Category: Breeding

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Nigerian farmers do their own research

From allAfrica.com, an astonishing story of what farmers can achieve, with a little assistance, when they start investigating their options.

Abdul Malik, a farmer aged 30, says he gathers 15 to 17 100kg bags of millet using improved varieties, where he used to gather only 10. With his increased income, he bought two new soil tilling machines this year, where before he had just one. “I’m satisfied at this level [of production,]” he says, “but I continue to hope for more improvement.”

The improved varieties were gathered from 16 African countries and trialled by the farmers on their own land in northern Nigeria. The project, supported by IFAD, also examined fertilizers and methods to control weeds, and promises to deliver benefits beyond the farmers and their immediate families to middlemen and others. There’s a lot more in the article and an accompanying photo essay. ((Slightly worried that allAfrica.com may put articles behind a paywall at some point in the future, so here’s a link to a site scraper that perhaps will keep it available. Hard to understand, though, where they got the “hybrid” in their title from, or why they tagged it “biotechnology” and “IITA”.))

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Organic seeds enmeshed

Grain has published a new briefing on “the politics of organic seed certification.” It makes all the usual points, most of which boil down to the fact that when there is a fixed cost for something — anything — bigger players benefit. There’s plenty of good information in the briefing, and in the annex that details the requirements of different regulatory bodies. But the one fundamental question I don’t see asked, let alone answered.

Why did the bodies that represent organic growers even contemplate legislation that would make “organic” seeds compulsory?

Seriously, this is something that has bothered me from the start. Lord

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Africa needs an old-fashioned green revolution

An article in The Africa Report, published by the Rockefeller Foundation, outlines several good news stories achieved “with not a petri dish-induced genetic manipulation in sight”. While one may quibble with the details — how many engineered genes can you actually see — one cannot fault the conclusion: old-fashioned breeding is more likely to deliver the goods than GMOs. The article is at pains to point out that the early emphasis of the Rockefeller Foundation and Bill Gates on biotechnology was “slow and expensive”. Conventional breeding, by contrast, has resulted in fast-growing disease-resistant cassava and better bean varieties. ((“Roughly half the beans grown on the continent are eaten by weevils, not by people.” That’s astonishing.)) The article also stresses the need for investment in agriculture:

There is broad agreement among economists that countries like India, China and Vietnam all kick-started their economies by accumulating an agricultural surplus, which not only created healthier and more productive workforces, but also released manpower that would otherwise have been devoted to farming.

No argument on that score. In other respects, though, I’d have to say that the “new” approach doesn’t go quite far enough. For example, it contrasts Africa’s variable landscape with the “uniform” coastal plains of Asia that responded to “the high-yield variety of paddy rice”. Professor Mark Laing, the expert quoted to support that view, goes on:

[I]n Asia … you are able to use a single superior variety suitable for this habitat. This can’t work in Africa, because it doesn’t have these coherent zones. For example, between South Africa and Zimbabwe you need four different varieties of soybean.

Four whole varieties! Africa’s farmers deserve better. They deserve a rich diversity of crops and a rich diversity of varieties. While old-fashioned breeding, suitably beefed up with better training for African breeders, is a good start, making full use of farmers’ own expertise as participants in the breeding process would be even better.

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Getting ready for changing climates

Four papers together give an insight into what global warming promises for agriculture and agriculturalists, and how to deal with it.

ResearchBlogging.orgSome people will tell you that global warming is something we can cope with because it won’t actually create any new climates, just shift the old ones around a bit on the the surface of the Earth. They’re wrong. ((Williams, J. W., Jackson, S. T., & Kutzbach, J. E. (2007). Projected distributions of novel and disappearing climates by 2100 AD. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(14), 5738-5742.)) John Williams and his colleagues published an article in PNAS in the spring that shows conclusively that even the IPCC’s B1 scenario, in which modest reduction sees CO2 stabilized at 550 parts per million by 2100 AD, creates considerable risk of completely novel climates.

Continue reading “Getting ready for changing climates”

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Three into one for new wheat

Scientists at the Australian CSIRO and Sydney University, working with colleagues at CIMMYT in Mexico, have built a chromosome that brings together the disease resistance genes of two wild wheat species into a single genetic package. ((L. Ayala-Navarrete, H. S. Bariana, R. P. Singh, J. M. Gibson, A. A. Mechanicos and P. J. Larkin (2007) Trigenomic chromosomes by recombination of Thinopyrum intermedium and Th. ponticum translocations in wheat. Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 116: 63-75.)) This should make life easier for wheat breeders; while they may be able to find valuable genes in wheat’s wild relatives, those genes are often accompanied by large blocks of other genes that often bring bad qualities. Getting the harmful genes out of the cross is apparently sometimes so difficult that breeders give up.

Thinopyrum intermedium (intermediate wheatgrass) contributed resistance to barley dwarf yellow virus, while Th. ponticum (tall wheatgrass) supplied a couple of rust resistance genes. They are both on the short arm of one of the wheat chromosomes, but without the baggage normally associated with genes from wild relatives. Crosses with bread wheats resulted in fertile offspring with the required resistance. These are being used to study the genes further in search of molecular markers that will help breeders to identify valuable crosses.

According to a press release:

By developing new DNA markers and by careful testing the team has produced a number of the disease resistance packages for wheat breeders, making it faster and easier to include these important disease resistance traits in future wheat varieties.