- “No a la droga, si al caucho y al cacao.”
- Spotting banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) with biochemical tests.
- The tree that owns itself. Take that, lawyers!
- “The old Chinese gardener in ragged blue coat and trousers with a wispy white beard who potters around smoking one of these long pipes with a tiny bowl — and a mongol cap, periodically performing elaborate grafting techniques on the plum tree.”
- Mexican coffee growers protect surrounding forest. Nepal forest community moving in similar direction?
- Mapping the competition between soy and forest in Brazil.
- Weird agrobiodiversity corner: pseudomonad bacteria help maize take up nutrients.
- Using herbicides to help prairie establishment (including sunflower wild relative).
- Stop press: “Agricultural genetics is one of the easier parts of the solution.”
- “…wildcats preferred resting sites in shelter structures near forest edges.”
- Video on Greek yogurt. Jeremy comments: “I’m going back to Crete.”
The Indian mango problem
What’s going on with mangoes in India? It seems I can’t fire up my feed reader these days without some tale of mango woe popping up. If it’s not Noor Jahan being down to its last four trees, it’s the Kesar variety being cut down in Gujarat. And the Mango Mela — an agricultural fair held in Bangalore — only featured 20 varieties last year, after a really bad, low quality harvest. The latest thing is that Malihabad in Uttar Pradesh has gone from 700 varieties to just a few due to market pressures:
“The reason for certain mango varieties facing extinction threat is the fact that mangoes like Dussheri, Chosa, Lucknowi have taken over the market in a big manner. Mango growers get a good price for these varieties. However, mango varieties that are facing extinction are not able to make their presence felt in the market as there are few trees grown of these varieties,” Haji Kalimullah Khan, a veteran mango cultivator said.
It might be the season, I suppose. There does seem to be a spike of interest in mangoes in March-May. But are things really as bad as all that? Or is the press just focusing on the bad news and ignoring the good, as usual? And if things really are bad, is anything being done about it? Perhaps an expert on Indian mangoes will explain it all to us.
Unripe for plucking
Zurayk is a professor of Agriculture at American University Beirut. If Mouzawak is the poet of Lebanese produce, Zurayk is its academic dean. He’s a founding member of Slow Food Beirut, the author of a book on local food culture, and an avid produce blogger. He told me that as far as he knew, “Nobody has studied this aspect of eating.”
“This aspect” being the eating of unripe fruit, which is apparently a common feature of Lebanese gastronomy. Of the various reasons advanced by the professor for this predilection, the one I like best is this:
One of the origins of the taste for unripe fruits may be that poor country kids used to steal fruit from farmers. As the fruit ripened, the farmers were on alert, so the kids had to make their moves as early as possible, long before the fruit was ready to eat.
But in fact this — and indeed the other reasons proffered too — do not seem particularly peculiar to Lebanon. So is scoffing unripe fruits common elsewhere around the world? For example, my wife, from Kenya, likes to munch hard, unripe mangoes, skin and all. And are some varieties preferred for this early plucking over others?
The Human Toll of Climate Change mapped
Science Progress has a great interactive map on the effects of climate change on different aspects of human life, including health and agriculture.
Clicking on the pin takes you to the original source of the information. And you can add your own pins. This is just the kind of model that we could use in developing our platform for an early warning system for genetic erosion.
When did you last see your common ancestor?
Just came across a truly amazing website called TimeTree. You give it the names of two organisms and it goes away and looks at its database of published literature on molecular clock studies and calculates the time when they diverged.
I put in Oryza sativa and Oryza meridionalis and it returned a figure of 2 million years ago (Mya) based on a recent paper. Asian rice and maize diverged about 36.25 Mya. And Homo sapiens and rice last shared a common ancestor 1,397.06 Mya, in case you were wondering. The sheep and goat diverged about 9 Mya.
So much fun one could have… I hope they put in a lot more crop wild relative data, though.
