- The World Cat Congress is on. Hipsters hanging out, smoking dope, listening to jazz, I imagine. Very select, though.
- Canadian boffins evaluate nutritional differences among pulse cultivars. Regular readers recognize leitmotif.
- Celebrity chefs try to save British cherry orchards. Madame Ranevskaya happy to hear it.
More spud news than anyone needs
Today’s crop of heartwarming potato stories come to you from Peru, the Philippines and India. First, Living in Peru has a fluff piece about how Peruvians are not eating enough potatoes, and that something must be done about it. It also says that “Peru has 2,800 of the 3,900 varieties of potatoes that exist in the world today.” I have no idea where they got those figures, whether they are close to the truth, or whether we even know the truth. But I’ll try to dig a little deeper and report back.
Then comes the Philippines Information Authority with news that a new potato variety is to be released in that country, bearing the name of the president. How sweet. The article says that the “original planting material was sourced” from the International Potato Centre (CIP), and previously had the codename “13.1.1”. The variety is blight-resistant and high in solids, and is supposed to be good for organic conditions. Now, it would have been interesting to know a little more about 13.1.1, but some rapid checking revealed nothing. Again, I will dig further.
And finally, news from India that a local farmer’s son, who went to the US for training in plant physiology and pathology, has now come back and set up a tissue culture lab on the family farm. Now that’s what I call technology transfer. But you wonder what kind of a farmer the father is. Not your typical Indian farmer, I’ll wager.
Nibbles: Eco-tourism, peas, apples, mozzarella
- USAID promotes eco-tourism in Uganda, no mention of agriculture.
- Genetics 101 (cont). Rebsie explains all.
- Irishman finds apples in Orange.
- Hold the pizza.
Wheat and climate change
A review paper in the latest Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment looks at what climate change will do to wheat, and what can be done about it. ((ORTIZ, R. et al. (2008). Climate change: Can wheat beat the heat?. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. DOI: 10.1016/j.agee.2008.01.019)) The lead author is deputy director general at the International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT), and the picture he paints must be keeping him up at nights.
There are 12 different types of places where wheat is grown around the world — so-called “mega-environments.” They range from “high rainfall, hot” (e.g. in Bangladesh) to “low rainfall, severe cold” (around Ankara in Turkey). Some are better than others. One of the best is mega-environment 1, which amounts to 32 million hectares in northwest Mexico, the Indo-Gangetic Plains and the Nile Valley. It accounts for 15% of global wheat production, and it is in trouble.
When you look at the likely 2050 climate, half of the area of the Indo-Gangetic Plains which is now in mega-environment 1 might well need to be re-classified from pretty ideal low rainfall, irrigated, temperate to heat-stressed, short season. That is, conditions will look more like the Gezira in Sudan or Kano in Nigeria. That will reduce yields, affecting 200 million people.
So wheat breeders will have to develop varieties that can maintain yields under higher temperatures, unless you want farmers to switch to another crop entirely. Which might be the easiest thing in some places, actually, but that’s another story.
You can breed for resistance to an abiotic stress such as heat by growing a wide range of genotypes under that stress and looking for the highest yielding genotypes, of course. But what breeders at CIMMYT are now increasingly doing is trying to identify the different physiological attributes which are associated with high yield under stress conditions — things like leaf chlorophyll content during grain filling, for example. And then stacking them up together in new varieties. That’s had some success in breeding for drought resistance. Let’s hope — for the sake of Indian wheat farmers — that it works for heat too.
Nibbles: AGRA, Andean potatoes, farmer factsheets, tequila, Dogon, yak milk
- AGRA’s first eight PhD students get to work.
- Papa Andina Regional Initiative assessed by CGIAR CAPrI. Can’t be bothered reading the whole thing? Try this.
- Factsheets for farmers in Kenya and Uganda; Luigi’s MIL not available for comment.
- Tequila for lunch: Jeremy comments: “Wish I could be at this seminar, at the University of California, Davis”.
- Dogon agriculture 101.
- Got yak milk?