- Viewpoint: Aligning vision and reality in publicly funded agricultural research for development: A case study of CGIAR. Some countries and crops are being short-changed.
- Institutional and farm-level challenges limiting the diffusion of new varieties from public and CGIAR centers: The case of wheat in Morocco. No way either Morocco nor wheat are being short-changed, and yet both micro-level and institutional factors are holding back new varieties there.
- Estimation of genetic erosion on Ethiopian tetraploid wheat landraces using different approaches. No such adoption problems in Ethiopia, it seems.
- Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits in Napier Grass (Cenchrus purpureus) and QTL Regions Governing Forage Biomass Yield, Water Use Efficiency and Feed Quality Traits. Napier grass is clearly not being short-changed. I’m sure my MIL would approve.
- Tropical and subtropical Asia’s valued tree species under threat. Not valued enough, though.
- The origin of the genus Cannabis. If CGIAR decides to work on cannabis, Yunnan would be the place to start getting material from.
- Phased, chromosome-scale genome assemblies of tetraploid potato reveals a complex genome, transcriptome, and predicted proteome landscape underpinning genetic diversity. Clonal propagation and limited meiosis has really short-changed the potato, but this work, which includes CGIAR, will really help breeders get rid of accumulated nasty alleles.
- Somaclonal variation in clonal crops: containing the bad, exploring the good. And then there’s somaclonal variation…
- Sugarcane Genetic Diversity and Major Germplasm Collections. Ripe for the above treatment. Followed by take-over by CGIAR.
- On-farm conservation in Phaseolus lunatus L: an alternative for agricultural biodiversity. On farm conservation must not be short-changed.
- Leveraging Digital Tools and Crowdsourcing Approaches to Generate High-Frequency Data for Diet Quality Monitoring at Population Scale in Rwanda. Younger people get short-changed in their diet; but, surprisingly, women do not.
- UAV-Based Mapping of Banana Land Area for Village-Level Decision-Support in Rwanda. Can’t help thinking we’re being short-changed by not mashing this up with the above somehow.
- The Genetic Diversity of Enset (Ensete ventricosum) Landraces Used in Traditional Medicine Is Similar to the Diversity Found in Non-medicinal Landraces. The title short-changes the casual reader. Medicinal varieties are in fact different from non-medicinal varieties, but do not cluster together. Mapping from space next?
- Phenological diversity in wild and hybrid grapes (Vitis) from the USDA-ARS cold-hardy grape collection. No sign of short-changing grapevine, at least in the US, resulting in some interesting opportunities for its expansion into new areas using wild relatives.
Nibbles: Ginger, Cover crops, Pulses, Campbell Soup, NASA, OWD, Göbekli Tepe, Sydney herbarium, Bourdeix museum, Mezcal folk vocabulary, Mango love, Probiotic ag, Andean ag
- China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
- US doubles down on cover crops…
- …and pulses. No word on ginger.
- How Campbell’s doubled down on tomato breeding. But never released the seeds.
- Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
- Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
- Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
- Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
- A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
- How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
- A paean to the mango.
- Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
- It kind of already is in the Andes.
The humble spuds gets its 15 minutes of fame
I’m just back from a few weeks’ break in Kenya, where the big news was that over the holidays KFC ran out out chips (French fries). It was not a question of inadequate production, though. There are plenty of potatoes in Kenya.
The problem, apparently, was that potential local suppliers had not gone through KFC’s quality assurance process that makes sure “our food is safe for consumption by our customers”, the company’s East Africa chief executive Jacques Theunissen told the Standard newspaper.
So KFC ended up importing potatoes from Egypt, and ran into supply chain snarl-ups.
Makes you think. What’s the point of fancy breeding projects to boost local production, including by the likes of the International Potato Centre, based on decades of research, and using genetic resources painstakingly collected all over the Andes over many years, if in the end local growers get screwed over standards they don’t even know about?
Anyway, let me say a few words about what exactly it is I linked to above about potato collecting, because it really is worth having a look at.
Professor Jack Hawkes was a world-renowned potato and genetic resources expert who spent much of his professional life at the University of Birmingham. He made his first trip to South America in 1939 to collect wild and cultivated species of potato. And on this expedition and others that followed he made several 16 mm films, which have recently been converted to digital format, and become available to view more widely for the first time.
Dr Mike Jackson, no slouch at collecting potatoes himself, put the website together with help from Dr Abigail Amey, who wrote the narrative to accompany the films.
Happy new year.
Nibbles: Seed saving, Ulu, Diet diversity, Azeri fruit/veg, Tomato breeding, Indigenous farming, AGRA-ecology
- Food security through seed saving in the African diaspora.
- Food security through breadfruit in Hawaii.
- Food security through the dietary diversity of women.
- Food security through preserving fruits and veggies in Azerbaijan.
- Food security through tomato wild relatives.
- Food security through Native American farming practices.
- Food security through agroecology.
Nibbles: Presentations, Taro leaf blight, Agroforestry, Agroecology, Photosynthesis
- Two guides to making good presentations. For what it’s worth, here’s my take: fewer words.
- The latest on taro leaf blight in Samoa, from an Indigenous perspective. Not a presentation in sight.
- Agroforestry in the Solomon Islands involves 132 species. Probably including taro.
- The case for agroecology from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. You could also see the above.
- Or, we could tweak photosynthesis.