- IRRI working to adapt rice to climate change, thanks to genebank.
- Palestine gets a genebank. And genebankers, thanks to ICARDA.
- Lupin ice-cream. Sounds yummie.
- Ethio Organic Seed Action “trains farmers in the use of traditional seeds.” I doubt it, but the stuff on community genebanks is nice.
- Goat racing in Uganda. Where are the photos?
- IFPRI publishes companion volume to Millions Fed.
- Vouching for seed vouchers.
- Breeding anti-GMO maize. Well, kinda.
- “Beer could provide lifeline for South Sudan’s small farmers.” I know how they feel.
Nibbles: Refugia, Mann, Tree pix, Sparing v sharing, Lethal yellowing, Value chains, Coral sun-blocking, GlobalHort, Gravenstein, Pirate agrobiodiversity
- How species survive climate change.
- Charles C. Mann, author of great books on pre-Columbian America and the consequences of the Columbian Exchange, interviewed.
- Dreamy pictures of old British trees.
- “Protecting wild species may require growing more food on less land.” Great press release headlines of our times. Fortunately Mongabay has a discussion.
- Coconut lethal yellowing wreaking havoc in Mozambique.
- What makes a good food value chain?
- Boffins want to re-activate coral genes in temperate plants to stop them getting sunstroke. Or something.
- Old friend engaged by GlobalHort to work on position paper on “Promoting Agrobiodiversity for International Development: A Rationale and Roadmap for Collective Action”. Go, Hannah.
- Grapes vs apples in Sonoma County.
- Aaargh, pirates smoked like chimneys and drank like fish. Well I never. Anyway, nice to see them making full use of the local agrobiodiversity products.
Wheat researcher honoured by CSSA
Prof. Bikram Gill of Kansas State University is to be awarded the Crop Science Society of America’s Frank N. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources. Prof. Gill is Director of the Wheat Genetic and Genomic Resources Center in the Department of Plant Pathology. I’ll let him tell you about his work. Congratulations.
Nibbles: Dutch soybeans, American flora and vegetation, Cassava pests, Bangladesh biocrats
- Do you have a small parcel of land in the Netherlands that you would not mind being used to test soybean varieties? Non-GMO, mind.
- Kew has a couple of new online resources on Neotropical plants.
- We need an international early warning system for cassava problems.
- “Is there anyone in Bangladesh to look deep into the workings of the biocrats who are bent on advancing the cause of giant companies at the expense of the people’s long-term food security?”
Ecological intensification at IBC18
Doyle McKey‘s presentation at IBC18 sounds like a doozy. I was alerted to it by Eve Emshwiller on Twitter, who said, among other things:
McKey: ecological intensification, not just green revolution model “intensification” of ag needed. #ibc18
Music to our ears, of course. Here’s a summary from the (very large) Abstract Book of the congress.
The evolutionary ecology of plant chemical defenses in agroecosystems: past, present and future.
McKey, Gleadow, Cavagnaro
Plant chemical defenses mediate interactions between plants, their herbivores and pathogens, and the naturalenemies of these plant parasites. In domesticated plants, farmers are added to this web of interactions. Plant defenses have been subjected to complex selection pressures under domestication, leading both to decreases and to increases in their concentration, and to shifts in their intra-plant distribution. This complexity is explained partly by variation in the kinds of plants farmers chose to domesticate, and partly by the kinds of environments that nature and farmers combined to create in agroecosystems. Today, the interactions mediated by plant defenses are affected by changing climate, rising temperature and increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. These changes can threaten food security by lowering not only the production of food but also its nutritional quality. The strategies proposed to counter these threats envisage a wide range of ways, not mutually exclusive, to manage biotic interactions in agroecosystems. These include modifying crop plants’ natural constitutive and induced defenses and other sources of resistance; engineering crop plants to express novel defenses; and increasing the effectiveness of ‘integrated pest management’ (through natural enemies, other components of agrobiodiversity and pesticides) by modifying the structure and functioning of agroecosystems. In this presentation, we examine these proposed solutions through the evolutionary ecologist’s lens: What are their respective costs and benefits, and how do these affect the ecological situations in which each could help farmers produce sufficient amounts of high-quality food? How can the coevolutionary dynamics of interactions between crop plants and their biotic environment be managed to avert catastrophic fluctuation of yield?