Apologies for our rather spare look. We’ve been having a lot of trouble with the site over the past few weeks, mostly being very slow to respond. I’ve tried everything, but I’m really rather out of my depth. In an effort to get to the bottom of the problem we’re going right back to basics and removing all the bells and whistles. If that helps, maybe we’ll add some of them back in, slowly. If there are any you particularly miss, shout.
Nibbles: Haiti, India, Maize, Research
- Monsanto’s seeds in Haiti. “Let the farmers decide,” says Anastasia
- Indian stamps celebrate biodiversity. No pictures, so we can’t comment.
- Is maize becoming more tolerant to heat and drought? Maybe not.
- Olivier de Schutter says investment in agriculture is destroying the world’s peasantry. Responsibly.
Pest increases potato crop yields
Here’s a turn-up for the books. Potato plants in which a tuber is infested by the larva of the Gautemalan Potato Moth Tecia solanivora — “considered one of the most economically important potato pests in Latin America” — produce 2.5 times more marketable potatoes than uninfected plants. Something in the caterpillar’s saliva spreads through the plant and promotes tuber growth, giving a greater yield even when up to one in five of the tubers are infected.
Did indigenous Colombian potato farmers know of this? I couldn’t discover why the researchers had decided to investigate. In any case, the Guatemalan Potato Moth is clearly no pest. Researchers are now looking at “herbivore-derived chemical clues” and “induced compensatory plant responses to herbivory” as new ways to boost production.
Sweet potato fries brains?
It is actually hard to know whether Tom Barnett’s tongue was in his cheek when he gave a recent piece this headline: The sweet potato silver-bullet?. In fact, in light of his article and its source, the headline makes no sense at all, except that it did persuade me to sit up and take notice.
The thrust of Tom’s piece is a report in the Wall Street Journal about industrial food giant ConAgra trying to create a sweet potato ideal for frying. 1 The WSJ’s botany is not all that sparkling, referring to the sweet potato as the “step-brother” of the “ordinary” potato. That suggests to me that they share one recent parent. And how about this:
Sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes, but the roots of a plant.
But I digress. The WSJ’s beat is business, not botany, and it reports in wonderful detail on ConAgra’s goal, to create the raw material suitable for an industrial business process: uniform shape, size, colour and sweetness.
[T]hree years ago, ConAgra started working with scientists at the Louisiana State University AgCenter and elsewhere to change some characteristics of sweet potatoes.
“We’re wanting to deliver to [ConAgra’s] factory something that looks like a brick,” says AgCenter researcher Don LaBonte as he brandishes a sweet potato shaped more like a croissant. “We don’t want them with that pretty shape like you get in the grocery store.”
Read on, for an insight into how the food industry views its raw materials and its final products. There are, of course, other approaches. A chum of Luigi’s reports that in Taiwan in the 1980s “SP fries were the standard in local fast food. It was changed to potato fries when the giant international chains entered.” The same chum is working on sweet potato leaves as a vegetable green, not an entirely new idea. Well, they’re a huge component of livestock feed; how nice to reverse the normal pattern of animals eating our food. And apparently sweet potato leaves might do well in space.
One of the commenters at Tom’s blog asks why people don’t just “eat a baked sweet potato, all funky shaped”. He clearly doesn’t understand the business of food production.
And frankly, neither do I.
Nibbles: Wheat, Mississippi, Blogs, Greenwash, Livestock
- CIMMYT live blogs the wheat meet in St Pete. Riiiiiiight.
- Got the no veg blues? More ag on the airwaves. h/t Agricultural Law
- Guardian collects science blogs, almost no botany. h/t Anastasia.
- Coke-fuelled excitement at Green Week.
- Lights! Camera! ILRI! Films on livestock goods and bads.