes institutions from the Baltic countries and Ukraine.
Top photo: Buckwheat from the Nordic seed collection cultivated in NordGen's garden.
In a world where climate change is threatening our agricultural systems with extreme weather and new diseases and pests, most of what we eat still comes from a few crops such as wheat, rice and maize. This makes us vulnerable, especially when combined with a troubled geopolitical landscape where wars, conflicts and trade barriers can lead to import problems. Against this backdrop, the partners of the ‘FUnCrop - Strengthening Food security by conservation and knowledge-building of Underutilised Crops’ project have chosen to take a closer look at what are known as underutilised crops.
‘Underutilised crops are important genetic resources that have the potential to be grown on a much larger scale than today. They can contribute to more resilient farming systems and have often been culturally and historically important in the regions where they were grown. But overall, they have not been researched as much as crops grown on a larger scale. That's why this project is so important,’ says Külli Annamaa, who is responsible for the national genebank in Estonia.
Field trials and networking
The project will produce a report on underutilized crops. It will also create a network with the aim of establishing long-term co-operation between the Nordic and Baltic countries and Ukraine.
‘Another important part of the project is that we will conduct field trials with all the crops on the list to learn more about them and develop methods on how best to grow them,’ says Mohammad El-Khalifeh, a plant expert at NordGen.
He is responsible for the field trials part of the project together with Oleh Trygub, who is in charge of the Ustymivs'ka Experimental Station of Plant production, part of the National Genebank of Ukraine. Ukraine has two other partner organisations in the project.
‘We have a list of nine different crops to be grown during the project period. What they have in common is that we don't know much about them, but they have good potential to be grown on a larger scale to promote nutritious domestic food production,’ he says.
The nine crops included in the project:
- Beans
- Buckwheat
- Vetches
- Broad beans
- Lentils
- Grey peas
- Flax
- Lupin
- Mustard
FUnCrop runs until 31 October 2026 and has the following partners:
- Estonian Rural Research and Knowledge Centre (METK), Estonia
- LSFRI ‘Silava’, Latvia
- Agricultural Resources and Economics Institute (AREI), Latvia
- State Forestry Administration, Lithuania
- Lithuanian Agricultural and Forestry Research Centre, Vokė Branch, Lithuania
- Department of Higher Education, Faculty of Agrotechnology, Lithuania
- NordGen, Nordic countries
- Institute of Plant Production named after V.Ya. Yuriev NAAS, Ukraine
- Ustymivs'ka Experimental Station of Plant Production Institute named after V.Y.Yuriev of NAAS, Ukraine
- Institute of Agriculture of the Carpathian Region NAAS, Ukraine