- This origin-of-dogs saga is getting tedious. Figure it out, already.
- Dutch wheat varieties still improving.
- Chinese ate wild grasses for 20,000 years before domesticating crops.
- Fungal endophyte helps tall fescue cope with drought and high temperatures, but some fungal genotypes more than others. And some do it without producing livestock toxins.
Transforming agriculture in Africa
I challenged our friend Andy Jarvis to summarize his just-out paper (with assorted co-authors) in Nature Climate Change 1 in a tweet, and this is what he came up with:
@AgroBioDiverse Model maps where + when farmer must change staple crop: beans, banana + maize hit most; sorghum, millet + cassava to rescue.
— Andy Jarvis (@ajarviscali) March 7, 2016
Not bad, but let’s unpack it a bit. Andy and his colleagues ran climate models for sub-Saharan Africa and looked at what would happen over the course of this century to the areas where different crops are currently being grown. Crucially, they tried to figure out when it would become untenable to continue growing a given crop in a given spot, thus triggering a switch to another crop altogether. Absent, that is, some kind of adaptation, such as bringing in varieties better suited to the new conditions, or altering agronomic practices.
As Andy says in his tweet, beans, banana and maize are the worst hit: farmers in 60% of the current African bean area, and about 30% of that of the other crops, will need to think about some other crop at some time during the 21st century. That hits home, as people who follow this blog will know that my mother-in-law’s farm is in maize-and-beans country. Well, fortunately, the highlands of central Kenya do not seem, in this analysis, to be too badly impacted. But what are the descendants of my mother-in-law’s equivalents in the dryer parts of East Africa, and in southern Africa, to do?
…farmers in the maize-mixed farming system might, in the long run, shift to more drought-tolerant cereals such as millet and sorghum, which we identify as viable substitutes in many locations, although these may experience yield reductions.
Alas, there’s more:
…in some areas in the southern Sahel and in dry parts of Southern and Eastern Africa even these drought-resilient crops might become increasingly marginal. For these areas, a more drastic transformation to livestock might be necessary, because cropping might not be a viable livelihood strategy in the long run.
Scary. Better get breeding.
Nibbles: CC & death, GBIF enhancements, Killer fungi, Lion trees, Old oaks, Gourmet ganja, Wild horses, Resistant cassava, Contested agronomy, p-values
- Climate change is going to hit us where we live. Or die.
- How to make GBIF more relevant for agrobiodiversity: a 10-point plan.
- Killer fungi on the loose? ‘Twas ever thus. But genomics will save us?
- Planting trees is good for lions too.
- There are still medieval oaks in England.
- “…where sommelier-like ‘budtenders’ sell gourmet ganja in a designer showroom.”
- Rewilding the wild horse.
- More about the cassava variety Kasetsart 50, poster child for CGIAR impact.
- It’s not just genetic resources that are contested. Yep, agronomy too.
- “Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.”
Nibbles: PPB, AnGR, Children of the corn, African wildlife & China, Japanese plastic food, Hedge balls, Falanghina et al., NY hipster kava bar, Genetics & diet
- The next step in the evolution of participatory plant breeding is evolutionary plant breeding.
- 1458 livestock breeds are in trouble.
- A blast from corn’s past. In more ways than one, as this article from High Country News is kinda old.
- The Chinese market in African wildlife is bad for both.
- Let them eat plastic.
- Maclura pomifera is apparently all the rage in Iowa.
- There’s more to Italian wine than chianti.
- “You can’t really get fucked up on kava.” I beg to differ.
- Two independent pieces on the continuing evolution of humans to cope with their diet: starch, milk and meat.
Cooperation-88 featured in National Geographic
Farmers once cultivated a wider array of genetically diverse crop varieties, but modern industrialized agriculture has focused mainly on a commercially successful few. Now a rush is on to save the old varieties—which could hold genetic keys to de- veloping crops that can adapt to climate change. “No country is self-sufficient with its plant genetic resources,” says Francisco Lopez, of the secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The group oversees the exchange of seeds and other plant materials that are stored in the world’s 1,750 gene banks. — Kelsey Nowakowski
That’s the introduction to a nice feature in the current National Geographic, part of the series The Future of Food. Problem is, I can’t find it online any more. I swear it was there, but it’s not any more. Maybe it was a copyright issue, and it will come back later, when National Gepgraphic is good and ready.
Anyway, the piece is entitled The Potato Challenge:
Potatoes in southwestern China had long been plagued by disease, so scientists began searching for blight-resistant varieties that could be grown in tropical highlands. By the mid-1990s researchers at Yunnan Normal University in China and the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru had created a new resistant spud using Indian and Filipino potatoes.
The resistant spud is Cooperation-88, of course, and if and when the piece finds its way online you’ll be able to admire some fancy infographics summarizing how it was developed and the impact it has had.