- Phenomics is the new genomics.
- No, wait. Peanuts to get a genome. A rice relative’s got one already.
- All the Cucurbitaceae of India, in one handy checklist.
- The paradox of argan oil.
- Couple of things on the history of food. And one on the ethics of food.
- Big push for drought-resistant sorghum. Wait, I thought it was drought-resistant already.
- Ft Collins gets yet another media write-up.
- Telegraph says Queen gets rare pear. Letter writer to Times begs to differ on the whole rarity thing. It sounds like, damn thing being (mostly) behind a paywall.
- If you’re on Facebook, why not like this photo of the CIMMYT maize genebank?
- Canada to help Malawi diversify. Into cowpeas.
- Big report on big nutrition meeting. Big deal?
Brainfood: Flower microbiome, Salt screening, Sustainble fisheries, Pollinator interactions, Wild pollinators, Forest loss, Landraces, Fisheries collapse, Quinoa diversity, Potted plants, Wheat diversity, Goat diversity, Genomics of domestication
- Unexpected Diversity during Community Succession in the Apple Flower Microbiome. Could be important in disease management.
- Plant Tissue Culture: A Useful Measure for the Screening of Salt Tolerance in Plants. But lots of different ways to do it.
- Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Some. But probably not enough. Here’s the industry spin. And the NY Times does a number on it.
- Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-Occurrence and Function. Extinctions and phenological shifts have occurred, but the system has shown resilience. It is unlikely, however, to continue to do so.
- Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance. Don’t you sometimes wish titles left something to the imagination? NPR breaks it down for ya, but doesn’t add much to the title.
- Continental estimates of forest cover and forest cover changes in the dry ecosystems of Africa between 1990 and 2000. About 20 Mha of forest loss, not 34 Mha. Still too much, though. But how did FAO get it so wrong?
- Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. Local varieties can scale out. And should be used in breeding.
- Genetic and life-history changes associated with fisheries-induced population collapse. Phenotypic changes during Eurasian perch Baltic Sea fisheries collapse could be evolution, but when you look at the genetics it looks more like immigration of unadapted interlopers. Which might be bad for recovery.
- Variable activation of immune response by quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) prolamins in celiac disease. Quinoa may be gluten-free, but it can still give you grief, and some varieties are far worse than others.
- Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants. It’s artificial selection, Jim, but not as we know it.
- Wheat Cultivar Performance and Stability between No-Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Tested 21 cultivars for performance under late-planted no-till system and — guess what? — performance varied.
- Genetic diversity and structure in Asian native goat analyzed by newly developed SNP markers. They originated in W Asia, and then admixtured (admixed?) in the E to different extents. Yeah, I thought we knew that already too, but scientists gotta make a living.
- A Bountiful Harvest: Genomic Insights into Crop Domestication Phenotypes. The mutations that underpinned domestication came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Like this one in maize, for example.
Nibbles: Hunger meet, Collecting info, Mapping species, Fair trade, Irish Famine, Rice changes, Food podcast, Cow genomics
- Hidden hunger experts come out into the open.
- Bioversity germplasm collecting reports go online.
- Where the threatened species are.
- Fair trade, shmare trade.
- The Lumper makes a comeback.
- Rice innovation in Bangladesh, abandonment in Nepal.
- Cherfas smears himself in bog butter for new podcast.
- Genomics and the livestock industry.
Brainfood: Diverse grasslands, More diverse grasslands, Latitudinal meta-gradients, Acacia barcoding, Cryoconserving recalcitrant seeds, Tree tomato, Modeling parasites, Landscape complexity & services, Genomics & breeding
Transgressive overyielding of soil microbial biomass in a grassland plant diversity gradient. Dead link. More microbial biomass in mixtures of plants than in each of the monocultures. Which I guess is a good thing?- Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3-year continental-scale field experiment. That transgression goes for the yield of the plants too. The mixtures were also more resistant to weed invasion.
- Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species’ responses to temperature. Meta-analysis shows that many life history traits vary with latitude, but not necessarily with temperature.
