- Maintaining Food Value of Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.) Using Comparative Genomics. Cultivated cultivated rice assists in the breeding of cultivated wild rice. If you see what I mean.
- Mining the Genus Solanum for Increasing Disease Resistance. The key is distinguishing the alleles from the paralogs.
- Genetic Dissection of Aluminium Tolerance in the Triticeae. And the trifecta from the Genomics of Plant Genetic Resources book. Rye has most, barley least, and we know how they do it.
- Dual Threats of Imperiled Native Agroecosystems and Climate Change to World Food Security: Genomic Perspectives. Genebanks are necessary but not sufficient.
- Identification of new sources of resistance to powdery mildew in oat. In the wild species, natch.
- Optimum ratios of zeolite seed Drying Beads® to dry rice seeds for genebank storage. 1:1 by weight.
- The Biodiversity Forecasting Toolkit: Answering the ‘how much’, ‘what’, and ‘where’ of planning for biodiversity persistence. Yeah, but will it work with agricultural biodiversity?
- How do various maize crop models vary in their responses to climate change factors? Enough to make using an ensemble best, not enough to doubt that temperature will be the main factor affecting yields by the end of the century.
- Dietary quality and tree cover in Africa. More trees, more dietary diversity, more fruit & veg consumption, though up to a point.
- The importance of local forest benefits: Economic valuation of Non-Timber Forest Products in the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania. $42 million a year, spread over 2000 households.
- Fortification: new findings and implications. It’s worked in the US for some nutrients, but not for others, and in some case we don’t understand how and why. We know in other cases it is unlikely to work. Nutritionists have to work together with plant breeders. And, we would add, the agricultural sector in general.
The apple of Poland’s eye
You may have noticed a certain slackness in our blogging last week. That’s because we were both travelling for work, Jeremy holed up at an undisclosed location with lots of copy and a red pen, myself in Warsaw, trying to drum up support for genebanks. It was my first time in Poland, and much too short a visit, but I learned a lot. Like that Poland is a huge apple exporter. It also, and perhaps not coincidentally, has a lot of apple diversity, and Poles are very proud of it. Even a small corner grocery shop in Warsaw will have half a dozen and more distinct varieties on display.
That, I was told, is at least partly due to the tireless efforts of the famous apple breeder Prof. Szczepan Pieniążek, founder and long-time head of the Research Institute of Pomology in Skierniewice. The apple genebank there has maybe a thousand accessions still. Prof. Pieniążek has obviously left quite a legacy, despite being, if I understand the Google Translate rendition of his Polish Wikipedia entry, a proponent of quasi-Lamarckian theories, after the fashion of the equally famous Russian breeder Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin. I guess, in breeding, practice is much more important than theory.
Let Buck Marshall feed you
Whatever you think about Big Ag, I’m willing to bet you’ll agree that the new comedy series Farmed and Dangerous is pretty funny. Very clever of Chipotle Mexican Grill, a chain of holier-than-thou but hip Mexican-themed restaurants, to go the satire route to advertise their agroecology and locavore credentials. There’s even the now admittedly de rigueur parody Twitter account. When can we expect McDonalds to follow suit? Or Greenpeace, for that matter.
Did you know that only 50% of animals are used for meat? The rest are for soaps, candles, and leather… sounds like a Friday night to me!
— Buck Marshall (@BuckMarshall) February 7, 2014
Nibbles: Decolonization edition
- Decolonize your diet.
- Decolonize your grazing regime.
- Decolonize your plant threat status assessment.
Brainfood: Cucumber diversity, Micronutrients in Africa, Natural enemies, Ag expansion, Food security & trade, Chinese forages, Frafra potato, Rayada rice, Persea agroforestry, European oats, Agrobiodiversity & health
- A genomic variation map provides insights into the genetic basis of cucumber domestication and diversity. Four geographic groups, bottleneck not too bad. Opportunity for breeding for better nutritional value. But I suspect that’s a low bar.
- Dietary mineral supplies in Africa. Zn seems to be the lowest hanging fruit, as it were. I wonder if above’s super-cucumbers would help.
- Mechanisms for flowering plants to benefit arthropod natural enemies of insect pests: Prospects for enhanced use in agriculture. If you chose the right plants to plant, you can boost biological control of insect pests on farms.
- Agricultural expansion and its impacts on tropical nature. Roads will lead to increased conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Sustainable intensification is the answer.
- From Food Insufficiency towards Trade Dependency: A Historical Analysis of Global Food Availability. If most of us have more food now, it’s because of trade.
- Technical challenges in evaluating southern China’s forage germplasm resources. Nothing they can’t handle, clearly.
- Sustaining Frafra potato (Solenostemon rotundifolius Poir.) in the food chain; current opportunities in Ghana. Better varieties and processing. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, in every single paper on neglected crops.
- Rayada specialty: the forgotten resource of elite features of rice. It’s a weird variant of deepwater rice from Bangladesh with possible enhanced stress tolerance due to longer root system.
- Persea schiedeana: A High Oil “Cinderella Species” Fruit with Potential for Tropical Agroforestry Systems. Superior genotypes of this neglected avocado relative identified in fairs in Mexican region, and targeted for vegetative propagation and participatory breeding.
- Quality characteristics of European avena genetic resources collections. The modern varieties are better, but that doesn’t mean the old ones are useless.
- Nutrient Intake, Morbidity and Nutritional Status of Preschool Children are Influenced by Agricultural and Dietary Diversity in Western Kenya. Low food variety is associated with stunting. Kinda sorta.