- 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 1 about genebank database hell. Musa itinerans is in the Musa Germplasm Information System, fourteen accessions of it, 2 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.