The wild relative might offer some additional options to rooibos tea farmers in South Africa as climate change hits.
Pacific foods data tables
Hyperactive nutritionist and dear friend Lois Englberger in Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia tells me that the Community Food Data Tables of their Pohnpei case study have now been posted on the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) website. Pohnpei was one of the twelve case studies in the global health and indigenous foods project led by CINE’s Prof. Harriet Kuhnlein. There’s background information and the main findings of the Pohnpei study based in Mand, a list of the research team members, as well as photos of Karat (banana), Meikole (seeded breadfruit variety), Simihden (well-liked giant swamp taro variety), pandanus and fish liver. Yummie.
Biofuels in the UK
Sunflower in the UK? Yep, and then some!
European corn borer not so boring
Jeremy had a post recently on how to keep track of emerging pests and diseases. Certainly services like ProMED-mail and HealthMap are incredibly valuable. But perhaps even better would be a way to predict what a disease might do before it actually does it, for example as a result of climate change. That’s what some Czech researchers have done for the European corn borer, a pest of maize. ((There’s also an assessment of the risk of spread to new areas in a recent study of the root-parasite Orobanche crenata, but that paper did not specifically consider climate change in any detail.)) They modelled its life cycle on the basis of daily weather data, both current, to see if the model fit reality, and possible future, to predict what the pest might do under different climate change scenarios. The result was that the corn borer will cover the entire agricultural area of the country by 2040-2075, by which time “maize is expected to partly replace traditional cereals (e.g. winter wheat, rye, etc.).” That’s a frightening prospect. Better start planning – and breeding – for it now. ((A recent paper on wheat spot blotch in the East Gangetic Plains of India, Bangladesh and Nepal describes how breeding has made good resistant varieties available, but adds that climate change is tilting the playing field in favour of the disease, which means that breeders can’t afford to rest on their laurels.))
Earthworms, nematodes, bananas
There’s an interesting paper in the latest Pedologia. Researchers grew Cavendish bananas in all combinations of with and without an endoparasitic nematode, and with and without an earthworm. They found that the banana plants did better when there were earthworms around, which slightly alleviated the root damage done by the nematodes and made more nutrients bioavailable. This is a great illustration of the importance of having an understanding of agricultural biodiversity as a whole, in the sense of all the different organisms — including crops, pests, symbionts, whatever — that interact in a farming landscape, affecting each other’s performance. These kinds of interactions are what organic agriculture aims to maintain, and why silver bullets rarely work.