A heart-warming story from BBC News: in the village of Dharhara in India, parents plant 10 or more fruit trees when a baby girl is born. The trees mature slightly faster than the girls, and by the time a girl is nubile the profits from the sale of fruit is more than enough to pay the bride price commonly required by the groom’s family. Bihar has the highest death rate among families who cannot pay a bride price. But not in Dharhara.
Nibbles: Grind, School Gardens
- Rachel Laudan teaser for her talk on grain and cities at Postopolis 10. Can’t wait for the whole thing.
- School gardens in Copenhagen. Every town should have some.
Serious amateur breeding
Plant breeding need not be the high-tech, white-coated affair many people think it is. After all, for most of the history of agriculture, it wasn’t. Serious amateurs, in the true sense of the word, can make huge contributions.
We’ve written before about Rebsie Fairholm‘s pea breeding. Two others doing fine work are Rhizowen and Tom Wagner, and there are new accounts of both of their endeavours. Rhizowen modestly claims to have “the largest collection of oca germplasm in the whole county of Cornwall” as he brings us up to date with his efforts to breed a better Andean tuber. Tom Wagner’s speciality is the Solanaceae; we have him to thank for Green Zebra tomato, and many others. A current project is to breed a potato more resistant to late blight disease. The high-tech, white-coated gene jockeys are attempting the same trick, and Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots compares and contrasts the two approaches. While I don’t agree with everything he says, I do agree that a coordinated and widespread effort by amateur growers to assess Tom Wagner’s crosses is a fine idea. Patrick says that the UK trials of GM blight-resistant potatoes have a security fence that cost GBP20,000 and a 24 hour security guard. “If we had the money invested in the UK security fence alone, we could dramatically expand our trials not to mention offset some of our expenses,” he points out.
Where are the participatory plant breeding wallahs when you need them?
Nibbles: Sunberry, CGIAR, Climate change, Ecosystem services, Sorghum beer, Turkeys, Ireland
- Sunberry. Taste-free! Toxin-loaded?
- CGIAR needs to do more “crop genetic improvement” for greater impact. Yeah, right.
- Heavy hitters to brief US Congress on Climate Change and Agriculture, June 16.
- Management more important than agricultural biodiversity in delivering ecosystem services? Say it isn’t so!
- Sorghum beer a big hit with England soccer fans.
- Turkeys domesticated for their feathers? This I gotta see.
- (Irish) public understanding of biodiversity.
IPBES — IPCC for biodiversity — agreed
I suppose this is a big deal. After a couple of years of negotiations, countries agreed in Korea yesterday to go ahead with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services — IPBES. You can read about it at Nature and the Guardian. Neither says anything about agriculture or wild relatives, although Professor Bob Watson, vice-chair of IPBES, says it will focus on “poverty alleviation, human well-being and sustainable development”. So far, so unsurprising. According to Nature, one of the problems for countries to agree to create IPBES was its scope, and it has been limited to “new topics” in biodiversity and ecosystem science.
That means we probably can’t look forward to an authoritative estimate of the extent of genetic erosion. Darn.