• Higher maize yields? Plant cover crops between the rows.
• Barley tempeh! My kind of food exploration.
• Danny Hunter impresses Irish Times with need to conserve biodiversity.
• UK devotes millions to research for “bigger yields of better quality fruits and vegetables”.
• Germans embrace high-tech urban agriculture — cautiously.
• Put farmers’ markets near medical centres for added benefits. What happens when everyone’s so healthy they don’t need the doctor?

There’s been a whole lot of noise lately about how to feed 9 billion people well, much of it adopting ammunition of silver. Organics can do it. GMOs are essential. Women farmers. Microdoses of fertiliser. Sequence everything. Drip irrigation. Et cetera, et cetera. Mostly special interest groups looking after their special interests. And like Dr Johnson’s apocryphal epigram, they’ll never agree because they are arguing from different premises. In the meantime, though, is it any wonder that some people take umbrage at pronouncements like these:

The United States of America is the world leader in agriculture. We have invested in domestic agricultural education, infrastructure and distribution, and reaped the rewards. Other countries look to us for new technologies and new systems. It is time to teach them more efficient farming methods.

That, from one Christopher Barden, is the prelude to a call to increase the number of agricultural exchanges, which “allow young or mid-career agriculturalists to come to the U.S. and live and work alongside American farmers and learn the work ethics, technologies, organization and honesty practiced in that community. Participants can earn money to invest in their agri-businesses at home while taking back a bank of knowledge and respect.” Mr Barden, as it happens, “is the vice president of Worldwide Farmers Exchange, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit independent of government funding”.

I wonder whether any of the young or mid-career agriculturalists have any solutions to, say, the problems of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, or the externalities imposed by concentrated pig operations?

Dan Glickman, former US Secretary of Agriculture, tells a very familiar story in an article for Diplomatic Courier magazine. Feeding a Growing World Sustainably and Nutritiously goes through the usual reasons and rounds up the usual suspects, to whit: invest in “basic and adaptive agricultural research,” in “the production of fruits and vegetables and other nutrient-dense specialty crops,” and especially in women.

Investing in women has positive repercussions not just for productivity, but also for nutritional improvement. Women make the majority of household nutritional decisions, and giving women nutrition information is proven to improve maternal and children’s health.

But here’s a thing: Despite Rhetoric, Women Still Sidelined in Development Funding.

Of course, one can’t blame ex-Secretary Glickman for that. Personally, however, if the problems are as pressing as everyone seems to think they are, wouldn’t it be better to try lots of different approaches, and see which ones work best where, and in what combinations. But no, lets just slag off everyone who doesn’t agree with us. One rather wishes a well-meaning psychologist type would come along and figure out why no one group can even begin to appreciate another’s point of view. The world is diverse, and so are the ways in which people secure their food and nutrition. A first step might be to recognise that.

When you start really looking out for something, you quickly get to wondering how you could possibly have missed it all before. Case in point: maps of the USA which hint at “a complex association where interactions between a variety of factors could produce reinforcing effects.” That’s in the words of an Annals of Botany Google+ pointer to a recent post of ours here which included maps of obesity and food insecurity and mused vaguely about the coolness of mashups.

After that, of course I started seeing such maps everywhere. Of renewable resources, including biomass. Of landuse. Of poverty. Of, errr, the names of soft drinks.

Some regions jump up at you during the even briefest of looks at the maps of poverty, obesity and food insecurity. Like the Mississippi Valley, for instance. So it is at least somewhat reassuring that other people have noticed that too, and are doing something about it. Even doing multiple things about it, in fact. USDA probably didn’t need fancy maps to identify this particular nexus of deprivation, but maybe there are others that are not so obvious, and which an in-depth perusal of these maps will bring to light. Along with, hopefully, some possible solutions. Even if they are only farmers markets.

But to end on a lighter note, this region is not just known for poverty and malnutrition. The blues came from there, of course, but also, ahem, Kermit the Frog. In fact, there’s a connection between our green friend and agriculture. I am reliably informed that Jim Henson’s father was superintendent of the USDA-ARS research station in Stoneville, MS and worked closely with researchers there. Perhaps Kermit should be asked to spread the nutrition and exercise message around his old hopping grounds? I can’t think of a more suitable role model.

• Mike Jackson gets himself a pulpit. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike!
• More on the Filipino ex-genebank.
• What they grew in an ancient Israelite garden. Can they really tell Citrus species apart from their pollen?
• More American maps to mashup with obesity and food insecurity: land use, renewable energy sources…. I do hope someone is keeping track. Even of the more esoteric stuff, of course, like the names of softdrinks.
• Yet more on horse domestication.
• Another organic farming externality for your consideration. Thanks, Robert.
• ILRI gets innovative on this whole training thing.
• “The future of chocolate” revealed.
• Boffins look at fossil bison epigenetics to investigate adaptation to climate change. What will they think of next. Well, applying it to chickens, for a start.
• Other boffins move potato anti-nematode genes into bananas. No word on the epigenetics of it all.
• Indian report on how to strengthen role of agriculture in nutrition.
• Kew has money for fieldwork.
• Cleaning messy taxonomic data. Useful in Genebank Database Hell?

