EJ on Zoos in Trouble:
Another reason that growing seeds in gardens and seed exchanges as well as raising the animals we need on working farms is so important. Once we give away our heritage it is at the mercy of fickle funders.
Alugbati et al.
[A]lugbati, ampalaya, bavok-bayok, himbabao, kulitis, labong, upo, malunggay, pako, saluyot, talinum, talong, amaranths, cucurbits, radish, luffa, wax gourd, snake gourd, squash, jute, basella, kangkong, ivy gourd, basil, lablab, rosella, okra, yardlong bean, winged bean, cucumber, tomato, and vegetable soybean.
Wha’ the? If you recognized those as vegetables, well, no big deal. If you recognized them as Filipino names for vegetables, you get extra points. The list comes from an article at Agriculture Business Week on Growing Indigenous Vegetables: Answer to Rural Malnutrition and Poverty. It’s about a new project from the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Centre (AVRDC) and it goes into considerable detail about the reasons for the project and its achievements to date. If anyone from AVRDC would like to tell about the project elsewhere, we’re listening.
How C4 came to be understood
Yesterday was Ada Lovelace day, when bloggers around the world celebrated women in technology. We weren’t aware of it, and frankly, I’m not sure who we might have chosen. Erna Bennett? Fortunately, though, we can direct you instead to Oliver Morton’s fine post on Constance Hartt. Who she?
Hartt was a laboratory researcher at the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association Experiment Station, and her assiduous work on the biochemistry of sugar cane in the 1930s and 1940s convinced her that, for that plant at least, the primary product of photosynthesis is malate, a four carbon sugar. Later carbon-14 studies showed that she was right — and led to an interesting conundrum. Why did some plants — most plants, indeed, and almost all algae — make a three carbon sugar, phophoglycerate, while sugar cane and, it later became clear, various other grasses made a four-carbon sugar?
Some gene-jockeys seem to think that all that’s needed to double the yield of crop plants is “simply” to give them a C4 photosynthetic pathway. I’m not going to get into that one. But Morton gives a good account of how and why C4 differs from C3, and the part Hartt played in its elucidation.
Nibbles: Conference, Funding, Borlaug, Bananas, Indian genebanks, Cassava cooking, Bees, Beer
- FARA-led Conference on Agricultural Biodiversity in Africa, 2010
- Switzerland will not cut support to genebank in Africa.
- Yesterday’s birthday paean to Norman Borlaug,
- Man worries (inchoately) about banana extinction.
- “Over 20,000 indigenous varieties of Indian rice and other food grains have been conserved under Crop Germplasm Conservation at the gene banks.”
- IITA gets USAID support to come up with better cassava recipes. Luigi comments: “All the money in the world will not be enough.”
- Giving native bees a home.
- Bespoke organic beer in the UK. Sweet!
Not at all scary
“We don’t want to suggest that the sky is falling, but major losses could occur if the right set of conditions converges,” Mundt said. “This is something that we shouldn’t take a chance on. It’s already spread to Iran, and the new research shows that its global spread may be about to pick up speed.”
Scientists have been studying the spread of airborne diseases, like UG99 rust disease of wheat.