- Rethinking rice-based agriculture in Assam.
- And China, maybe?
- By breeding your way out of the problem, maybe?
- And then patenting the result? Well, maybe not.
- Here comes fair-trade quinoa.
- Nordic cheeses to go with those insects from a few days back. Lack of Norwegian representation pointed out, as well as a remedy.
- I wonder how many Italian cheeses are made from the milk of endangered breeds. Well, now the relevant association has a Facebook page, so I can ask them.
Nibbles: Brazil flora & urban ag, Telling species apart, Canary seed for humans, Training breeders, Solitary bees, Tajik protected area, Rennell Island, Nordic grubs, Belize TV
- Brazil’s flora moves online. And its agriculture into its favelas.
- Taxonomy 101.
- Wish the people who wrote this press release on “canary seed” had taken a taxonomy course. It’s Phalaris canariensis, it turns out.
- African breeders to be trained at UCDavis. Ok, but what about WACCI? What’s going on? Cornell-Davis smackdown?
- Further proof, if any were needed, of the importance of wild bees.
- Tajikistan gets its first World Heritage Site. Includes most of the Pamirs, so surely a whole lot of agricultural biodiversity, both wild and cultivated, plant and animal. Not that that was the prime mover for protection, probably.
- Incidentally, there’s a list of World Heritage Sites in danger, and it includes Rennell Island in the Solomons. The reason I bring it up is that it is famous for a local coconut variety. Hope that’s not endangered!
- Nordic Food Lab gets money to experiment with cooking insects.
- Belize TV looks to agrobiodiversity to cope with climate change.
Plant breeding as a public good. Again.
Back in February 2012 we were happy to spread the word about the first Student Organic Seed Symposium, in Vermont in the US. We heard no more about it, of course. 1 Such is our institutional memory, however, that an official report on the meeting, in a proper journal no less, caught our eye and demanded to be shared.
It’s an interesting read, and full of hope. There is clearly a demand for breeding to meet the needs of not just organic but other sorts of what might be called “proper” farming. 2 And there are young professionals who want to meet those demands. The tricky part is how to make it pay. From the brief details in the report, it seems that US government funding and private philanthropy are helping to train breeders and support specific breeding programmes, a return to plant breeding as a public good. Will that be enough?
Nibbles: Fishing, Food systems, Monitoring, Farmers’ rights book, Indian veggies
- Fishing in the gene pool, a presentation from that Eucarpia meeting.
- The Maine Law Review publishes a whole bunch of papers on food systems in the US and elsewhere.
- While Ensia publishes just one: food rethought.
- Conservation Magazine points to a nifty idea from Australia: Fluker posts. Citizen science for monitoring landscape change. Can we get some agricultural ones?
- Speaking of citizens: new book on farmers’ rights.
- Indians told to eat their (native) vegetables.
Varieties of climate change
Something is up, no doubt about it. First off, PBS in the US has a longish news report on how farmers in India “find promise in ancient seeds”.
Watch Struggling Farmers in India Find Promise in Ancient Seeds on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Strangely, although the farmers are able to find promise in ancient seeds, the report claims that seeds stored at IRRI in the 1960s are too ancient to be viable. Not sure how that works.
One of the protagonists of the PBS video, Debal Deb, crops up again in another video that came to light on the PAR website. According to PAR: “This film follows the construction of a new seed bank premises in Odisha, a venture that provides a potent symbol of Debal’s values”.
With the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change, it is good to be reminded that droughts are diverse too. David Lobell looks at two recent scientific papers on drought tolerance. One shows very little difference between specifically “drought-tolerant” maize varieties and other varieties without the drought-tolerance genes.
To me, there are a couple of possible ways to interpret this. One is that the newer varieties being marketed by companies are not really much better in general. Or these results might indicate that the types of droughts the newer varieties were designed for are somehow different than the type of droughts they were exposed to in this experiment. In particular, as we’ve discussed in prior posts, 2012 was a drought characterized by very high temperatures and vapor pressure deficits, the kind of droughts that one expects more of with climate change.
2012, in other words, was not just a dry drought but a hot drought. The other study David looks at compares the two kinds of drought.
What’s really interesting is how remarkably low the correlation between performance in “drought” and “drought+heat” is (0.08).
While not reading too much into either study, Lobell cautions that very hot droughts may require different kinds of varieties from mere dry droughts.