Two stories of collaborative crop improvement — past, present and future — and the genebanks that underpin it to end the week with.
From an IRRI press release out today on IRRI’s collaboration with the Philippines:
Filipino farmers have adopted more than 75 IRRI-bred high-yielding rice varieties since 1960, have greatly improved their fertilizer and pest management strategies, and are implementing water-saving technologies.
It is telling that a particular point is made of the Filipino material in the IRRI genebank.
…in the International Rice Genebank housed at IRRI, 4,670 rice samples from the Philippines are conserved, including 4,070 traditional varieties, 485 modern varieties, and 115 wild relatives — all are available to share with Filipino farmers and scientists.
And from USDA’s Agricultural Research magazine, Feb. 2010 edition:
Of 1,768 heirloom wheats submitted since 2005, only 78 (or 4.4 percent) showed resistance to Ug99 at the Njoro site. Still, the prescreening led to identification of more Ug99-resistant wheat accessions than would’ve been achieved from sending randomly selected accessions for testing, says Bonman. This is evidenced by the fact that 7 percent of wheat lines resistant to U.S. races showed rust resistance in Kenya, yet only 1 percent of randomly selected accessions did.
I’ll be travelling for the next couple of weeks and blogging may be sparse.