- An economist designs a sustainable agricultural system. Good news: it includes genebanks, if only as an additional thought.
- Peruvian rock art marks transition between hunting/gathering and agriculture.
- A food garden on the White House lawn? Via Slow Food Nation, get your tickets quick. And follow the blog. Thanks, Colinski, and have a good time there.
- “The total economic value of pollination worldwide amounted to €153 billion, which represented 9.5% of the value of the world agricultural production used for human food in 2005.”
- “I want the farmers to get the message that what we are doing, what they will be doing when they embrace natural farming, is revolutionary.”
Re-synthesizing crops
Jeremy recently mused about the possibility of reconstructing the cultivated peanut. As coincidence would have it, a brace of papers just out look at the same thing for a couple of other crops.
A team from the US, Canada and Turkey describe in Euphytica how they reconstructed the modern cultivated dessert strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) by crossing F. virginiana and F. chiloensis. That’s what happened in the 18th century in some gardens in Britanny once the Chilean strawberry, cultivated for a thousand years by the Mapuche, found its way there after its introduction to Europe by the French spy, Captain Amédée-François Frézier, and met the wild Virginia strawberry. That had started replacing the local cultivated F. vesca in European gardens up to a century before. The researchers were able to come up with significantly better varieties of dessert strawberry by being careful to choose a wider range of elite, complementary genotypes as parents.
And over at GRACE, Iranian and Japanese researchers looked for areas where cultivated tetraploid (durum) wheat is found together with the other putative parent of bread wheat, i.e. wild/weedy Aegilops tauschii. They found the two species in close proximity in two districts in the central Alborz Mountains. So, the “association hypothesized in the theory of bread wheat evolution staill exists in the area where bread wheat probably originated.” The paper does not report finding any natural hybrids, but it does suggest that further field studies should be undertaken, presumably to look for evidence of such introgression.
Honey trifecta
There are three stories on honey in the latest NWFP digest. Did you know there are more than 300 distinct types of honey produced in the US? But I bet none tastes like the stuff collected by the Baka Pygmies. Or like the type that Solomon Island farmers are being encouraged to produce more of. I can vouch for this last one, it’s pretty good.
Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club launched
Just in from GBIP.
The GIPB Knowledge Resource Center is launching the Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club, a virtual place that allows communities to meet and critically evaluate plant breeding and related fields’ articles in the scientific literature.
This e-Journal Club is directed to professionals and students interested in discussing relevant plant breeding themes and issues.  Its majors objectives are to help improve skills of understanding and debating current topics of interest to plant breeding and to promote intellectually stimulating and professionally rewarding exchange with colleagues from around the world.
This e-Journal Club will use Fireboard, a forum component fully integrated to the GIPB website, which allows implementation of many e-Journal Club groups simultaneously. Dr. Fred Bliss kindly agreed to serve as the convener of this first GIPB e-Journal Club, which will discuss the article “Quantitative Genetics, Genomics, and the Future of Plant Breeding†by Dr. Bruce Walsh.
In order to participate you just need to follow the instructions in the front page of the GIPB website. Registration is now opened and the e-Journal Club will start on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.
Please, note that discussion in this first e-Journal Club will be held in English, but proposals of conveners willing to start e-Journal Clubs in other languages can be sent to gipb@fao.org.
Nibbles: Qat, Tomato, Climate change squared, Documentation, Food diaspora, Mapping Africa, Gout, Chicken origins, HealthMap, Olive, Crop mixtures
- Catha edulis bad for Yemen economy. Having been waved a gun at by a qat-chewing Somali teenager, I can testify it’s bad for other things as well.
- Amy Goldman on the heirloom tomato.
- Biology Letters special feature on climate change and biodiversity.
- And more on climate change, this time its likely effect on livelihoods.
- All you ever wanted to know about plant genetic resources conservation in Germany.
- “Isn’t it crazy to think that everything we eat or use that comes from plants at one time grew completely wild?” Well, not so much.
- Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment. (Watch out, very large file.)
- Another reason not to drink sugary soft drinks: gout. Coconut water anyone?
- Pre-Columbian Chilean chickens could have come from anywhere, not just Polynesia.
- Mapping diseases.
- A 12th century olive genebank in Morocco.
- Traditional Ethiopian barley/wheat mixtures (hanfets) have some advantages over pure stands.