Category: Breeding

Something for the weekend. I hope you enjoy this special edition of Brainfood focusing on citizen science, Indigenous knowledge and participatory research. Do you like themed Brainfood editions like this? There will be another one on Monday, as it happens. They’re more tricky to produce, but if there’s significant interest I may make the extra effort. Let me know, and suggest topics.

• The value of climate-resilient seeds for smallholder adaptation in sub-Saharan Africa. Up to USD 2 billion in Malawi and Tanzania over the next 30 years.
• Agricultural productivity and deforestation: Evidence from input subsidies and ethnic favoritism in Malawi. Cheaper fertilizers increased yields and decreased deforestation. Better seeds would help too, no doubt (see above).
• Channels used to deliver agricultural information and knowledge to smallholder farmers. Farmer groups and demonstration plots work well to spread the news about fertilizers and seeds.
• Integrating Conventional and Participatory Crop Improvement for Smallholder Agriculture Using the Seeds for Needs Approach: A Review. Combine high-tech centralized and participatory decentralized germplasm evaluation and breeding approaches to get those better seeds to farmer groups and their demonstration plots.
• Citizen science breathes new life into participatory agricultural research. A review. Why do the participatory, decentralized bit? Here’s why. Fortunately, there’s an app for it…
• A global resource for exploring and exploiting genetic variation in sorghum crop wild relatives. If those seeds include sorghum, you could start with this lot.
• Gendered differences in crop diversity choices: A case study from Papua New Guinea. And don’t forget gender as you do all this participatory, decentralized stuff. For example, in PNG, the women are into marketing, the men into tradition.
• Crowd breeding of Danish apple cultivars. No word on gender differences, alas.
• Modelling illustrates that genomic selection provides new opportunities for intercrop breeding. Here’s the high-tech, centralized bit, or at least a model of it, ripe for mashing up with citizen science.
• Dissection of the domestication‐shaped genetic architecture of lettuce primary metabolism. More high-tech, centralized stuff, the real thing this time. Which can now be used to breed a better lettuce, hopefully by lots of citizens growing the stuff in their gardens and providing salad tasting results through a nifty app.
• Indigenous and Local Knowledge Practices and Innovations for Enhancing Food Security Under Climate Change: Examples from Mijikenda Communities in Coastal Kenya. Maybe farmers should run participatory programmes, with scientists as the citizens.
• Micronutrient composition and microbial community analysis across diverse landraces of the Ethiopian orphan crop enset. Don’t know how you’d do citizen science on this, but I bet somebody does.
• Discovering the indigenous microbial communities associated with the natural fermentation of sap from the cider gum Eucalyptus gunnii. Someone mention traditional fermentation practices?
• The Milpa Game: a Field Experiment Investigating the Social and Ecological Dynamics of Q’eqchi’ Maya Swidden Agriculture. Citizen science is not a game. No, wait…
• The Ancient Tree Inventory: a summary of the results of a 15 year citizen science project recording ancient, veteran and notable trees across the UK. Not a game indeed: very serious, but fun, definitely fun.