Category: Breeding

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Super Rice.

Cutting through the hype, there may be some substance in the announcement by the University of Arizona that it is leading a team funded to the tune of USD 9.9 million “to develop ‘super rice’“. ((Come to think of super-rice would be cheap at that price.)) The plan is to understand the genomes of all 24 rice species, the better to breed the two species — Oryza sativa and O. glaberrima — that yield the rice crop.

The announcement contains a lot of information about how this effort will help researchers to understand the evolutionary history and current functioning of rice. But there’s also a food security angle, natch.

“During the domestication process, people end up selecting a couple of plants and crossing them,” [said University of Arizona plant scientist Rod] Wing. “This way, one of them became the founder of all the domesticated plants. That variety was then improved over thousands of years, but it contains only a very small variety of genes that could be used for crop improvement.” … This so-called domestication bottleneck leads to crop plants with highly desirable traits such as high yield but deficiencies in other areas such as compromised ability to fight off diseases or cope with droughts.

I expect the researchers might be wondering whether they can duplicate the domestication events that resulted in modern rice, as wheat researchers did in constructing synthetic bread wheats, injecting a whole lot more agricultural biodiversity into the crop.

And here’s a cool idea; spend some of the loot on public awareness:

As an outreach component, the project will include a biannual Plant Science Family Night program at Ventana Vista Elementary School in Tucson, targeting K-5 students and families, with the goal of getting children and their families in the greater Tucson area excited about plants and the role plant science plays in ensuring a safe, sustainable and secure food supply for our planet.

Shouldn’t every big grant do something similar?

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Nibbles: Cattle nutrition, Maize, Freshwater biota, Modeling maize, Rice, Book, Veg, Urban ag

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Is there really no downside to Brazil’s agricultural miracle?

It’s not easy to explain the Brazilian agricultural miracle to a lay audience in a couple of magazine pages, and The Economist makes a pretty good fist of it. It points out that the astonishing increase in crop and meat production in Brazil in the past ten to fifteen year — and it is astonishing, more that 300% by value — has come about due to an expansion in the amount of land under the plow, sure, but much more so due to an increase in productivity. It rightly heaps praise on Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural research corporation, for devising a system that has made the cerrado, Brazil’s hitherto agronomically intractable savannah, so productive. It highlights the fact that a key part of that system is improved germplasm — of Brachiaria, soybean, zebu cattle — originally from other parts of the world, incidentally helping make the case for international interdependence in genetic resources. ((Alas, soybean is not part of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture’s system of access and benefit sharing, which means that exchange of germplasm is still guided by the relatively cumbersome rules of the Convention on Biological Diversity.)) And much more.

What it resolutely does not do is give any sense of the cost of all this. I don’t mean the monetary cost, though it would have been nice for policy makers to be reminded that agricultural research does cost money, though the potential returns are great. The graph shows what’s been happening to Embrapa’s budget of late. A billion reais of agricultural research in 2006 bought 108 billion reais of crop production.

But I was really thinking of environmental and social costs. The Economist article says that Brazil is “often accused of levelling the rainforest to create its farms, but hardly any of this new land lies in Amazonia; most is cerrado.” So that’s all right then. No problem at all if 50% of one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots has been destroyed. ((Home to some of the wild relatives of the peanut, for example.)) After all, it’s not the Amazon. A truly comprehensive overview of Brazil’s undoubted agricultural successes would surely cast at least a cursory look at the downside, if only to say that it’s all been worth it. Especially since plans are afoot to export the system to the African savannah. And it’s not as if the information is not out there.

A final observation. One key point the article makes is that the success of the agricultural development model used in the cerrado is that farms are big.

Like almost every large farming country, Brazil is divided between productive giant operations and inefficient hobby farms.

Well, leave aside for a moment whether it is empirically true that big means efficient and small inefficient in farming. Leave aside also the issue of with regard to what efficiency is being measured, and whether that makes any sense. Leave all that aside. I would not be surprised if millions of subsistence farming families around the world were to concede that what they did was not particularly efficient. But I think they would find it astonishing — and not a little insulting — to see their daily struggles described as a hobby.

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Putting high-tech breeding in more hands

New Agriculturist has a long report about marker-assisted selection and cowpea breeding. The gist of it is that cowpea is susceptible to Striga, or witchweed, a parasitic plant that can destroy the harvest totally. A resistance gene turned up in “an unimproved variety from Botswana” ((Where, bizarrely, Striga does not occur. Go figure.)) and is the basis of breeding programmes. Screening the results of crossing programmes conventionally is a nightmare, but a doddle if all you’re looking for is the presence of the resistance gene (or a marker close by). That, however, normally requires a well-equipped biotech lab. A UK charity, the Kirkhouse Trust, has been funding a consortium of cowpea breeders in west Africa with the specific aim of making marker-assisted selection available in the field.

The requirements for MAS boil down to a means of extracting DNA from the plant, and the equipment and reagents to then amplify the critical sequence in order to establish its presence or absence. The Trust’s priority has been to source reagents which do not require constant refrigeration and are not hazardous. DNA extraction has become a matter of squashing a leaf segment onto a specially treated paper, and the amplification reaction is provided in dry form, to which the user needs only to add water, and the DNA in the form of a small disc of paper.

One of the project’s six west African partners, in Burkina Faso, has made excellent progress and is now the focus of efforts and a training centre.

The key to the whole effort is the search for sustainability; the Trust believes that this is much more likely to be achieved by putting the technology directly into the hands of the practitioners, rather than by gifting it from on high. This way, the breeders themselves are more likely to have a stake in proving its worth and to be prepared to generate the internal pressure to incorporate MAS into their own national programmes over the long term.

I wonder, though, how many other valuable genes are hiding in unimproved varieties in Botswana and elsewhere. What about their sustainability?