- DNA barcoding for conservation, seed banking and ecological restoration of Acacia in the Midwest of Western Australia. Not quite there yet, is it?
- Preservation of Recalcitrant Seeds. We have the technology. Recalcitrance is not an excuse. And may not be as common as advertised anyway.
- Genetic diversity and relationships in accessions from different cultivar groups and origins in the tree tomato (Solanum betaceum Cav.). It is variable. It originated in Ecuador. Even the press release struggles to say much more than that. They should have asked the mother-in-law.
- Metabolic approaches to understanding climate change impacts on seasonal host-macroparasite dynamics. Fortunately, and yet suspiciously, it is easy to estimate the model parameters even when you don’t have much data.
- Flow and stability of natural pest control services depend on complexity and crop rotation at the landscape scale. You need complexity in both space and time to get the most out of your landscapes.
- Improving fruit and wine: what does genomics have to offer? A lot. But you have to be ready for it.
MacGyver tackles agricultural research
It should be so, so simple.
Take a bunch of hectares. Plant a bunch of rice. In a bunch of different ways. Replicate a bunch of times. In a bunch of different places. Count stuff. Publish the results. Eat the experiment.
We were talking, a couple of days ago, on my Facebook timeline, about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). I had posted a short, somewhat doubtful, article from The Guardian, and that was Jim Croft’s solution to the problem of whether it, well, whether SRI actually works or not. Mike Jackson, who worked at IRRI for many years and should know, then weighed in.
That has been tried, following the ‘SRI recipe’ as formulated. When the results did not come up to scratch, so to speak, the SRI-ites claimed that the ‘recipe’ had not been followed. Efforts have been made to resolve the issues. SRI-ites have religion; faith — not empiricism — is the name of the game.
And yes, there have indeed been studies and trials and surveys and analyses and meta-analyses and pamphlets and training manuals and celebrity websites. Not to mention blogposts trying to make sense of all of the above.
So why haven’t we got to the bottom of it all yet? Why is something that is, at best, a variable hotchpotch of practices some of which, in some combinations, sometime work, to some extent, in some places, being touted as the greatest thing since the last Big Thing? Peter Fredenburg had a theory, again over on Facebook.
SRI is an easy story to sell. It comes across as smart farming that gets more harvest from fewer inputs and builds farmers’ character. Conventional agricultural research, by contrast, addresses each problem with another input or gene, turning farmers into mindless conveyor belts for lab products. SRI is MacGyver. Conventional ag research plods.
MacGyver is a character in an old(ish) TV show; he was an unconventional spy, who refused to use a gun, and relied on complicated, ingenious contraptions to get out of his predicaments instead, which he would build incredibly quickly with a Swiss Army knife and duct tape, usually under extreme pressure. That sold then, on TV, and it sells now, in agricultural research. Just ask the people who advocate balanced, diverse diets as the most sustainable solution to malnutrition. They regularly get told the kind of thing that the new and improved Mark Lynas, fresh from his Damascene encounter with science, told them a couple of days back.
No-one disputes that a balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet is the best long-term solution to vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in general. But achieving this requires the elimination of poverty (which is why rich countries do not have this problem), something which will take time and decades of economic growth in the developing world.
You see what I mean? Nevermind all that plodding. Call in MacGyver and his Biofortification Army knife. Lynas was following up a post on Golden Rice, which has been in the news of late, incidentally causing IRRI to issue a useful clarification. Jeremy had this to say about Golden Rice a while back, and I see no reason to disagree with him now, five years on.
Golden Rice, as a poster child for engineered biofortification, has come a long way. Those promoting it have become much less strident and have sought to build alliances. But I haven’t seen anyone willing to give the most desirable option — a varied and sufficient diet — a fair crack of the whip.
SRI and biofortification — both of which, incidentally, I would be very happy to see succeed, as we cannot afford to lose any options for ensuring food security — could be seen as being on opposite sides of the agricultural barricades. But they are both benefiting from the same fascination with ingenious quick fixes, with the deus ex machina, though admittedly among different constituencies. With silver bullets, I’d be tempted to say, if only MacGyver used a gun.
And yet it should be so, so simple.