Category: Breeding

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Breeding news galore

The latest Plant Breeding News is out. There’s a huge number of interesting tidbits in it this month, including announcements for a number of major international conferences. But I’ll just highlight a web site that I think I may have linked to before but certainly bears mentioning again: PlantStress:

…the purpose of this web site is to serve as a brokerage of information, a meeting place, a consultation facility and a source for professional update on the most important issues of plant environmental (abiotic) stress. While the site is dynamic and constantly updated it also offers basic educational materials to newcomers into this area who wish to use the site for learning. The most important goal of this web site is to promote interaction among those interested in solving the problem of plants under stress in agriculture, be it scientists, extension specialists, business people, administrators, policy makers or farmers.

It includes a useful page of news, announcements and events, although unfortunately it does not have an RSS feed.

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Nibbles: Book, Moral and physical revulsion, DNA bank, Cacao genome, Cassava, Agroforestry, Dung products, Pork brain

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New Scientist on how to get through the next 100 years

An article in New Scientist tells us how to survive the 21st century, what with climate change and all.

There’s a paragraph on agriculture ((The links are provided as in the original article. I didn’t add them myself.)):

Since water will be scarce, food production will need to be far more efficient. Hot growing seasons will be more common, meaning that livestock will become increasingly stressed, and crop growing seasons will shorten, according to David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues (Science, vol 323, p 240). We will need heat and drought-tolerant crop varieties, they suggest. Rice may have to give way to less thirsty staples such as potatoes.

The interactive map also has stuff on agriculture. Check out in particular Southern Europe, where, apparently, “[a]lthough agriculture will be largely impossible, hardy animals such as goats will be kept on the fringes of the desert.”

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Nibbles: Cacao, Forbes, Gum arabic, Bees, Private sector, Kumquats, Maize, Edible weeds, Herbs, Medicinals, Banana wine, Cachaca. Obamas’ dog

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Jigawa experiments with cattle diversity

About 30,000 cows drawn from different species will be used in Jigawa state for artificial insemination experiment before the end of May this year, the state commissioner of agriculture, Alhaji Nasidi Ali has said.

Ok, I suppose he meant breeds rather than species. Although a follow up quote from the commissioner adds that: “We want to change the species and varieties of cows in Jigawa state.” Anyway, one has to wonder what this will do to whatever local breeds ((There are also lists of local breeds from ILRI and FAO.)) roam around Jigawa State, Nigeria. The recent State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture did not paint a rosy global picture, you’ll recall.