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Assessing progress towards healthier people, farms and landscapes through nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) requires transdisciplinary methods with robust models and metrics. Farm-household models could facilitate disentangling the complex agriculture-nutrition nexus, by jointly assessing performance indicators on different farm system components such as farm productivity, farm environmental performance, household nutrition, and livelihoods. We, therefore, applied a farm-household model, FarmDESIGN, expanded to more comprehensively capture household nutrition and production diversity, diet diversity, and nutrient adequacy metrics. We estimated the potential contribution of an NSA intervention targeting the diversification of home gardens, aimed at reducing nutritional gaps and improving livelihoods in rural Vietnam. We addressed three central questions: (1) Do 'Selected Crops' (i.e. crops identified in a participatory process) in the intervention contribute to satisfying household dietary requirements?; (2) Does the adoption of Selected Crops contribute to improving household livelihoods (i.e. does it increase leisure time for non-earning activities as well as the dispensable budget)?; and (3) Do the proposed nutritionrelated metrics estimate the contribution of home-garden diversification towards satisfying household dietary requirements? Results indicate trade-offs between nutrition and dispensable budget, with limited farm-household configurations leading to jointly improved nutrition and livelihoods. FarmDESIGN facilitated testing the robustness and limitations of commonly used metrics to monitor progress towards NSA. Results indicate that most of the production diversity metrics performed poorly at predicting desirable nutritional outcomes in this modelling study. This study demonstrates that farm-household models can facilitate anticipating the effect (positive or negative) of agricultural interventions on nutrition and the environment, identifying complementary interventions for significant and positive results and helping to foresee the trade-offs that farm-households could face. Furthermore, FarmDESIGN could contribute to identifying agreed-upon and robust metrics for measuring nutritional outcomes at the farm-household level, to allow comparability between contexts and NSA interventions.

Historic illustrations represent interesting source material for the study of traditional crop varieties that have not been described in the literature or safeguarded in germplasm institutes or botanic gardens. Here, we present the crop diversity depicted on 143 illustrated pages of the 30-volume Seikei Zusetsu agricultural catalog, compiled in Japan around 1800 and gifted to the Dutch East India Company physician and naturalist Philipp Franz Von Siebold (1796-1866). We identified 109 different species of crops and wild edible plants in the catalog, in which cereals were represented with 35 different varieties and Brassicaceae with 29 varieties of turnips, cabbages, and radishes. We published all images online, with translations of the historic Kanji and Katakana names, of which 103 included ancient Dutch crop names. Less than half of these early nineteenth-century crop species are still grown in substantial quantities in Japan today, although some may have survived in home gardens. The Seikei Zusetsu catalog is a valuable repository of traditional Japanese knowledge on crops, agricultural practices, and food processing methods and could stimulate efforts to create more agrobiodiverse farming systems and the marketing of high-value crops to ensure the survival of distinctive food cultures.

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