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.

• Yale University magazine drinks the fast-track breeding KoolAid panacea.
• Compare and contrast. Repeat. Endlessly.
• Grafting tomatoes is hot for lots of reasons; but how does it protect against leaf-borne diseases?
• Getting the lowdown on that “food sovereignty” farrago.
• And today’s DNA sequencing will solve world hunger and cure bunions story.
• Genomics also good for “health, agriculture, livestock, fisheries and biodiversity” in Philippines. Have we forgotten anything?
• Well yeah, you forgot your handy molecular toolkit.
• Meanwhile, back in the real world, the choice is between forests and yaks.
• More hard choices: evotourism destinations. But check it out, there be agricultural biodiversity too!

Selected collections from the Biodiversity Heritage Library are now online and available through iTunesU. There’s some wonderful stuff. One thing of agrobiodiversity interest is “Wild Oxen, Sheep & Goats of All Lands, Living and Extinct”, by R. Ward, published in 1898. Below is one of the illustrations to whet your appetite.

And yes, we have blogged about Marco Polo sheep here, of course we have.

We’re of course all holding our breath, are we not, over the imminent appearance of the American Journal of Botany Special Issue on what next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies mean for the plant sciences. A few teasers are already out on the journal’s website, and it looks like the papers will come out in piecemeal fashion over the next weeks, and months for all I know. The paper that’s most relevant to us here is perhaps that of Susan McCouch and others on NGS and genebanks. I saw an early version of it, but am not allowed to share it, so until it comes out officially, here’s a taster from the introduction to the volume as a whole by Ashley N. Egan, Jessica Schlueter and David M. Spooner. I trust the journal will consider it fair use and not come after us with their lawyers.

A total of 1750 national and international gene banks worldwide preserve ~7 million accessions of advanced cultivars, landraces, and wild species relatives of plants that the world depends on for food, fiber, and fuel (FAO, 2010 ). McCouch et al. (2012) present a vision for the potential of large-scale genotyping to help characterize, use, and manage gene bank collections, from their perspectives as scientists working with large-scale rice collections. Genebanks have many pressing challenges due to the large size of their collections and the need to characterize them properly for a wide variety of users. They also face legal constraints (and opportunities) imposed in today’s climate of ownership of genetic resources. The challenges include the need to correctly identify accessions, track seed lots, varieties, and alleles, identify and eliminate duplicate accessions, justify adding new accessions to the collection, identify a small subset of the collection that represents a majority of the variation in the entire collection (a “core collection”), identify geographic areas holding useful sets of diverse alleles, associate genotypes with phenotypes, and motivate innovative collaborations to place useful materials into the hands of plant breeders. McCouch et al. (2012) outline these challenges and show how NGS can vastly improve genetic characterization efforts in genebanks. Initial NGS projects with the rice collections include identification of SNPs and other polymorphisms (http://www.oryzasnp. org/; http://www.ricediversity.org/; http://www.ricesnp.org/) based on large-scale resequencing and genotyping projects.

Back with a full discussion (and a comparison with the paper on the same subject in a recent Brainfood) when the publication is online.

• The annual Wageningen agrobiodiversity conservation course is in India this year. Hannes says it’s really good.
• AVRDC’s veggie seed kits are a hit in Orissa.
• CIMMYT swimming in data. Waving, not drowning.
• IRRI not doing badly either. But “quantitative train loci” is a new one on me.
• Australia thinking about introducing elephants. Yeah because that sort of thing has been such a success in the past.
• Well, actually, with sheep, I suppose it has, in a way. And the genetics says breeders have a lot of diversity to play with still.
• Your mama is a llama.
• The Island of Dogs has crop wild relatives. No, not the one in London.
• Cuba goes for new urban crops. And not for the first time, Shirley. But what about the old ones?
• Quick, duck! This piece has been rather a hit for me over on Facebook.
• VII International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon and Their Wild Relatives: The (Very Expensive) Book.
• Food sovereignty “started in New England”. Huh? And proponents “want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators”. Huh?

• Banana boffins at each others’ throats over alleged new species. Great spectator sport.
• What does a Musa voucher specimen look like, I wonder.
• Fancy shmanzy Bangkok restaurant links up with heirloom seedbank.
• Aroid network working really hard.
• Marker-assisted selection: a biotechnology we can all get behind. Can’t we?
• Conservation in Sierra Leone. No agrobiodiversity, natch.

Sad to hear that Dr Ed Percival, a world expert on cotton and its genetic resources, passed away last month. He collected wild and cultivated germplasm widely, and he was formerly curator of the USDA cotton germplasm collection at College Station, Texas, one of the more important in the world.

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.

We’ve written before about consolidation in the seed industry making the same tired joke that I want to make again now, that a picture is worth 1000 words. It doesn’t hurt to stay up to date though, which is why I am grateful to Resources Research for finding, and colouring in, the diagram from the USDA report on Research Investments and Market Structure in the Food Processing, Agricultural Input, and Biofuel Industries Worldwide.

The USDA report is not, as far as I can tell, anything to do with the US Department of Justice’s investigation of antitrust practices in the seed industry, announced a couple of years ago. So what has become of that? Anyone know?

• Effects of Introducing Threatened Falcons into Vineyards on Abundance of Passeriformes and Bird Damage to Grapes. Potential savings of US$234/ha for Sauvignon Blanc, more for Pinot Noir.
• Genetic characterization and gene flow in different geographical-distance neighbouring natural populations of wild soybean (Glycine soja Sieb. & Zucc.) and implications for protection from GM soybeans. There is a small amount of outcrossing, which decreases with distance. GM crops should be grown far from wild populations, certainly more than 1.5km. And we can work out better ways to collect for ex situ conservation.
• Phylogenetic relationships, interspecific hybridization and origin of some rare characters of wild soybean in the subgenus Glycine soja in China. Intermediate forms are closer to the wild than the cultivated species.
• Mitochondrial genomes from modern horses reveal the major haplogroups that underwent domestication. A diversity of maternal lines were domesticated about 150,000 years ago, leading to about 18 modern haplogroups. One of them is only found in the only remaining wild horse, E. przewalskii.