- “…WFP’s partnership with the Millennium Villages Project would deploy the full range of the Programme’s tools and help utilize the Millennium Villages as a platform for best practices.” Good. But let’s just hope the villagers’ own best tool — agrobiodiversity — doesn’t get left behind.
- More on the Cotacachi agroecotourism project in Ecuador.
- Heritage tourism in the Virgin Islands targets old sugar cane mill.
- The “mango villages” of India.
- Pollination needs to go wild.
- Ok, so the CGIAR is going to re-organize itself into mega-programmes (look at the PDF at the bottom of the page), one of which is on “Crop germplasm conservation, enhancement and use.” Big deal? I wish I knew.
- Pssst, wanna discuss grape breeding?
- More from IIED on landraces and climate change.
- Deforestation, drought and politics in Kenya.
- Tracking eel migrations.
Progress in perennial wheat
We’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for perennial cereals, eagerly anticipating the day when the Land Institute’s farmer-breeders harvest ready-made muesli from their perennial polyculture on the prairies. Recent research confirms that perennial wheat is slowly coming closer in reality and simply as a concept for conservative farmers to contemplate.
As a concept, it could gain traction in Australia thanks to a desk-study that looked at the economic potential of perennial cereals there. Savings can be made in fertilisers, herbicides, tillage and sowing costs, but are they enough to offset yield penalties? Lindsay Bell and colleagues plugged a perennial wheat into a farm model called MIDAS (Model of an Integrated Dryland Agricultural System). They made various assumptions about the yield penalty that perennial wheat might labour under, the quality of the wheat, and whether it might offer grazing to livestock.
In areas where wheat is in any case not very profitable, then if the quality remains the same perennial wheat is profitable even if the yield is only 60% to 75%. If quality is lower, suitable only for feed markets, then the yield must be at least 85%. Factor in feed and things become even more interesting. On a mixed farm that raises sheep as well as wheat, a dual-purpose perennial grain that offers forage, especially early in the growing season, can “greatly increase whole-farm profitability” according to the study. Even if grain yield is only 40% of annual wheat, a perennial wheat would be worth including on 12% of the farm area. The study points out that “this demonstrates that there is capacity to trade-off grain yield for forage production from a perennial cereal”. ((Surely not! That means it doesn’t have to be either or?))
Other benefits can be factored in too. In some parts of the US, research is focused on perennial wheat because the permanent cover and particularly the root system would slow soil erosion in sensitive areas. Reports of a recent field visit at the University of Michigan, which recently won a US$1 million grant to develop perennial wheat, stress this aspect of a permanent crop. In an aside that article says that “fields could be used to graze livestock between harvests”.
I wonder whether they’re aware of this research thrust on some of the cattle ranches I’ve visited in Texas? Farmers there sow wheat only to provide forage for cattle and don’t really care whether they get a grain harvest from it or not. A half-decent perennial crop would surely be valuable for them.
There are all sorts other factors that could tip the balance in favour of perennial cereals. One that’s become especially relevant lately is carbon sequestration. Those perennial root systems are doubtless capable of plucking buckets of CO2 out of the atmosphere. It would be nice to think that maybe some of the climate change funds sloshing around might find their way into this kind of research and maybe even pay farmers to grow perennial cereals.
Nibbles: Non-wood forest products, Landraces and climate change, Brewing, IRRI, Agroforestry, Borlaug, Mutant
- New NWFP Digest is out. Bamboo, bamboo and more bamboo. You all have subscribed, right?
- Your indigenous seeds will set you free. Not if you don’t have a breeding programme and decent seed companies they wont. Or not only.
- College students to evaluate hop varieties. What could possibly go wrong?
- “The IRRI is not involved in any projects on land acquisition for rice production, nor do we provide advice on land acquisition.”
- Agroforestry professor interviewed by Mongabay.
- Edwin Price vs Vandana Shiva on Borlaug on Oz radio. Let the games begin.
- Cool chimeric apple.
An African agrobiodiversity snowclone
Beware of the “X doesn’t need A, it needs B” snowclone. For example: “Africa doesn’t need a green revolution. It needs agroecology.” Because it invariably turns out that what X really needs is both A and B.
Animal Breeding and Genomics newsletter out
The newsletter produced by the Animal Breeding and Genomics Centre (ABGC), a joint venture of Wageningen UR Livestock Research and Wageningen University, is unfortunately not available as an RSS feed, but I think it may well be worth subscribing to via email. The latest edition, for example, gives an update on the Dutch Heritage Sheep project, which points out that “[s]pecific equipment for semen collection was prepared in order to get the ram to mount a ewe in heat” and includes a helpful photograph.