Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
On the lack of varieties selected to perform well under organic agriculture, David Tribe (aka GMO Pundit) asks:
Why not use the seed industry varieties already on the market? There plenty of money invested there. Why do you need to reinvent the wheel?
He clearly has other things on his mind.
In reference to the organic meta-analysis, Matthew asks:
What about crop genetics?? I read the actual Nature piece and no mention of seed or breeding.
Organic vs Conventional studies are often flawed in that they ignore that most organic farmers are using seed bred for conventional systems … The first axiom of breeding is to breed in area of intended use, and organic environments are quite different than conventional. Research from Washington State University shows evidence that when organic farmers used wheat seed that had been selected in organic systems for multiple generations there is as much as 20% increase in wheat yields, compared to when they plant conventional seed.
I think this is the research referred to.
You’ll have seen bits of the hoohah surrounding the meta-analysis of organic agriculture published in Nature. Having nothing to add, I’m very content to reblog this, from Big Picture Agriculture.
My biggest complaint with these Foley papers in the journal Nature is that they ignore the unsustainable energy inputs for industrial ag, and I’ve said so before. Today, the coverage of this new study is splashed across headlines everywhere, most of the headlines stating that organic production under-performs industrial production. While this is obviously a complex subject, the main point in the conclusion of this study is that the calorie-dense grains have higher yields using industrial production methods. I preferred the way the LAT presented the paper: Organic farming, carefully done, can be efficient. Organic agriculture produces smaller harvests than conventional methods, but the difference can be minimized by employing the right techniques, a study finds. (LATimes) Here is the Nature paper link.
This is going to be all over the serious (and not so serious) blogs and news outlets, because it grabs the imagination better than a punch of burnt old seeds. DNA from four 5000-year old human skeletons in Sweden has revealed two genetically distinct populations. Three of the skeletons were hunter-gatherers. The fourth was a farmer. And the farmer’s DNA matched that of Mediterranean people, such as the people of Cyprus, while the hunter gatherers were typical Northern Europeans, but without any great affinity with any particular people. The two groups lived side by side for a long time, more than a thousand years, according to the researchers, and eventually interbred. The result is that none of today’s Northern Europeans has the same genetic profile as the original hunter-gatherers, although some hunter-gather genes are present in most Northern Europeans.
These results help to shore up the prevailing account of the spread of agriculture: that is was the farmers themselves who spread, rather than merely ideas about how to farm. The great mystery, for now, is did those farmers bring rye (Secale cereale, the classic cereal of Scandinavia) with them, or did it arrive much later. I don’t know nearly enough about the current story on rye domestication, but the centre of diversity and wild relatives seems to be in the Fertile Crescent, along with wheat and barley. There is evidence of domesticated rye from Neolithic Turkish sites, the earliest dated about 10,000 years ago. So plenty of time for it to have reached the southern Mediterranean and then moved up to Scandinavia, but did it? Most of the Central and Northern European rye remains are much more recent, only a couple of thousand years old. I look forward to a more learned account.