- How to do impact evaluation. Required reading.
- Podcast on the history of coffee from Linn. Soc. Required listening.
- How to intensify agriculture sustainably. Meah.
- It may well involve patient capital though.
- This thing will look for all the species names in a piece of text or website. Bound to come in useful one of these days.
- How to use Google properly. And a vaguely agricultural quiz to see if you’ve been listening in class.
- Protecting ancient irrigation system on the West Bank.
- And finding the oldest agricultural site in East Asia.
- The good and bad side of Prosopis in Africa.
- CIMMYT in China.
- The banana as a weapon.
- Touring UK plant science sites.
- Mapping breadfruit to save the world.
- “Over 78 million Europeans (15–64 years) have tried cannabis…” Purely medicinal purposes, man.
- “We wanted to see how farmers are reacting to this global climate change…” Bean farmers, not cannabis farmers.
- If you’re at the Noosa Botanic Gardens, Cooroy, you can see rare macadamias. Yeah but can you smoke ’em?
- Organic seed systems in California. No, not cannabis, settle down.
Superwheat: not another comic hero
BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today this morning had visited the John Innes Centre to hear all about superwheats, promising yields of 15 t/ha as opposed to the current (UK) average of about 8t/ha. Intrepid reporter Anna Hill couldn’t supress a little chuckle as she gazed in awe at 5 foot (150 cm) tall plants towering over her, each ear enclosed in a little plastic bag.
The John Innes Centre is looking in wheats from thousands of years ago for traits to feed the 9 billion, traits that might have been left behind because they weren’t incorporated into the pool when modern wheat breeding began.
There’s a lot there to take issue with. The researcher 1 described landraces as having developed “almost naturally,” which rather downplays the role of farmers in both selecting and maintaining the characteristics of their landraces. It also gives the lie to the idea that these landraces are thousands of years old. I don’t know exactly when they were collected, but I’d be willing to bet is was less than 100 years ago, at most.
Then there’s the whole idea of going back to landraces in search of forgotten traits as if this was some Eureka-style breakthrough in breeder thinking. John Innes’ breeders are hardly the first to have thought of this. In fact CIMMYT went one better, and actually recreated modern wheat by re-hybridizing the parental species, broadening considerably the genetic base for breeders.
(Those breeders, by the way, have just published a summary of the yield gains in their elite spring wheat programme over the past 15 years (1995-2009). Average annual gains across 919 environments in 69 countries are of the order of 0.65%. Of course, that’s no reason to be complacent — the trend may be slowing — but still … 2)
And finally, the bit that really made me squirm was when Anna Hill put Alford (if it was he) on the spot by asking what traits he was looking for, and whether he had found anything, and the poor researcher was left to utter pleasantries about transport systems, and leaf area, and robust plants and disease resistance and photosynthesis and “it’s very complicated”. It all seemed to reflect a press release in search of a story.
Anyway, listen for yourself.
Nibbles: Fork, Prairies, Cynodon, Clove, Impact, Amazon, Blog, Horse, Thyme, Mauritius, Dyes
- Slate puts a fork in, well, the fork.
- Gotta love the Prairies.
- Mysterious Cattle Deaths Caused by GMO Grass: not GMO, not particularly mysterious.
- Gotta love the Spice Islands.
- How scientists can extract impact from their
navel-gazingresearch. - Gotta love online mapping platforms.
- Another journal starts a blog.
- Horses in agriculture, and history.
- Gotta love za’tar. It’s about thyme.
- Sweeter than sugar. Mauritius goes for fair trade and diversification.
- Dying for batik.
Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes
- Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
- Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
- Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
- Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
- Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
- Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
- Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
- Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
- The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
- Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
- Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
- Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
- Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.
Nibbles: Plant Cuttings, Millennium Seed Bank, ITPGRFA, siRNA, Zoonoses information, Botanical garden, Rio +20, Italian bees, Brazilian coriander, Sri Lankan rice, International Treaty
- “Times are hard; everybody wants more (but seems to be getting less…)…”
- “The panels will produce enough energy to power all of the bank’s seed stores.”
- “One of the Benefit-sharing Fund’s unique features is the transparent process that governs the allocation of funds. After a wide announcement of each call, all the project proposals received for funding are evaluated according to established scientific criteria by international experts in order to fund the best projects.”
- “Basically we’re going to add bullets (siRNA) to the plants’ defense arsenal. It’s science fiction right now, but if it works, then the lengthy, expensive cleanup process could be shortened to two minutes.”
- “A new website provides examples of policies, institutions and stakeholders involved in the management of zoonoses, collated in a meta-database, together with discussion of cross-cutting themes and case studies to illustrate potential approaches.”
- “…the polka-dotted pumpkins were a hit.”
- “We all know this wasn’t the meeting where world governments were going to rise from the ashes.”
- “The tradition of micro-beekeeping has completely disappeared.”
- “No one buys beans, but they do buy cilantro.”
- “Teaming up with Alex Thanthriarachchi, 62, a reformed militant Marxist, Wijertane is on a mission to promote indigenous varieties of rice and other staples as the best way for Sri Lankan farmers to deal with changing climate.”
- “As a metaphor for itself, the treaty is the seed that is there and has been planted. It now needs to be used by all countries in order to keep sustaining life.”