Nibbles: Human migrations, Fungi, Madagascar, Green Revolution
- “Nilotic-language speakers … first brought herds of animals to southern Africa before the Bantu migration” about 2000 years ago.
- British truffles go berserk. And more.
- An interview with the guy who’s been mapping hundreds of Malagasy species.
- Not sure if I already drew your attention to the New Agriculturist’s Focus feature on A Green Revolution for Africa.
Paean to singular agricultures
A puff piece in EurekAlert alerted me to what looks to be a very interesting book about the wonderful world of traditional agriculture:
These forms of agriculture are often highly idiosyncratic and take up only a tiny portion of the Earth’s total cultivated surface. Yet they stand out owing to their ability to adapt to a constantly changing natural environment and to the diversity of farming practices they adopt.
Problem is, no details on the book are given: no title, no authors. Fortunately, this led me to the original IRD release, in French. Which led me to the book itself, though again details on the book are at a premium, I must say.
Nibbles: Economics, Agricultural origins, Slow Food, Pollinators, India
- 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.