- Bill funds Africa soil map.
- Healthy foods. Pace the blogger, I could probably get all of them in Nairobi.
- First Irish farmers came and went.
- Pssst! Wanna start your own Farmers’ Market?
- Tea.
- The African Crop Science Society has a website.
- Coconut: the lazy man’s crop. Thousands of women batter down Sun Star’s doors.
Fungi sorted
As part of a new conservation strategy, the UK is to merge two large fungal collections.
There are already 800,000 specimens of mushrooms, puffball, toadstools and micro-fungi kept in the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew, including the specimens collected by Charles Darwin. Some 400,000 collection from the CABI research institute will be added, including a specimen of Sir Alexander Fleming’s penicillin producing culture, 138 specimens of the potato blight organism and the key reference sample of the Dutch elm disease that changed the face of the English landscape in the 1970s.
I guess that must include both preserved and living material, but I could be wrong. What about doing the same rationalization for plant genetic resources collections? Well, one bit of agrobiodiversity at the time, eh?
Go, dormouse
I do hope the English dormouse population takes off. Because then the Brits could start eating the cute little things again.
Turkey to get yet another genebank?
The news that a genebank will be built in Ankara in 2009, which we nibbled a couple of days ago, is problematic for a number of reasons. But let’s just deal with an error of fact first.
The ministry announced that it will set up Turkey’s first seed bank in Ankara in 2009. The bank, which will reportedly be named Noah’s Bin, will be the fourth largest of its kind in the world.
This will not in fact be Turkey’s first seed bank, as even a Turkish tourism site knows. ((Or did. The site sems to have disappeared.)) The Aegean Agricultural Research Institute (AARI) at Izmir has in fact housed a genebank since 1964, and contributes data to EURISCO, and thence Genesys, to the tune of some 13,000 accessions.
Am I missing something? Is the Izmir genebank going to close, in favour of a larger, newer facility in Ankara? If that is the case, it will not just contain Turkish material.
Some 160,000 wheat types and 27,000 maize types currently registered at the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center (CIMMYT) will also be included in the gene bank. Turkey will be the third country to have such a center.
What is the metric according to which this genebank would be the third in the world? The only thing I can think of is that it would be the third place to house the CIMMYT collection, after CIMMYT itself and Svalbard. But what would be the rationale for that? Why would Turkey want to go to the expense of maintaining a triplicate of “160,000 wheat types and 27,000 maize types” when it could just get the ones it wanted from CIMMYT at any time at the drop of an email?
It is very laudable that the Turkish government is taking the threat of climate change to agriculture so seriously as to contemplate an expense of this magnitude on ex situ conservation, but the article does raise some interesting questions.
Nebamun redux
One — or at least part of one — of the great agrobiodiversity-themed art works of the ancient world is back. Apart from “Fowling in the marshes,” reproduced below, Nebamun’s painted tomb includes representations of a garden pool, wine-making, and food offerings.
Photograph: The British Museum