- Our friends at the Global Crop Diversity Trust have been busy:
- “Experts: Failure to focus on farming will undermine global climate agreement and increase hunger.” Er … what agreement?
- Oh, and we need more money, please.
- Tomorrow, US Congress briefed on soil microbiology and Vitis fermentation products, aka terroir.
- IRRI Boss wants to sequence all 109,000 rice accessions in genebank. Jeremy asks: “Then what?”
- Seeking C4 rice — and C3 sorghum. Good luck with that.
- Women grow food basket. In India.
Nibbles: Rice domestication, H5N1, Fisheries, Crop maps, Grafting, Livestock video, Perennial conference, Goat genetic patterns, Satellites, Large seeds, W4RA
- 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.