Climate change

March 18, 2013March 18, 2013

Food security is not about scarcity

The idea of scarcity is perhaps the biggest challenge we face in addressing the world’s food needs. As long as food security policy and programs remain focused on solving scarcity, food security will remain focused on technical fixes for hunger: greater technology, greater inputs, greater efficiency. This narrative of scarcity has trumped any reasonable effort to measure actual levels of production in the world today, the return on greater technological inputs versus solving the causes of waste in existing systems, and even served as a useful foil through which to obscure the deepening unsustainability of the very agricultural systems that are often treated as a model, those here in the United States and Europe.

Edward Carr’s first blast on Doing Food Security Differently. No disagreement from me, yet.

March 18, 2013March 18, 2013

Brainfood: Perennial wheat, Tree diversity, Fire, Dog domestication, Coffee diversity, Uganda cassava diversity, Sorghum structure, Japanese pastures, Maize diversity, Protection, Pigeonpea hybrid, Wheat nutritional composition, Pollinator diversity, Cajanus gap, Tree diversity, Resilient seed systems

Perennial cereal crops: An initial evaluation of wheat derivatives. Early days still.
Effects of silviculture on native tree species richness: interactions between management, landscape context and regional climate. Encourage mosaics, and don’t harvest everything.
The global fire–productivity relationship. It’s humped, and will be changed by climate change, though for different reasons for different productivity levels. Wonder about the fire-diversity relationship, though.
Ancient DNA Analysis Affirms the Canid from Altai as a Primitive Dog. Bit of a judgement call though.
Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Just what you would expect, given the “morpho-taxonomic species delimitations and genetic units.”
Genetic diversity among farmer-preferred cassava landraces in Uganda. Landraces only a bit more diverse than elites overall, but half of them quite different.
Correspondence between genetic structure and farmers’ taxonomy — a case study from dry-season sorghum landraces in northern Cameroon. Genetic units = farmer-recognized landraces.
Plant diversity, productivity and nutritive value change following abandonment of public pastures in Japan. The best way to restore productivity (diversity doesn’t change much) in abandoned pastures is to start grazing them again.
Genetic variability of maize stover quality and the potential for genetic improvement of fodder value. You can improve stover and grain yield simultaneously, in hybrids. In theory.
Governance regime and location influence avoided deforestation success of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon. Total protection better than sustainable use. Ouch. Meanwhile, in the USA…
ICPH 2671 – the world’s first commercial food legume hybrid. Yet another milestone on the road to the complete eradication of farmers’ rights.
Genetic improvement of grain protein content and other health-related constituents of wheat grain. Need to figure out the genetic control mechanisms, and then exploit “alien” germplasm using MAS. Oh, and GMOs too.
Quantifying the impacts of bioenergy crops on pollinating insect abundance and diversity: a field-scale evaluation reveals taxon-specific responses. Diversity begets diversity.
Diversity and geographical gaps in Cajanus scarabaeoides (L.) Thou. germplasm conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. Now collectors know exactly where to go.
Tree species diversity increases fine root productivity through increased soil volume filling. Below-ground complementarity is good for everyone’s roots, presumably good for the community too.
Making seed systems more resilient to stress. Foster informal innovation, but also information exchange (presumably including of the formal kind).

March 12, 2013March 12, 2013

Nibbles: GRISP video, Savory management, Herbarium digitization, Fancy NASA map, Range photos, Fancy phenotyping, Ghana research, African food, Neotropical tree book, Epigenetics of nutrition, Liberian veg seed, Wheat belly, Germany & India

The future of rice science. It says here.
Is Holistic Management the SRI of livestock?
Another online botanical database to contend with. Eventually.
NASA maps poleward vegetation shift. I suspect the Progressive Cattleman will be onto that in a flash. See what I did there?
More fancy aerial science, this time at the service of phenotyping. And more of the same.
Ghana’s agricultural research system deconstructed. Would have been nice to mention the genebank.
African food, in Africa and America. And in audio.
Propagating tropical trees for fun and profit.
The epigenetics of maternal nutrition, courtesy of USDA.
Liberians showered in seeds.
Kim, are you listening? This one’s for you.
IPK reaches out to India.

March 11, 2013March 11, 2013

Brainfood: Flower microbiome, Salt screening, Sustainble fisheries, Pollinator interactions, Wild pollinators, Forest loss, Landraces, Fisheries collapse, Quinoa diversity, Potted plants, Wheat diversity, Goat diversity, Genomics of domestication

Unexpected Diversity during Community Succession in the Apple Flower Microbiome. Could be important in disease management.
Plant Tissue Culture: A Useful Measure for the Screening of Salt Tolerance in Plants. But lots of different ways to do it.
Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Some. But probably not enough. Here’s the industry spin. And the NY Times does a number on it.
Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-Occurrence and Function. Extinctions and phenological shifts have occurred, but the system has shown resilience. It is unlikely, however, to continue to do so.
Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance. Don’t you sometimes wish titles left something to the imagination? NPR breaks it down for ya, but doesn’t add much to the title.
Continental estimates of forest cover and forest cover changes in the dry ecosystems of Africa between 1990 and 2000. About 20 Mha of forest loss, not 34 Mha. Still too much, though. But how did FAO get it so wrong?
Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. Local varieties can scale out. And should be used in breeding.
Genetic and life-history changes associated with fisheries-induced population collapse. Phenotypic changes during Eurasian perch Baltic Sea fisheries collapse could be evolution, but when you look at the genetics it looks more like immigration of unadapted interlopers. Which might be bad for recovery.
Variable activation of immune response by quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) prolamins in celiac disease. Quinoa may be gluten-free, but it can still give you grief, and some varieties are far worse than others.
Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants. It’s artificial selection, Jim, but not as we know it.
Wheat Cultivar Performance and Stability between No-Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Tested 21 cultivars for performance under late-planted no-till system and — guess what? — performance varied.
Genetic diversity and structure in Asian native goat analyzed by newly developed SNP markers. They originated in W Asia, and then admixtured (admixed?) in the E to different extents. Yeah, I thought we knew that already too, but scientists gotta make a living.
A Bountiful Harvest: Genomic Insights into Crop Domestication Phenotypes. The mutations that underpinned domestication came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Like this one in maize, for example.

March 4, 2013March 4, 2013

Nibbles: Hunger meet, Collecting info, Mapping species, Fair trade, Irish Famine, Rice changes, Food podcast, Cow genomics

Hidden hunger experts come out into the open.
Bioversity germplasm collecting reports go online.
Where the threatened species are.
Fair trade, shmare trade.
The Lumper makes a comeback.
Rice innovation in Bangladesh, abandonment in Nepal.
Cherfas smears himself in bog butter for new podcast.
Genomics and the livestock industry.