So, the UN Climate Change Conference, otherwise known as COP23, has started here in Bonn, and we’re trying to make sure the voice of agriculture is heard, on the fringes if nowhere else. The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) is busy touting its vision for an agricultural transformation under climate change. With a bunch of partners, they’ve organized a series of side events on the different dimensions that such a transformation will entail, including, perhaps most relevant to us here, the role ofcrop breeding and improvement. All the usual social media channels are in play, so follow along, and send in your questions and harangues.
Nibbles: Halloween roots, Fred’s great potatoes, Ellis on TV, CIP genebank online, Weird potato, Weird watermelon, Paul Gepts, Caucasian sheep, Livestock hybrids, COP23
- Halloween is an agricultural thing. Basically.
- Frederick the Great had a thing for potatoes. Among other things.
- CIP genebank manager on TV. He has a thing for potatoes too. As you can tell from his new website.
- Pop quiz: Can you find this N American potato in the CIP genebank?
- The extraordinary story of the ancient Native American crookneck watermelon. Bet it goes well with S. jamesii.
- Paul Gepts gets award. No word on his thoughts on potatoes, but he does like beans.
- Transhumance lives in the Caucasus.
- What in tarnation is a zubron?
- Making the case for climate action on agriculture at COP23. And vice versa.
Feeding another 825 million people is easy
A paper just published in Nature Geoscience has terrific news for anyone worried about the sustainability of agriculture. 1 It should be possible to grow 10% more calories and 19% more protein while simultaneously using 14% less rainwater and 12% less irrigation water. And that, the authors say “would feed an additional 825 million people”.
Kyle Frankel Davis and colleagues reach this happy conclusion by modelling the effect of shifting crops around to where they yield the most, taking into account things like how much water is available and which crops do best under those circumstances. Globally, you do it by increasing groundnuts, roots, soybeans, sorghum and tubers at the expense of millets, rice, sugar crops and wheat, but the details depend on where you are. In western Russia, for example, you cut down on the millets, sugar beet and sunflowers and plant rainfed sorghum, soybeans, tubers and wheat. In the Nile Delta, groundnuts, maize and sorghum replace sugar beet and wheat. In other places the substitutions involve more crops.
Their detailed look at the outputs of the models offers some important observations. For water, 42 countries, many of which currently don’t have enough for their farms, would save at least 20% of their water needs. And 63 countries that currently depend on imports for a lot of their food would see their production of protein and calories increase by at least 20%, boosting food security.
There’s bad news too: in Australia’s Murray-Darling basin, northern India and the US midwest, no choice of crops offers sustainable water use.
Optimistic optimisation
This approach is not entirely new. In 2006 Christoph Müller and his colleagues did a similar kind of optimisation exercise under which crops were allocated to the areas in which they would be most productive, ignoring trade barriers, transportation costs and subsidies. 2 That model found that you could grow all the food humanity needs on just 2 million km2, whereas you need 35 million km2 if you try and grow as much food as possible locally. 3
The Davis et al. study is somewhat more realistic, constraining the shifts so that there’s no loss of crop diversity, expansion of croplands or impact on nutrient and feed availability. They also say that there would not be much impact on rural livelihoods.
Both papers are making important points about the contribution of agriculture to global water and carbon cycles, although I guess the take-home is that the way agriculture is organised now is really, really inefficient. That’s clearly true.
But still …
I see no prospect of any shift to the kind of global distribution that either paper imagines.
What are people on the 33 million km2 supposed to do instead of growing food? Hang around waiting for a shipment? Which they buy with what?
And given how wedded people are to their “traditional” crops, even if those crops have been around less than a couple of hundred years, I can’t imagine them shifting just because it would be more sustainable.
Davis et al. say:
Of course, there are probably cultural barriers and dietary preferences that may limit the application of this strategy in certain ways — considerations that may be better accommodated in future analyses by constraining the production quantities of each crop.
It probably needs world peace too.
Pass the bottle
Brainfood: Hot seeds, Diet diversity double, Finger millet GxE, Botanical gardens, CWR prebreeding double, Pathogen spread, Dog genomics, Cryo calculations, Biodiversity & productivity double, Movies & conservation
- High-temperature stress during drying improves subsequent rice (Oryza sativa L.) seed longevity. Up to 45°C, because it triggers a stress protection mechanism.
- Agricultural diversification and dietary diversity: A feminist political ecology of the everyday experiences of landless and smallholder households in northern Ghana. Production diversity at the farm level is necessary for dietary diversity, but not sufficient.
- Critical review of the emerging research evidence on agricultural biodiversity, diet diversity, and nutritional status in low- and middle-income countries. Production diversity at the farm level has a small but consistent positive association with dietary diversity.
- Exploiting Genetic Diversity for Adaptation and Mitigation of Climate Change: A Case of Finger Millet in East Africa. Some varieties are good everywhere, others only good in some places.
- Ex situ conservation of plant diversity in the world’s botanic gardens. A third of all known plants, and half of endangered ones, are to be found in botanic gardens, but the tropics are under-represented.
- Prebreeding Using Wild Species for Genetic Enhancement of Grain Legumes at ICRISAT. It’s a drag, but someone has to do it.
- Wide crosses of durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) reveal good disease resistance, yield stability, and industrial quality across Mediterranean sites. Not such a drag after all.
- Quantifying airborne dispersal routes of pathogens over continents to safeguard global wheat supply. Incredibly fancy maths says Yemen is the key.
- Demographic history, selection and functional diversity of the canine genome. There’s a lot here, in particular the genes that were involved in early phenotypic differentiation from wolves, and evidence of continuous geneflow with wilds canids. But the thing that really got me is that humans and dogs show parallel evolution in the ability to process complex carbohydrates, associated with agriculture.
- Probabilistic viability calculations for cryopreserving vegetatively propagated collections in genebanks. One Excel spreadsheet to rule all cryo.
- Biodiversity effects in the wild are common and as strong as key drivers of productivity. Meta-analysis of observations in nature supports results of experimental work.
- Biodiversity promotes primary productivity and growing season lengthening at the landscape scale. “…a large species pool is important for adaption to climate change.” An example of the above.
- Considering connections between Hollywood and biodiversity conservation. Conservationists need to get out more.