This is a bit old but still worth noting. Mother Earth News came up last year with America’s Top Twenty Tomatoes. They did it by asking “people like Carolyn Male of Salem, N.Y., who has personally grown and tasted more than 2,000 varieties, and Robbins Hail, who tends 600 tomato varieties each season at Bear Creek Farms in Osceola, Mo.” And no doubt Amy Goldman too. Serious tomato people, in other words. I want to know how many of these Jeremy has grown.
How IR8 was born
Henry M. “Hank” Beachell shared the World Food Prize in 1996 with Gurdev Khush. Both IRRI rice breeders, they were responsible for breeding the first Green Revolution dwarf rice variety, IR8. IRRI’s channel on youtube has just posted an excerpt from a USDA-National Agricultural Library (NAL) video project called Precious Seeds which tells his story. The money quote: “…cooking quality was secondary, milling quality was secondary, the main thing was rice production.”
The Bioscience Behind Secure Harvests ignores conservation
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) invests £78m (€80m) in plant and crop research at universities and institutes across the UK, sometimes in the form of international partnerships. They have a pamphlet out called The Bioscience Behind Secure Harvests, highlighting “key BBSRC-supported research into achieving global food security.” There’s a lot on breeding, in particular as a way of adapting to climate change, and a section on “Harnessing natural diversity.” 1 There are even a couple of — albeit brief — references to the use of wild relatives in wheat breeding. But nothing at all on the conservation side of things. I guess the BBSRC figures that funding the long-term availability of the raw materials of all this breeding it is supporting is someone else’s problem.
Nibbles: Millet origins, Maize origins, Cowpea, Edible weeds, Watermelons
- Trace chemicals in Chinese dog bones from 7-8K years ago suggest a diet high in millet, and therefore its cultivation.
- Maize origins pushed back and down.
- A new cowpea system, including faster varieties, being tried out in Niger.
- It’s spring, and Italians’ thoughts starting to turn to eating weeds.
- “…his 3 wives and 20 children depend on the water melon business as means of livelihood.”
The pedigree of tolerance to submergence in rice
You may remember a post a few days ago about submergence-tolerant rice. Our friends at IRRI have been kind enough to explain to me where the gene in question — sub1 — came from.
I hope I get this right. It seems the immediate parent for IR64-sub1 was from the cross IR49830, which in turn came from the cross IR22385, made in 1978. The source of the gene at the time was a line called FR13A, which was derived from a germplasm accession called IRGC 8887. That was acquired by IRRI in 1963 from India, but with no further passport data.
If you want to get an impression of the complexity of the pedigrees of modern varieties, below is the one for IR64-sub1, with IRGC 8887 highlighted in yellow, thanks to the pedigree visualization tool that IRRI has been developing (click to enlarge).
It’s a great illustration of the reason for the Multilateral System of access and benefit sharing being put in place by the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. In a bilateral system, such as the one envisaged by the Convention on Biological Diversity, how would you work out the contribution of IRGC 8887 — or indeed any of the other germplasm involved in the pedigree — to the overall success or otherwise of the final product?