Category: Breeding

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Three good ideas

I think I have already pointed out that Nigel Chaffey does an entertaining round-up of botanically themed items from the world’s media on every issue of Annals of Botany. The latest one has three stories — on training, innovation and information — of great relevance to some of our recurring obsessions here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

  • “Teaching Tools in Plant Biology is a new, online feature of The Plant Cell consisting of materials to help instructors teach plant biology courses. Each topic includes a short essay introducing the topic, with suggested further readings, and a PowerPoint lecture with handouts. The materials are peer reviewed by leaders in the field to ensure accuracy, like all material in The Plant Cell.” Anyone want to volunteer to do one on agrobiodiversity conservation?
  • InnoCentive, the global innovation marketplace, “where creative minds solve some of the world’s most important problems for cash awards up to $1 million,” is to tackle the problem of the European corn borer, though the solvers of this one get only $20,000, and must relinquish all intellectual property rights. Will be interesting to see if anyone bites. The deadline for submission just passed.
  • Annals of Botany is going to take part in a project “to establish whether content in various formats from disparate sources (e.g. literature from publishers and data from public databases) can be delivered to a central ‘knowledge brokering service’, which then makes the content machine-readable and allows key pieces of information to be extracted by data-mining approaches.” I really like this idea as a way of aggregating information on germplasm accessions, data from databases but also published results from papers etc.
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Nibbles: Seed saving, Hard graft, Urban Ag, Sandwiches, Chickens

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Amman conference draws to a close with declaration

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the Amman conference on food security in the drylands has been all about germplasm and breeding, as far as adaptation to climate change is concerned. Cultural practices did get a look-in. Conservation agriculture in general, and zero tillage in particular, came up repeatedly, in fact. But of course, even when it’s not about germplasm, it’s really about germplasm. Because landraces and varieties are probably going to differ in their adaptation to these conditions. In fact, evidence to that effect is already there. An experiment at ICARDA showed last year that recently released varieties don’t do very well under zero tillage in general, but some do better than others. There’s bound to be a rush to screen all kinds of material under such practices.

Anyway, the highlight of the last day was a magisterial keynote from Peter Hazell of IFPRI on the role of agricultural policies and institutions in coping with climate change. It featured the first explanation of private weather index insurance that I’ve actually understood. He was very hopeful about the potential of such schemes, but said that the barriers to entry are still too high, which is why the 37 such programmes in 35 countries only add up to about a US$ 1 billion. Many many many times that will be needed. One of the main problems is the inadequacy of the system of weather stations in many countries. Another bit of infrastructure that is holding development back in rural areas.

Hazell also took part in the final panel discussion, which was very lively and lasted over two hours. He pointed out that the return to investment in agricultural research has really been rather good, and that probably the best hope for adaptation is more science. However, he did say that a breakthrough was needed from somewhere on the scale of the Green Revolution, and he did not see where that was coming from. He pointedly, I thought, did not mention biotechnology.

Well, it’s all over now. The panel session was followed by discussion of the draft Amman Declaration. Comments and amendments were considered, and the final version will be available in due course. But be not afraid, it features strong recommendations to collect and conserve biodiversity, and use it to breed new “climate-ready” crop varieties and build resilient production systems. And so to bed.

Read more on the conference at Rural Climate Exchange.

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Some answers from Amman

Ok, here goes with those answers I promised last night, or some of them anyway.

What’s so new about climate change? After all, breeders have been preparing for, and reacting to, environmental changes of various kinds since their beginning as a profession. Well, for one thing the speed of the changes, and the fact that this time there is fairly solid scientific information about long-term trends. One of the things Cal Qualset recommended is that there should be a sort of worldwide network of testing sites relevant to the anticipated environments of the most threatened countries.

He also talked about evolutionary-participatory plant breeding, a newish name for an old idea going back to Harlan and Allard. This topic was taken up by Salvatore Ceccarelli of ICARDA and others later in the day. Salvatore asked why, in this year of biodiversity, we are talking about varietal uniformity as if it were the only option. He’s set out an alternative vision here with us before.

It revolves around making large mixed populations available to farmers, getting them to plant them in lots of contrasting places, and letting natural and artificial selection do the rest. He’s been doing that in Iran and other places with a mixture of 1600 F2 barley lines deriving from some 300 parents. He thinks he can get improvements in yield stability and stress tolerance over time, but almost certainly not quality. He calls this a way to get a “local solution to a global problem.” The question that was asked, however, was how long this would take. Cal Qualset let slip almost as an aside that his group is seeing very little change in Turkish wheat landraces since the 1930s, and that the variation within landraces wasn’t as much as they had expected. He’s working on a project to introgress smut resistance into these landraces.

And speaking of farmer participation in evaluation and breeding, Cal Qualset also mentioned in his keynote that he was able to see 2% yield improvement per year in the maize Chalqueno landrace by designing and helping farmers implement, in their own fields, a mass selection scheme.

More later.