Author: Luigi Guarino

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Wheat and climate change

ResearchBlogging.orgA review paper in the latest Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment looks at what climate change will do to wheat, and what can be done about it. ((ORTIZ, R. et al. (2008). Climate change: Can wheat beat the heat?. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. DOI: 10.1016/j.agee.2008.01.019)) The lead author is deputy director general at the International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT), and the picture he paints must be keeping him up at nights.

There are 12 different types of places where wheat is grown around the world — so-called “mega-environments.” They range from “high rainfall, hot” (e.g. in Bangladesh) to “low rainfall, severe cold” (around Ankara in Turkey). Some are better than others. One of the best is mega-environment 1, which amounts to 32 million hectares in northwest Mexico, the Indo-Gangetic Plains and the Nile Valley. It accounts for 15% of global wheat production, and it is in trouble.

When you look at the likely 2050 climate, half of the area of the Indo-Gangetic Plains which is now in mega-environment 1 might well need to be re-classified from pretty ideal low rainfall, irrigated, temperate to heat-stressed, short season. That is, conditions will look more like the Gezira in Sudan or Kano in Nigeria. That will reduce yields, affecting 200 million people.

So wheat breeders will have to develop varieties that can maintain yields under higher temperatures, unless you want farmers to switch to another crop entirely. Which might be the easiest thing in some places, actually, but that’s another story.

You can breed for resistance to an abiotic stress such as heat by growing a wide range of genotypes under that stress and looking for the highest yielding genotypes, of course. But what breeders at CIMMYT are now increasingly doing is trying to identify the different physiological attributes which are associated with high yield under stress conditions — things like leaf chlorophyll content during grain filling, for example. And then stacking them up together in new varieties. That’s had some success in breeding for drought resistance. Let’s hope — for the sake of Indian wheat farmers — that it works for heat too.

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No, she wanted to go

I can’t imagine why the Jamaica Information Service should have decided to tell the world about the work of the Crop Research Unit of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Research and Development Division. And at quite some length to boot. But I’m glad they did. Lots of interesting stuff about agrobiodiversity conservation, seed production and breeding. Now you know where to get your scotch bonnet seeds.

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Bees in the UK

Another post from Danny. Maybe we should be giving him frequent flier miles. Anyway, it’s on a subject we’ve tackled before, but not, I think, from a British perspective.

Having just been interviewed for a job in Limerick, and with one panel member expressing an interest in biodiversity of ants and bees, I thought it might be interesting to post on this subject. It is also pouring with rain and blowing a gale so I have little better to do as I sit around Limerick railway station awaiting the next train to Dublin. Honey bees ‘wiped out in 10 years’, in yesterday’s Observer reports the threat posed to British bees by devastating diseases, especially the real danger that colony collapse disease will be introduced to the country.

It is estimated that bees contribute £165m a year to the economy through the pollination of fruit trees and other crops and about £12m through the sale of British honey. This is certainly an undervaluation when the other benefits of bees are considered. ‘If nothing is done about it, the honey bee population could be wiped out in 10 years,’ the Farming Minister, Lord Rooker, has admitted in the House of Lords. But, despite this importance of bees to the nation’s economy, the government has said it has no cash left to fund a research project to investigate the ‘killer’ diseases. The amount needed? The British Beekeeping Association is asking for a £8m research project that would run for five years. At a conservative estimate this is about 1% of the revenue that bees generate over the same period!

The article is accompanied by a video describing how the world’s largest pollination event in California’s almond orchards is under threat. The video also describes the interesting occupation of honeybee broker.