- Cryo congress coming.
- Ancient farmers enjoyed a beer…
- …and now we all can.
- Yeah but what’s next in the improvement pipeline?
- CePaCT: The Video.
- Why can’t we all just get along?
- Genetic maps are from Mars, nutrition is from Venus…
- Using markets to teach biodiversity.
- The end of camel herding?
Why mixtures do well
I bring you a nice photo, and even nicer quote, from Salvatore Ceccarelli’s Facebook page today. Salvatore has blogged for us in the past about his work on variety mixtures.
In 2008, at ICARDA, we dusted off the old idea of evolutionary breeding to bring biodiversity back into farming systems. We made large, widely diverse populations of barley, bread wheat and durum wheat by mixing lots of F2 lines. And I mean lots: 1600 in the case of barley, 2000 in the case of bread wheat and 700 for durum wheat. The populations went to different countries, including Jordan, Algeria, Eritrea, Iran, and lately even Italy. In Ethiopia, a specific population was made based more specifically on Ethiopian germplasm.
A few days ago Salvatore was examining this particular mixture of 217 durum wheats on a farm at Geregera, in the region of Gonder, Ethiopia.
The farmer responsible for the mixture is the one at the extreme right of the photo (the guy talking, just to his left, is the student who sowed the experiment). This is how the farmer described what’s going on in his field.
In a mixture, plants are jealous of one another and try to be better than their neighbours, and the result is that the whole field is better.
And you can see what he means, although unfortunately it doesn’t seem to apply to humans.
Nibbles: Two conferences and a breeding
- Conference: Known, forgotten and lost grains, Symposia of Greek Gastronomy, Crete, next summer.
- Conference: Crop Diversification in a Changing World – Mobilizing the green gold of plant genetic resources, Eucarpia, Montpellier, next spring.
- Breeding the kale of the future, which, it seems, might be less like kale.
CBN Variety Showcase organizer gets podcast treatment
You remember our recent short blog post on the Culinary Breeding Network’s Variety Showcase? Well, you can now hear all about it on Jeremy’s latest Eat this Podcast, in which he talks to Lane Selman, the organizer. Want a teaser? How’s this?
Many vegetables don’t taste of anything much these days, but whose fault is that, really?
Brainfood: Food diversity, Vigna salt tolerance, Medicinal rice, Sustainable intensification, US wild potatoes, Ethiopian potatoes, Temperate rice, Brazilian maize, Soybean cores, Pea cores, Danish cattle viability
- On-Farm Crop Species Richness Is Associated with Household Diet Diversity and Quality in Subsistence- and Market-Oriented Farming Households in Malawi. Correlation is not causation, but one gets one’s victories where one can.
- Agroecology and healthy food systems in semi-humid tropical Africa: Participatory research with vulnerable farming households in Malawi. See above.
- Diversity and Evolution of Salt Tolerance in the Genus Vigna. Salt tolerance has evolved at least 4 times in the genus among coastal species.
- An ethnobotanical study of traditional rice landraces (Oryza sativa L.) used for medical treatment in selected local communities of the Philippines. 19 landraces are used to treat a variety of nutritional and other complaints.
- Is it time for a socio-ecological revolution in agriculture? Sustainable intensification is often neither.
- Core Collections of Potato (Solanum) Species Native to the USA. Only two species, but more collecting needed, though one population of one of the species captures 82% of total AFLP bands. In other news, people still using AFLPs.
- Genetic Diversity and Relationship of Ethiopian Potato Varieties to Germplasm from North America, Europe and the International Potato Center. 15 unique Ethiopian genotypes reflects 2 distinct introductions from Europe.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Rice Varieties Cultivated in Temperate Regions. 217 varieties from temperate regions show much diversity, structured by grain type and origin.
- Genetic Vulnerability and the Relationship of Commercial Germplasms of Maize in Brazil with the Nested Association Mapping Parents. Brazilian commercial maize hybrids are pretty diverse, but show little overlap with the diversity of the NAM parents.
- Evaluation of resistance to Phytophthora sojae in soybean mini core collections using an improved assay system. Resistant materials made up about a third of the world mini-core, but <10% of the Japanese mini-core.
- Genetic Diversity of Chinese and Global Pea (Pisum sativum L.) Collections. The USDA global core was more diverse than the Chinese core, which was pretty diverse anyway.
- Population viability analysis on a native Danish cattle breed. Jutland cattle has 122 years if nothing is done, but things can be done.