Pollen find pushes back date of safflower move to Japan.
Rice art
All good things come to an end. But not usually this well.
Intensifying rice
WWF has a news release today announcing the publication of a study on the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a set of practices initially developed in Madagascar in the 1980s. ((If you’re wondering why WWF is publishing a report on agriculture: “WWF is focusing on sustainable agriculture efforts for cotton, sugar and rice, some of the most consuming crops for which alternative techniques can result in a strong yield and water savings.”))
The system is based on eight principles which are different to conventional rice cultivation. They include developing nutrient-rich and un-flooded nurseries instead of flooded ones; ensuring wider spacing between rice seedlings; preferring composts or manure to synthetic fertilizers; and managing water carefully to avoid that the plants’ roots are not saturated.
The WWF study says SRI is more water-efficient and productive: in India, yields have apparently risen by 30%, while water use has decreased by 40%. No word on its effects on local agrobiodiversity. Yet. But methane emissions are supposed to go down. Nevertheless, there has been some criticism of SRI in the past.
Linking archaeology and agrobiodiversity
It was probably a silly thing to say. A couple of days ago I briefly mentioned the models that researchers have built, based on present-day genetic data on Europeans, to understand the rate and pattern of human movement into the continent during the Neolithic. And I made the throw-away comment that I wasn’t aware of similar models for crops. I sort of instantly regretted it, and last night did some googling.
At first I thought perhaps I was right after all. I found a recent (2006) paper whose abstract says:
Thus far, no attempts have been made to track the movement of the founder genetic stocks of the first crop plants from their core area based on the genetic structure of living plants.
Further on, though, the authors say they’ve done just that for wheat. And I also found reference to a “Domestication of Europe” project which sought
to determine the extent to which phylogeographical analysis of modern landraces of barley and wheat, combined with examination of ancient DNA in preserved specimens, can reveal genetic information pertaining to the spread and establishment of cereal cultivation from its points of origin in Southwest Asia into and through Europe.
I think the project must have run from 2003-2006. The Glyn Daniel Laboratory for Archaeogenetics at Cambridge was one of the labs involved, and some of the work, and other related research projects, is described on its website.
So there are people out there trying to link up the archaeology and human genetics of agricultural spread in Europe with the genetics of crops and livestock. Is it too early for a Grand Synthesis?
Vitis genome
Uncommon Ground ably unpacks Nature paper on grapevine genome.