- Dorian Fuller rounds up rice domestication latest.
- Deconstructing the persistence of H5N1.
- Artisanal fisheries and climate change don’t mix. No-take reserves, anyone?
- Mo’ better crop mapping.
- Multi-variety fruit trees for sale. Perfect Christmas gift.
- For your consideration: video on livestock science.
- First International Perennial Grain Breeding Workshop. Tell us about it, please!
- History of goat pastoralism. The revenge of geography.
- SciDev on remote sensing for drought and other disasters. IWMI presumably knows all about that.
- Boffins find seed size gene. Oregon State University Seed Laboratory doesn’t care.
- Web Alliance for Re-greening Africa. New one on me.
Do farmers know how to save seeds?
There’s a strange story one hears in various quarters, that small-scale farmers, outside the industrial mainstream, don’t really know how to save their own seeds. We saw it a couple of weeks ago in a comment from Andre, who said that European legislation ensures that “varieties [are] properly maintained and registered and the seed produced according to state-of-the art standards and certified”. The clear implication is that seed produced under any other regime is likely to be defective in some way. I don’t have numbers, of course, but this kind of argument seems to be reasonably common among proponents of high-tech seed breeding. But I was rather surprised to see a somewhat similar argument in a project in the World Bank Development Marketplace, which is busy building to its giddy and exciting conclusion even as I write.
One of the finalists, Helvetas Mozambique, justifies its proposal like this:
“Without access to quality seeds, subsistence farmers practicing rain-fed agriculture continue recycling grain that has been exhausted after generations of cultivation, producing poor yields. …”
To break this cycle, Swiss-based Helvetas proposes what it calls a “zero-emission fridge” consisting of low-cost storage facilities run by community-owned seed banks that “distribute quality seeds of improved crop varieties and serve as a social safety net to benefit 10,000+ rural households”.
What is this notion that grain can become “exhausted after generations of cultivation”? It used to be said of potatoes in Europe, before anyone really understood anything about either sexual reproduction or tuber-borne diseases. And the proof was that if you saved potato fruits and planted true potato seed, the plants were much more vigorous, usually because the seeds did not contain the virus load that plagued seed tubers. Sex reinvigorated the stocks.
Judging from the picture accompanying the piece on the Helvetas proposal, the grain in question is maize. And maize does indeed suffer from inbreeding depression if seeds from too few individuals are saved, but I’m not aware of any evidence that experienced maize farmers don’t understand this. Does Helvetas have evidence that inbreeding depression is a real problem? Or is it, perhaps inadvertently, promoting a view that one reason subsistence farmers don’t have Swiss bank accounts is that they don’t know what they’re doing?
Nibbles: Edible terricolous insects, Interdependence, Spanish livestock, Milk for pastoralists, African Crop Science Society, Ethiopia CBD report, New Agriculturalist, Geo-referencing
- Cicadas are good, and good for you.
- Genes from “foreign” wheat played significant role in improving Chinese wheat.
- Spain publishes plan for the conservation, improvement and promotion of livestock breeds.
- Milk Matters. To Somali children in Ethiopia, in this case.
- Winners of ACSS awards for 2009 announced.
- “Conserving Ethiopia’s biodiversity far from adequate.” Or so says Ethiopia’s report to CBD. Some agrobiodiversity included.
- New Agriculturalist is out. Rejoice.
- Andy Jarvis on the value of geo-referencing.
Nibbles: Climate change, Papaya sex, Inheritance, AGCommons
- “New study warns that climate change could create agricultural winners and losers in east Africa.” Any other possibilities?
- “Researchers to perform sex change operation on papaya.” Bang goes a bunch of sexual diversity.
- Inherited wealth is good for farmers, better for herders, lousy for hunters.
- AGCommons is a CGIAR project to deliver information to farmers in Africa. Watch their new video, with added Andy Jarvis goodness.
Reviving an old rice for sake’s sake
“Use it or lose it” is a frequent refrain among those who want to conserve genetic resources. We strive to point out that nothing is ever useless, we just haven’t discovered the uses yet. Sometimes, though, the use is well-known. Brewers, especially the more traditional types, often swear by specific varieties of their raw material. Golden Promise, a famous malting barley, is spoken of fondly by bearded men in sandals clutching a pint of warm cloudy brew. So I shouldn’t be surprised that the same is true of Nihonshu (日本酒). A long article at The Japan Times explains how sake makers are increasingly trying to use traditional old rice varieties.
Wataribune was used in 1939 to develop the now-dominant Yamada Nishiki strain. It had been widely used in sake making for centuries but fell into near-extinction around 50 years ago. Though it was rumored to yield brews of great depth and complexity, it was notoriously difficult to grow. The plant’s tall stalks made it vulnerable to typhoons, while its long growing season exacerbated the risks. [Takaaki] Yamauchi proposed an initiative to revive the strain, but few farmers were willing to gamble on such an uncertain enterprise.
The article goes on to describe how the master brewer eventually found 14 grams of Wataribune rice in the genebank at the National Agricultural Institute in Tsukuba, and parlayed that into a range of award-winning sakes. The photo, by article author Melinda Joe, shows how easily Wataribune rice grains fall from the ears of the stalk, making it a challenging rice strain to work with. There’s a lot more in the article, about rice varieties in sake and about ordinary Japanese people who are spearheading a movement towards more regional diversity in rice, including groups that reclaim and regenerate abandoned rice paddies.