This Sunday, an estimated 58 percent of Americans will order pizza for Super Bowl parties around the country. To celebrate Game Day classics like pizza, cheese dips and nachos, we went to Wisconsin — the American dairyland that produces 35 percent of the country’s cheese — to find out the chemistry behind cheesemaking.

The “we” in this case is the American Chemical Society, and having been to the University of Wisconsin and sampled the delights of the Babcock Hall experimental ice-cream shop, I was anxious to see the ACS video. Alas, it is as dull as factory cheese. And in light of that “58% will order pizza” statistic, I wish instead the ACS — or the University of Wisconsin-Madison — had investigated the whole business of analog, imitation substitute cheese which, and I’m guessing here, probably feature prominently, and possibly exclusively, on 98.2% of the pizzas those 58% of Americans are going to order.

• Another use for chillies: keeping errant apes away.
• Catfish are the new tilapia.
• New fungicide-resistant strain of potato late blight found in UK. (How do they name these things?)
• The chickenization of the US beef industry, on NPR. Salutary.
• The Seed Warrior of Svalbard gets over-exposed.
• What HarvestPlus is doing on each of its crops, in a handy brochure. And more on the same subject but a different crop from Bill Gates himself.
• But that’s just one aspect of the relationship between agriculture and nutrition/health. Right? Right.
• You also need dietary diversification, right? Right.
• What’s that you say? Biodiversity databasing need not be hellish?
• Danny waxes nostalgic about Wallis and Futuna grapes. He and I also met a few nuts in the Pacific in our time. Grape-nuts. Geddit?
• Latest Plant Cuttings includes big piece on cassava.
• And you can put that in an ecological context.
• Do you have a forgotten germplasm collection?
• Vietnam gets its first EU Geographic Indication. Can’t help thinking it need not have bothered.
• Greek yoghurt, on the other hand…

• Revitalising socio-ecological production landscapes. It’s all the buzz, even though it doesn’t trip off my tongue.
• And the buzz keeps building for AgBioDiv 2012 in Ireland, 9 February.
• The great house of Veitch — but not a word about their many veg varieties.
• The first “really” purple tomato now available as seed.

It has been a bit of a rough week for people who prefer their grand policy pronouncements backed with a teeny bit of evidence. Like us. Two big papers, in important journals, have concluded that there is very little evidence that agriculturally improving dietary diversity feeds into better nutrition and health. In the British Medical Journal, a systematic review of agricultural interventions that aim to improve nutritional status of children concluded:

The data available show a poor effect of these interventions on nutritional status, but methodological weaknesses of the studies cast serious doubts on the validity of these results.

That’s based on a review of 23 published studies from a range of countries. In PLoS ONE, a study of the contribution of wild edible plants (WEP) to diets in DR Congo similarly concluded that:

[I]n a high biodiverse region with precarious food security, WEP are insufficiently consumed to increase nutrition security or dietary adequacy.

Both papers are making an important point. The second is perhaps less generally applicable. The authors were looking only at wild edible plants, not agricultural biodiversity as a whole, and found that they were “rarely consumed and do not contribute substantially to diets” in either urban or rural areas of DR Congo. It isn’t as if the people of DRC can afford to ignore WEP; their diets lack macro- and micronutrients and are not well balanced. And it isn’t as if there are no WEP for them to eat. 135 wild foods besides condiments, tubers, tea substitutes, etc. have been inventoried in the study area, but while the inhabitants described 77 WEP, only 11 species figured in their diets, and that during in the period of highest availability. More, clearly, could be done, both to capture the knowledge people have about WEP, and maybe to start attempting to domesticate some of the more important species.

The BMJ review paper looked agricultural interventions that explicitly sought to improve the nutritional status of children. These included bio-fortification, home gardens, aquaculture and small fisheries, poultry, dairy, and other livestock. These represent “own production” pathways, as opposed to the “market” pathways that seek both to improve incomes for farmers and make more nutritious foods more available. Criteria for inclusion were very strict. Studies had to include a control group, no before-and-after designs. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies were included as long as the possibility of selection bias was acknowledged and at least partly controlled for. Twenty-three studies made the final cut, 15 of them on home gardens. They’re not an impressive bunch.

Overall, the methodological quality of these studies was not high by the standards set by the review. … None of the primary studies reviewed was based on a randomised design. Studies were cross sectional or longitudinal project-control comparisons in which the controls, either households or villages, were selected on the basis of similar characteristics that were either very few or not made explicit. Power calculations were rarely done or presented, and samples were often small in terms of both individual participants and clusters. No study did a rigorous subgroup analysis of effect differentiating, for example, households of different wealth, sex of head of household, or location of residence.

