- US scientists put ash diversity in the deep freeze, for when they’ve solved the emerald ash borer menace.
- Millions fed: proven successes in agricultural development. A talk on 12 November in Washington DC. Jeremy sez: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.
- War! Huuh! What is it good for? Hybrid rice! Huh?
How to breed for the future
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at PBForum, an e-mail based forum for plant breeding and related fields managed by GIPB. It started out with a question from a Philippines breeder about how to get climate-ready rice varieties. I was particularly struck by the latest contribution, which basically said that, rather, we should be trying to…
…create climate-change-ready breeding programmes. That is, build in the flexibility to shift relatively quickly to a new climate related breeding objective, once it becomes established in what direction the climate will change and how it will affect crop yield.
What I would add is that such “climate-change-ready breeding programmes” would necessarily include ready access to as wide a range of raw materials as possible, including, crucially, properly evaluated collections of landraces and crop wild relatives conserved in, and readily accessible from, genebanks.
Nibbles: Cassava, Success, Fish, Models, Videos, Radio, Grazing
- South Africans produce virus-resistant cassava.
- Success stories in agricultural development documented. Some agrobiodiversity in there.
- Fisheries and food security. And more. And more: why not eat “weedy”fish?
- A crop modeler speaks.
- African agriculture is on youtube, but just barely.
- Forage grasses for beginners. Straight from the grazier’s mouth.
Nibbles: Apples, Rangeland degradation
- Woman discovers marketable new apple. Good news.
- Mongolian blogger thinks rangeland sustainability “projects should do more work in people’s mind than on the rangeland.”
Crop wild relative helps Kew reach 10% milestone
Kew Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank has reached its target of collecting 10% of the world’s wild plants, with seeds of a pink banana among its latest entries.
Congratulations, and happy birthday Kew! Interestingly, the wild banana in question, Musa itinerans, is also found in a genebank in Thailand, apparently as a breeder’s line, so it may well be useful in crop improvement.
LATER: Ok, this is why I talk ((Way too much, I know, but this is sapping my will to live, it really is.)) about genebank database hell. Musa itinerans is in the Musa Germplasm Information System, fourteen accessions of it, ((Select wild and itinerans.)) conserved in vitro at the International Transit Centre, and in China and the Philippines. But it seems it is not in SINGER, for some reason, which is where I first looked for it. And neither of these two sources seem to have made it to WIEWS.
LATER STILL: And 3 specimens in botanic gardens. GBIF disappointing, only a couple of MoBo sheets. Literature suggests it might be a source of cold resistance, and maybe disease resistance too.