After USAID, it’s now the turn of CGIAR to push climate smart agriculture without even a mention of the crop diversity that is surely its sine qua non. Oh well.
Nibbles: Seed access, Funding genebanks, Vote for me dammit, Quality AND yield, Floating gardens, Chocography, Wine heritage double, Uzbeki bread
- African Seed Access Index comes out for Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
- New way to fund crop diversity conservation to be unveiled at FFD3 in Addis Ababa next week.
- “When you looked for ‘Ethiopia’ in a dictionary, it would also always mention ‘famine’. Now that time is over.”
- Vote for me!!!! I so want to win this damn Bioversity photo competition.
- Yes, you can have your long-grain rice and yield too!
- Everybody loves floating gardens.
- Mapping chocolate.
- “Why Is there Wine on the UNESCO World Heritage List?” Why the hell not?
- Lost grapes in Shangri-La. UNESCO beckons?
- Flatbreads rule.
Seed libraries take a stand
Seed-sharing initiatives — which allow participants to “borrow” seeds from a library at the beginning of the gardening season and “donate” seeds back to the library after harvest — are cropping up all across the country. They have become a proven way to help build community, support local agriculture, and kickstart the sharing movement.
What’s not to like, right? Well, USDA had some objections, for one, leading to a bit of a crackdown last year.
…library officials received a letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture notifying them that their seed library was in violation of the Seed Act of 2004. The Department of Agriculture sent a top official and attorneys to meet with library representatives. They explained that, while the Seed Act’s main focus is the selling of seeds, the department is also tasked with keeping mislabeled seeds, invasive plant species, cross-pollinated varietals, and poisonous plants out of the state. As part of their discussions, the department further informed the library that all seeds had to be tested for purity and germination rates.
Well, it’s a year on now, and things are looking up.
In both Minnesota and Nebraska, bills that specifically exempt non-commercial seed sharing from commercial seed laws were recently signed into law.
And the Feds are on board, so there won’t be midnight knocks on the door from the Seed Police.
…“the Department of Agriculture itself worked with us to create the language that they were happy with. To that extent, it feels that there’s a really positive message that can be brought from Minnesota, that the leader of this organization, that his state supported it.”
But if you think that’s all very well, but not much comfort to seed enthusiasts in the other 48 States, there’s a petition you can sign. I wonder if this will make it to the Supreme Court, and if so how Scalia will vote.
Genebanks misunderstood again
“Seed banks were set up primarily to preserve the seeds of economically important crops, to keep a living bank of tissue with which we can grow these plants again in the future. The genome project is to preserve the genomic history and content of these plants so we can understand how life works.”
Oh yeah, because places like the Millennium Seed Bank don’t help at all in preserving the genomic content of plants and “understanding how life works.” And of course this has never been thought of before.
Comprehensive repositories of this kind would be “cool to have”, says Henrique Miguel Pereira, head of biodiversity conservation at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig. “But is it really the most important thing?” he asks.
De-balkanizing crop genomics
Genomics has a data problem, according to Nature. Not perhaps as big as YouTube’s, but…
Nevertheless, Desai says, genomics will have to address the fundamental question of how much data it should generate. “The world has a limited capacity for data collection and analysis, and it should be used well. Because of the accessibility of sequencing, the explosive growth of the community has occurred in a largely decentralized fashion, which can’t easily address questions like this,” he says. Other resource-intensive disciplines, such as high-energy physics, are more centralized; they “require coordination and consensus for instrument design, data collection and sampling strategies”, he adds. But genomics data sets are more balkanized, despite the recent interest of cloud-computing companies in centrally storing large amounts of genomics data.
…
Astronomers and high-energy physicists process much of their raw data soon after collection and then discard them, which simplifies later steps such as distribution and analysis. But genomics does not yet have standards for converting raw sequence data into processed data.
Leave aside for a minute that last sentence, which is generating some heat on Twitter…
Calling bullshit on "But genomics does not yet have standards for converting raw sequence data into processed data." http://t.co/g8zAK8bjj4
— Mick W@tson ↙️ (@BioMickWatson) July 8, 2015
…it is certainly worthwhile highlighting the balkanization of genomics datasets. But then, why not mention that in at least one area — crop diversity — there are some useful initiatives underway, like DivSeek. Which Nature knows about.