Category: Breeding

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Bad news from Tehran

In addition to everything else, it seems that the Turkman horse is under threat of extinction. 1 The problem seems to be interbreeding with Throughbreds, and owners unwilling to risk pure-bred Turkmen horses, which are expensive, in races where there is a risk of injury and prize money is low. According to one expert:

Iranian horses have unique features such as smartness, nobility, special physical conditions and high endurance level which cannot be observed in any of the imported horses.

Among the proposals to save the Turkmen horse are a genebank (not sure how that would work) and a breed register, which would probably require DNA testing for individuals.

The Byerly Turk
The Byerly Turk

One thing puzzles me. In the very restricted genetic bottleneck that resulted in the English Thoroughbred is a fine animal known as The Byerly Turk. Was it really a Turk? Wikipedia thinks not. More to the point, one can only be grateful that the English did not decry all that messy genetic pollution that gave rise to the English Thoroughbred.

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Evaluation networks redux?

More interesting thinking about the sites of variety yield trials from Glenn Hyman over at AGCommons. You’ll remember he posted a map a few weeks back of the distribution of such sites around Africa, categorized according to which crop evaluation network used them. This is part of a Gates Foundation-funded project to develop an online catalog of these places, including their environmental characterization, and eventually with links to the actual evaluation data they were used to obtain over the years. Glenn then posted about how knowledge of conditions at trial sites could be used to identify the best places for participatory/evolutionary breeding work. And now he’s linked to our recent analysis of interdependence among African countries for plant genetic resources under climate change and suggested that it would be interesting to figure out which sites represent future analogs for current climates: “[w]hat are the key sites for evaluating germplasm in view of climate change throughout Africa?” Is this the MacGuffin we need to get genebanks and breeders to talk to each other more?

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Let Greenpeace pick up the bill

One of the most emotional campaigns that Greenpeace says it is undertaking in Mexico, led by the Argentine Gustavo Ampugnani, is the defense of diversity of native maize against the cultivation of transgenics. Another lie, then.

If indeed that is the purpose, the NGO should donate money to supporting the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) in Texcoco, led by Thomas Lunpkyn, which keeps in a giant refrigerated bunker germplasm of 194 species of American maize, of which 57 varieties are Mexican in a total of 27 thousand samples. The annual budget of the CIMMYT, the cradle of the Green Revolution led by Norman Borlaug, is not more than 23 million pesos. The yearly cost of Greenpeace propaganda against transgenic corn is greater than the budget of a center that has generated seed of such high yield and nutritional quality as the HV-313 maize and Salamanca wheat without using polluting pesticides.

Ok, sorry for the maladroit translation. You can read the original column by Mauricio Flores in “La Razon.” He recently visited CIMMYT, apparently, and was impressed with the genebank. Nice idea. Not sure about those numbers though.