Wired magazine does some great-looking graphics. And the latest, on how science will solve the food crisis, is no exception. As for the content, well, I’m not sure that the future of global farming is down to push-pull intercropping, remote sensing and data-driven rotation, but it’s good to see things other than new seeds and fertilizers being given a chance. And somebody should tell Wired there are more than three plant genebanks in the world.
Cassava rules
The IITA public awareness machine must be in overdrive, and it looks like it’s running on cassava. Today
- a cassava mosaic project got a namecheck in the Sunday Tribune,
- news of a newly released drought tolerant variety got picked up in African Science News Service, and
- a meeting on value addition got an article in the wonderfully-named Daily Triumph.
Not that I’m complaining. It’s about time cassava got the attention it deserves in Africa.
Plant Breeding News is out
The latest Plant Breeding News is out, though only if you’re registered for email alerts. However, in a couple of days you should be able to get October’s digest on the archive page, where you can also subscribe. Lots of stuff about breeding for climate change in this issue. It’s a great resource, brought to you by the Global Partnership Initiative for Plant Breeding Capacity Building (GIPB). And I’m not just saying that because they gave us a namecheck this month.
Nibbles: Toms, Virus, Svalbard, CIRAD
- More on those purple tomatoes. And there’s lots more where that came from.
- Virus weakens the response of genes that normally boost defense against pest.
- “Superman had it right.”
- Yeah, but France has genebanks too.
- Dispatches from Terra Madre: “How are you fighting racism in your food community?”
Yemen may need taller wheat
Back when I made my living applying an outmoded and discredited paradigm by going around collecting germplasm, I had the great good fortune of visiting the Hardamawt province of what at the time was the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The region, and in particular the beautiful and historic city of Shibam has recently been hit by devastating floods. I could link to news accounts, but I think the series of photographs Jeremy just sent me does a better job of summing up the situation than any number of newspaper articles.
Agriculture in the Hadramawt relies on spate irrigation:
Flood water from mountain catchments is diverted from river beds (wadi’s) and spread over large areas. Spate systems are very risk-prone. The uncertainty comes both from the unpredictable nature of the floods and the frequent changes to the river beds from which the water is diverted.
So flood damage is to be expected every once in a while, and people by and large know how to cope, though on this occasion the flooding seems to have been particularly bad. One of the ways people cope is by building strong houses. Some houses in Shibam are hundreds of years old, despite being made of mud brick. I remember that while collecting (this was 20 years ago) I asked people why they were still growing their local wheats rather than the new Green Revolution varieties. They said that the new varieties, though giving a higher grain yield, were too short, ((In fact, you could say they give higher yields partly because they are shorter.)) and they needed a lot of straw to make the mud bricks they used to build their homes.
Now, I haven’t been back to Shibam since then, and I don’t know whether the use of shorter wheats has spread. And I don’t know whether even if they have this has affected the quality or quantity of the local bricks. But I wonder.