There were, of course, effects associated with the interventions. Incomes, for example.

Five studies reported a large positive effect of the interventions on total household income. However, only in one case was the difference between project and control groups statistically tested.

Diets changed too, but sometimes a focus on one component, for example fish, resulted in a decrease in another, in this case pulses. Changes in micronutrient intake were similarly inconclusive, with the possible exception of vitamin A intake, where the review authors’ meta-analysis

“[P]rovides some support to the hypothesis that agricultural home gardens interventions improve vitamin A intake among children under the age of 5”.

Thirteen of the 23 studies measured the children, but only 8 used these data to calculate the prevalence of under-nutrition. Three studies found a positive effect on underweight, two on wasting, and only one on stunting. This could be because stunting reflects long-term under-nutrition. The interventions might not have continued long enough to see effects on stunting.

Overall, these results provide little support for the hypothesis that agricultural interventions help to reduce under-nutrition.

That does indeed sound bad.

However, they should not be interpreted as evidence of the absence of an effect. Lack of significance can be the result of absence of effect or of absence of statistical power, and many of the studies reviewed included small samples of children.

To see if bad experimental design, particularly small sample sizes, might be to blame the review authors calculated the statistical power of the eight studies that measured children’s nutritional status. They conclude that they just weren’t that powerful, with only a 50% chance of detecting even a large (30% or more) reduction in malnutrition.

And that’s really the nub of the matter. One is tempted to bleat fatuously that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. But that is exactly what it is. So why am I upset by this absence of evidence? Because there is actually quite good evidence that dietary diversity is indeed linked to better health, although most of it is from rich countries and is concerned with diet, not agriculture. Heck, I’ve cited many of them myself ,  and blithely extrapolated from those rich-world studies to argue for agricultural interventions, and specifically dietary diversity of the type found in home gardens, as a way of improving nutrition in poor countries.

Tackling malnutrition, the Copenhagen Consensus agreed, is one of the most cost effective investments in development it is possible to make. The report on malnutrition, however, considers only supplements (direct and in fortified foods) and biofortification. Dietary diversity simply does not figure. I asked why. The lead author replied:

Clearly diversifying diets is an important part of the long run solution to improving nutritional status. However in the paper I was asked to focus on benefit-cost ratios which could be calculated, and it is typically harder to do this for such long run solutions.

Not so much absence of evidence, then, as no effort to find anyway.

What then does all this mean. To me, the answer is very clear. The people making grand policy pronouncements about agriculture and nutrition need to seriously up their game. Both of these papers, and especially the big BMJ review, offer an opportunity to get to grips with what it takes to produce the evidence that is currently lacking. And decent evidence will make it far more likely that agrobiodiversity is allowed to play a much fuller part in sustainable improvements in nutrition and health.

• Genetic structure and diversity of India hybrid tea. It’s complicated. It’s important because the success of tea outside its core are is due to hybridization between Indian and Chinese types in Assam starting in 1875. It’s limited.
• NGS technologies for analyzing germplasm diversity in genebanks. That’s Next-Generation Sequencing. Can be used to “identify patterns of genetic diversity, map quantitative traits and mine novel alleles.” Recommendation is for “genotyping by sequencing” to be applied stepwise, starting with a core collection. That’ll be complicated, but the real bottleneck will be the phenotyping.
• The role and influence of grandmothers on child nutrition: culturally designated advisors and caregivers. Wise up, nutrition advocates. You are, apparently, ignoring egg-suckers, a primary force for good.
• The importance of eating local: slaughter and scurvy in Antarctic cuisine. Who needs oranges when you have fresh penguin at hand?
• Islands and streams: clusters and gene flow in wild barley populations from the Levant. There is ecogeographic patterning in the wild material, once you remove the effect of recent admixture with cultivated barley. Geneflow is more N to S than vice versa.
• Global change belowground: impacts of elevated CO2, nitrogen, and summer drought on soil food webs and biodiversity. It’s complex, really complex; increased CO2 and N may result in new, simpler belowground assemblages.
• Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change. An entire issue of Rice journal.

• The Archaeobotanist reviews the domestication and spread of bananas …
• … and says that bananas weren’t important to the first farmers of Central Africa.
• New York Times blog dissects the climate change and agriculture paper that’s making waves.
• But biodiversity loss is a bigger threat than climate change. No mention of ag; do these guys ever talk to one another?
• In India, children of women who farm their own land are less malnourished.
• So what if 11 plant species “account for 93 percent of all that humans eat”? Rachel Laudan thinks that fine, and I agree.
• The patent on one of the Roundup-Ready genes is about to expire. So?