- Modern Taurine Cattle descended from small number of Near-Eastern founders. Only 80 founding females, so it was difficult.
- Implementing an Integrated Pest Management Program for Coffee Berry Borer in a Specialty Coffee Plantation in Colombia. It wasn’t easy, and it took time, but it worked; less pesticides, more predators, higher quality beans.
Late blight is forever
Dave Allan, writing in The Herald, a Scottish paper, almost a month ago, sang the praises of some very blight-resistant potatoes called the Sarpo group. I picked up the story because these varieties were first bred 40 years ago in Hungary by crossing local Soviet varieties with wild relatives collected by Nikolay Vavilov in South America. I stuck it on the back boiler, meaning to write something up for St Patrick’s day last Saturday. ((Couldn’t manage that; Monday is probably better anyway.))
Meanwhile, there’s been a bit of a todo lately over field tests of GM potatoes in Ireland and England. According to The Sainsbury Laboratory’s FAQ, the potatoes have been engineered to increase their resistance to late blight, using genes from wild potato species. I think the same is true of the Irish trials, which is part of Amiga, an EU research project. ((Assessing and Monitoring the Impacts of Genetically modified plants (GMPs) on Agro-ecosystems, which proves, once again, that the secret to EU funding is a good acronym.))
There’ve been all sorts of responses to this news, much of it utterly predictable. People thought it “ironic” that Ireland should question the need for blight-resistant potatoes, presumably in view of the famine of the 1840s. Others questioned the need for engineering blight resistance, given that there are some extremely resistant varieties.
But few people have questioned the basic premise: that engineered blight resistance will be more durable than that achieved by conventional breeding. I’m not sure there’s evidence for this either way. In any case, I wouldn’t expect it, a priori.
The point is quite simple: overcoming resistance is what pests and diseases do. They multiply like mad, and every new individual is a new lottery ticket. Sure, the odds of a jackpot are slim. But in every case I know of, the question is not if but when.
That was my response when NPR reported last week that, according to Monsanto scientists, “considering how hard it had been to create those crops, ‘the thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become tolerant’ to Roundup”. Regardless of how easy a ride reporter Dan Charles gave Monsanto, this is just daft. Natural selection has the numbers and the time to overcome anything mere researchers can come up with.
Potatoes are susceptible to late blight, and get sprayed a lot. A new variant of the blight pathogen, known as ‘superblight’ or Blue 13, destroys even the most resistant of previously resistant varieties but not Sarpo varieties. Sarpo Mira has five different resistance genes; is that enough to protect it forever from anything late blight can throw at it? No.
The Sainsbury Lab says the main reason to engineer blight resistance is because breeding is difficult; easier to insert the genes into an already desirable variety. The Savari Research Trust says Sarpo varieties are very tasty. Both laboratories, and everyone else, regardless of whether they engineer blight resistance or select for it, will have to stay in the game for as long as blight is around. Forever.
Finally, shifting back to Ireland and the famine; just how many engineered varieties (if any) are going to be deployed? Leaving aside the historical, economic and colonialist explanations for the devastation wrought by late blight in 1845, the proximate cause was the prevalence of a single potato variety, Lumpers, that was susceptible.
The danger of too little diversity remains, regardless of the crop, regardless of the source of resistance.
Nibbles: African Funding
- Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda will invest $1.2 million each over the next three years to revive the Institute of Agricultural and Zootechnical Research. Local solutions to global problems.
A diversity of nibbles
Got held up with sickness and overwork, so rather than nibbling, which takes work, ((There are many sources – Pascal, Johnson – for the canonical “Sorry to write such a long letter; I didn’t have time to do a short one.”)) how about a kinda narrative thang?
Starting off with a piece from Agriculture for Impact asking does planting trees compete with planting food?. “It depends,” natch. Richer farmers tend to do well in the particular scheme, which was based on payments for carbon sequestration. The one comment on the post – Planting trees is more profitable than planting food crops – puts in a nutshell the difficulties of improving local food security. Can you buy as much nutrition as you could grow on the same land? Is sequestering carbon considered in the USDA’s new Economic Research Report Rural Wealth Creation: Concepts, Strategies, and Measures? I’ve no idea. Also, on prices and wealth, Marcelino Fuentes calls the do-gooders for their volte-face on high food prices. Surely they’re good for poor farmers? Not any more. and how I remember the squirming when this very topic came up at the FAO in 2008.
In the wake of The Economist’s encomium to Svalbard, the Western Farm Press links that fine safety backup seed bank to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, calling it “the oldest global seed bank”. Pavlovsk is still under threat, which Svalbard presumably is not, so point taken. But c’mon, people, it is not a seed bank.
And speaking of seeds, Garden Organic in the UK has a new guide to exotica, serving the needs of communities new to the English Midlands who want to grow the stuff they’ve always eaten. I’d have thought they already knew how, but maybe the real point is to harvest that knowledge.
All those communities moving around the place have been known to muddy the linguistic waters around the things they eat; your rocket is my arugula, and neither of us knows what rughetta might be. There’s long been an on-again off-again project at Melbourne University, to compile a multilingual, multi script plant name database, which is useful if you have specific questions. Now comes something that might be altogether more provocative of interesting work: on open data standard for food. I’m not geeky enough to know exactly how it will be useful – for example in citizen science, or global surveys – but I am geeky enough to believe that it will indeed be useful.
Nibbles: Communications, Economics, Nutrition, Conservation
- What words should we use? “[B]est management practices” or “more casual words like local, family-owned and farmer”.
- Words like “farming”. How to make a living “farming” without leaving your armchair. Via.
- Hungry work, that. If only I had a slice of acorn-finished pork to finish.
- Someone else who would like that: where in the world is Luigi Guarino? Wherever “it is imperative that genetic diversity is maintained for posterity.”