- Wow, that’s one huge pumpkin!
- Genomic whiz-bangery, which was apparently not involved in producing the above pumpkin, continues to hold much promise for wheat yields. And your jetpack is in the mail. I would ban the use of the word promise in this type of article. But since I can’t do that, I promise not to link to them ever again.
- Jess gets to grips with Timorese nutrition. Get those local landraces back from any genebank that has them, Jess. And don’t forget to collect any remaining ones.
- Then you could do some cool Seeds-for-Needs-type stuff.
- And maybe some local breeding too?
- And don’t forget local fruit trees!
- Because you know investing in nutrition is really cost-effective.
- Though of course it’s not just about the money.
- Especially when it comes to coffee.
- Or cacao for that matter.
- They shoot hogs, don’t they? Maybe even in East Timor. Goats, alas, have problems of their own.
- And as for dogs, we forced them to digest starch. What even the dingo? I bet there are dingo-like dogs in East Timor.
It’s easy to get down on genomics when so much has been promised while so little has happened – but a mapped genome does allow marker assisted breeding. Just need to figure out which markers correlate with higher yields. I am optimistic!
But you don’t need a sequenced genome for marker assisted breeding, surely. Anyway, I didn’t mean to complain so much about the genomics as about the unimaginative way of reporting on it. Say what has been achieved, rather than what might.
Local fruit trees: Why bother with the hassle and possible toxins of domesticating indigenous fruit trees when there are hundreds of domesticates from other continents. For example Africa – where ICRAF is trying hard – can get hundreds of species from East Asia and tropical America. This is the tyranny of `local’ and `indigenous’ and, worse, `locally adapted’: far better introduce, free of co-evolved pests and diseases and with a few thousand years of farmer selection for quality control.
Certainly we should not settle on an ideology around ‘indigenous’ or ‘exotic’ – ICRAF wouldn’t (but both) – and everything is indigenous somewhere… But indigenous fruit tree species are often under-researched and large gains can sometimes be made… One of the sometimes little-considered issues with exotic fruits is access to germplasm on an intercontinental level – not always easy