Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Climate Feedback is a blog hosted by Nature Reports: Climate Change to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming.
There’s not a huge amount on agriculture normally, but a post yesterday from the Copenhagen conference mentions not one but two people whose (independent) work on the effect of climate change on agriculture we’ve mentioned a number of times, Marshall Burke from Stanford and Andy Jarvis from Bioversity International.
The International Development Research Centre’s Economy and Environment Program for South-East Asia (EEPSEA) has just published a study on the effects of climate change on SE Asia. The authors first mapped climate hazard, including all kinds of different things, from drought to cyclones to sea level rise. They then compared that with maps of population density and adaptive capacity. That allowed them to identify a number of vulnerability hotspots. And here they are, the most vulnerable areas in each country:
All good places in which to start looking for agrobiodiversity to collect for ex situ conservation before it disappears, and in which to test agrobiodiversity for its possible contribution to adaptation.
The Journal of Plant Breeding and Crop Science (JPBCS) is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal published monthly by Academic Journals dedicated to increasing the depth of Crop Science across disciplines with the ultimate aim of improving plant research.
A press release from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (we picked it up at Modern Ghana.com) says that improved varieties of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) are giving farmers 55% greater profits. The new varieties produce high quality grains and are resistant to the parasitic weed Striga. That’s great, and I have some questions.
What do we know about the heritage and breeding of the new varieties? Are they going to need replacement themselves, as pests and diseases adapt to them?
At least one was trialled in 1998 in California, and found to be possibly the best choice as a cover crop or green manure there. I wonder whether it was taken up?
Most interesting, to my mind, can we please get the full story? A quick poke around the intertubes reveals that one of these varieties — IT89KD-288 — has been around in the wild, as it were, since at least 1993, the year of “its accidental release to one farmer”. What happened? And what does it’s subsequent spread tell us about informal seed systems, farmer preferences, the role of extension services, etc. etc?