- All of the presentations from the World Congress on Agroforestry.
- Scuba rice in 13 slides.
- You got off easy on that last one. Here’s 55 slides on fish biodiversity and the food supply.
- Not much fish in the food supply of early farmers in Britain.
- New IFPRI book highlights technologies to beat hunger. Includes plant breeding. But no fish?
- Kenyan agroforestry organization gets C credits. Details sketchy though.
- The Bible got it wrong on camels. And that’s all I’m saying about that.
- Cuneiform tablets are so beautiful. Especially when they depict agricultural biodiversity. Via.
Exploring Polish processed foods
One of the fun things about visiting a new country is of course the food. There’s the formal cuisine, and the street food. 1 And the traditional markets with their food kiosks, and corner shops. But I also like to check out the supermarkets, both the big chains, and the smaller places. 2 I didn’t have much free time in Warsaw last week, just enough for a couple of visits to smallish supermarkets. But I can report that Poles seem to have an inordinate fondness for the juice of minor berries.
Oh, and for unusual vegetable soups.
Nibbles: Texan blackeyed peas, Pest distributions, Better eucalypts, City gardens, Allopolyploidy, Chilean agroforestry, Sahel agroforestry
- Texas A&M builds better
mousetrapcowpea. - Huge survey of the distribution of crop pests.
- Spanish tree breeders assisting in the despoliation of the Ethiopian plateau. Totally unfair, I know, there’s plenty of reasons why improving eucalyptus production in Ethiopia is a good idea. But I just wish similar effort had gone into local trees.
- They increased the biodiversity of city gardens and nobody noticed. Wonder if it would have been the same in allotments. Meanwhile, however…
- It takes 4-5 million years for allopolyploids to become different enough for their hybrids to be sterile.
- Save the Espinal!
- More water wouldn’t help sorghum in the Sahel. Yes, you guessed it, the World Congress on Agroforestry is still going on.
Data, data everywhere… Wheat edition
Speaking of wheat, I know we Nibbled yesterday the arrival of yet another germplasm database, the Seeds of Discovery (SeeD) Wheat Catalog (there’s also a maize one), but I couldn’t resist another bite at that cherry. If only because some of the material is on its way to Svalbard right now. The Seeds of Discovery catalogues are still works in progress, but already really important achievements:
At this point, the database contains an exemplary dataset of genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) profiles of selected landraces, synthetic bread wheats and modern cultivars; the passport data of Mexican landraces; and the Principal Coordinates (PCO) describing the genetic structure of a broad set of more than 10,000 Mexican and Iranian landraces, modern varieties and synthetic bread wheats.
My plea for the developers, as they work on the portal further, is that they do not lose sight of the fact that what they’re dealing with here is accessions in a genebank. I can see no way for a peruser of the Catalogue, intrigued by the genotype of an accession, to actually ask for seed. You know, like the stuff that’s going up to Svalbard. What you’d currently have to do is cut the accession number and paste it into the genebank’s documentation system or Genesys. I’ve done it, and it works, but it’s not particularly elegant. Or am I missing something? Maybe Seeds of Discovery and the CIMMYT genebank, who I know work very closely together, could expand a little on how they see their two databases linking up in the future.
Another slice of tumminia bread
For those readers who were intrigued by Jacob’s somewhat enigmatic comment on tumminia wheat, but put off by having to download a huge PDF of an 1818 edition of the Memorias de Agricoltura y Artes, in Spanish, here’s the money quote:
And here’s a quick translation:
The May wheat that the Belgians have recently obtained from an Egyptian wheat can be considered, based on its agronomy, its quality and its products, to be the same as the tremesino wheat of the ancient Greek authors; the three month wheat of Pliny and Columella; the setanio of Dioscorides and Galen; the trimenia and dimenia of Theophrastus. It is probably the trimenia of the province of Salerno, of Lucana and Calabria; the same as the tuminia of Sicily; the mazzatico wheat of the Kingdom of Naples; the mazzuolo wheat of the Tuscans.
People have been exchanging crop diversity, and been interdependent on each other for it, for a long time, I guess.
Jeremy has more on the etymology of tumminia in another comment.