Month: July 2009

July 10, 2009July 10, 2009

Natural selection at work

“This new forage has great insect resistance”, effused a former colleague, “we just need to eliminate the toxins that keep sheep from eating it.”

Genetically engineered drought-tolerant crops are introduced with great fanfare, only to disappear when they turn out to have low yield under nondrought conditions.

Fascinating post from R. Ford Denison, about how silly old natural selection (apparently) fails to make simple changes that would “obviously” be good for the organism concerned. Denison is very clear, in this post and elsewhere on his blog, about just how hard it is for even clever people to improve on the countless experiments that natural selection has had to work on, especially in agriculture. That’s why I for one am not holding my breath waiting for anyone anywhere to transform a C3 plant into a C4 plant.

July 10, 2009July 10, 2009

Nibbles: Chilli, Extension, Africa, Genebank, Potatoes, War, Angora

Cool new use for hot peppers: fungicides, for agriculture and human health.
Community Knowledge Workers transformed into “Mobile Banana Disease Monitors”.
Grain “call[s] on African peasants to resist and protect their agriculture, as they have always done”.
Near Corvallis, Ore, USA? Wanna tour the genebank? Wanna write it up for us?
New World Catalogue of Potato Varieties. A pedant asks: “Any Old World varieties in there?”
Germany is said to be demanding entire Rumanian wheat crop, also part of what is left over from 1938 crop. Orwell’s approaching war.
Saving the Angora goat in the US.

July 10, 2009July 8, 2009

The road to Pusa Campus

For years I’ve been seeing it in writing: NBPGR, Pusa Campus, New Delhi. But the picture of it I had in my mind turned out to be quite different to the reality. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute’s Pusa Campus comprises offices, labs and staff housing, yes, but also a huge area of agricultural fields, and right in the middle of New Delhi: a rural oasis in the teeming city (clicking on the map below will take you to Google Maps).

It all started in 1934, when the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute, established in 1905 at Pusa in Bihar, was moved to Delhi following an earthquake. Hence Pusa Campus. The institute of course became the Indian Agricultural Research Institute on independence, just like its parent body, the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research, became the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). But many of the buildings are still used. Such as the library.
Continue reading “The road to Pusa Campus”

July 9, 2009July 9, 2009

Nibbles: New genebank

How do you say “I know! Let’s build our own national genebank” in Nepalese?

July 9, 2009July 9, 2009

Featured: smaller haystacks

Nigel on reducing the size of the haystack:

The case of potatoes is very interesting indeed, but is it typical? There are numerous papers showing that using ecogeography as a predictor of patterns of genetic diversity does not always work, but ecogeography is still widely used because in the absence of clear genetic diversity or characterisation/evaluation data there is practically no alternative.

Practically no alternative, or no practical alternative? There is a difference.