- Where do new mushrooms come from? Hint: domestication of wild species has not stopped.
- And resistance to fireblight in apples? Hint: a single specimen of an old variety.
- How about help for flood-stricken Nigerian farmers? Hint: a gene bank!
- Where do people get gender in agriculture all wrong? Hint: women may bring home the bacon, but if that threatens their husband’s status, rationality flies out the door.
- Where, from 10-13 December, can you learn about “Crops from the past and new crops in adressing (sic) the challenges of the XXI century”? Hint: Córdoba, Spain.
- Where did the Dust Bowl go? Hint: it never went away.
- Where to get the straight dope on System of Rice Intensification? Hint: an SRI researcher may not be unbiased.
- Where are government and civil society elaborating a National Plan for Agroecology and Organic Production? Hint: a river runs through it.
All hail another all-encompassing database
NERC, which is the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council has a Knowledge Exchange Programme on Sustainable Food Production, which
aims to enhance the use of science in making UK food production systems more environmentally sustainable. Sustainable food production makes efficient use of natural resources and does not degrade the environmental systems that underpin it.
Great. NERC is summarising scientific research about how to make food production more sustainable. Naturally we went straight there and plugged “biodiversity” into the search engine. Up came the result. Yup, just the one. How to rear bumblebees in captivity. To be fair, the advice is based on 22 trials from 13 countries, and is pretty comprehensive. And bumblebees are important. It’s just that, to be honest, I expected more.
P.S.
While we’re on the subject of all-encompassing databases, SINGER is no longer. Go there, and you’ll see this message:
Bioversity is pleased to inform the users of the SINGER web site, that starting today, it will no longer exist and this page will automatically lead you to the new Plant Genetic Resource Gateway: GENESYS that currently compiles the data from SINGER, EURISCO and GRIN.
“Pleased”? Really?
We’ve been asked “to fix any links to SINGER in any web sites you are managing, preferrably replacing the SINGER logo with the GENESYS logo, and a direct link to GENESYS”. But you know what? Life’s too short. If you should find a link to SINGER that doesn’t work, let us know and we’ll try to do something about it, if there’s anything to be done.
Bread wheat genome rises
It’s a good day for cereal genomes. Nature offers both bread wheat and barley, and they’re both open access. That’s great; you can read them yourself and draw your own conclusions. Nature’s commentary on the matter, however, will set you back $18, which seems fair enough. The crucial points are:
- The wheat genome is huge — three sets of chromosomes derived from three different ancestors — and complex. So this isn’t actually a complete sequence.
- It is, however, a great scaffold on which to build a more detailed sequence, using additional techniques.
- The sequence has already revealed that members of some gene families have been lost since the ancestral hybridisation, while others, notably those involved in specific areas of plant metabolism and growth, have expanded.
- The best wheat yields can exceed 12 tonnes per hectare; the global average is more like 2 t/ha, and that is likely to be undermined by climate change. Will the genome help breeding efforts? Some people clearly hope so.
Barley was a relatively simple challenge, just one set of chromosomes, and smallish ones at that. And barley is already much more tolerant of physical stresses than many other cereals. So rather than looking to the genome for help in breeding better barley (though that is surely on the cards) researchers ask how barley’s genes help it to be so tolerant, and then use the answers to improve other cereals.
Nibbles: Agriculture and climate change and GM and nutrition
- Farmers are “the canaries in the mine when it comes to climate change,” says The Financial Times. Get the whole report as a PDF.
- Bioversity says it has climate change covered with a new Seeds for Needs project. Is there an echo in here?
- Farming First covers climate change in an infographic.
- Avenue of the Baobabs in Madagascar burnt down. Better edit those factsheets.
- Heirloom maize farmers talk sense on GM corn shock …
- … but Punjab doesn’t care. Invites Monsanto “To put agriculture diversification on the fast track”.
- Jessica Fanzo wins the Carasso Prize for her great research on nutrition. Proud to call her a friend.
- There was a roundtable associated with the Carasso Prize. Lawrence Haddad blogs about it.
- Pity that roundtable clashed with Workshop: ‘Adding Value to Local Foods for Food and Nutrition Security: Myth or Strategic Option’ in the Caribbean.
- Will the Caribbean warm to finger millet? Zester Daily just wants to share the gluten-free goodness.
- Bere whisky. No, you read that right. Bere as in barley, not as in beer. But then, barley is in beer. Where’s an etymologist when you need one?
And we’ve got nutrition in spades:
The whole food nexus in under 12 minutes
OK, so it isn’t strictly about agricultural biodiversity, and there are some statements one might cavil at, but you gotta hand it to David McWilliams: everything that ails global food in one groovy animated presentation.
Solutions? Not so much.