- Barley seed ageing: genetics behind the dry elevated pressure of oxygen ageing and moist controlled deterioration. There’s seed ageing and seed ageing, genetically speaking.
- Estimates of effective population size and inbreeding in South African indigenous chicken populations: implications for the conservation of unique genetic resources. “Conservation flocks” aren’t working.
- Seed laws, certification and standardization: outlawing informal seed systems in the Global South. The Man uses more than just IPR.
- Farmland biodiversity and agricultural management on 237 farms in 13 European and 2 African regions. The more agriculture, the less biodiversity…
- An Underground Revolution: Biodiversity and Soil Ecological Engineering for Agricultural Sustainability. …but you can do something about it…
- Warming and fertilization alter the dilution effect of host diversity on disease severity. …and this is why you should: plant diversity means better protection against pests and diseases.
- Multi-country evidence that crop diversification promotes ecological intensification of agriculture. No, really.
- Assessing the conservation value of ex situ seed bank collections of endangered wild plants. It’s not just the number of species.
- Biotechnology or organic? Extensive or intensive? Global or local? A critical review of potential pathways to resolve the global food crisis. “…no single pathway will work in every situation.”
Nibbles: Coffee taxonomy, Agarwood trade, Apios promotion, Dog species concept, Seed collecting, Kudzu control, ICARDA chickpeas, Ancient maize beer, Quinoa landscapes, History of domestication, Breeding mistakes, EU breeding value, Priming, Wild flower ecotypes, Vitellaria use
- Coffee botany resources.
- Uncovering the illegal agarwood trade.
- Developing the potato bean. First step: find a new name.
- Dog taxonomy explained.
- Project Baseline sets a, ahem, baseline, for studying plant diversity under climate change.
- Ok, random shout-out for my niece Francesca’s work on kudzu bug natural control. Because I can. And she’s fabulous.
- Blooming chickpeas!
- The inhabitants of Casas Grandes brewed maize beer in the 14th century. Well of course they did.
- Peruvian quinoa landscapes have a name: aynokas.
- Crop domestication 101.
- Where (commercial) breeders go wrong.
- Presumably none of above mistakes are made by EU plant breeding companies.
- Stimulating plant defences for faster response to pest and disease attack.
- Germany told to go for local meadow seeds.
- Use of shea butter trees goes way back.
Nibbles: Dog origins, Dutch wheat trials, Chinese agricultural origins, Grass endophytes
- This origin-of-dogs saga is getting tedious. Figure it out, already.
- Dutch wheat varieties still improving.
- Chinese ate wild grasses for 20,000 years before domesticating crops.
- Fungal endophyte helps tall fescue cope with drought and high temperatures, but some fungal genotypes more than others. And some do it without producing livestock toxins.
Transforming agriculture in Africa
I challenged our friend Andy Jarvis to summarize his just-out paper (with assorted co-authors) in Nature Climate Change 1 in a tweet, and this is what he came up with:
@AgroBioDiverse Model maps where + when farmer must change staple crop: beans, banana + maize hit most; sorghum, millet + cassava to rescue.
— Andy Jarvis (@ajarviscali) March 7, 2016
Not bad, but let’s unpack it a bit. Andy and his colleagues ran climate models for sub-Saharan Africa and looked at what would happen over the course of this century to the areas where different crops are currently being grown. Crucially, they tried to figure out when it would become untenable to continue growing a given crop in a given spot, thus triggering a switch to another crop altogether. Absent, that is, some kind of adaptation, such as bringing in varieties better suited to the new conditions, or altering agronomic practices.
As Andy says in his tweet, beans, banana and maize are the worst hit: farmers in 60% of the current African bean area, and about 30% of that of the other crops, will need to think about some other crop at some time during the 21st century. That hits home, as people who follow this blog will know that my mother-in-law’s farm is in maize-and-beans country. Well, fortunately, the highlands of central Kenya do not seem, in this analysis, to be too badly impacted. But what are the descendants of my mother-in-law’s equivalents in the dryer parts of East Africa, and in southern Africa, to do?
…farmers in the maize-mixed farming system might, in the long run, shift to more drought-tolerant cereals such as millet and sorghum, which we identify as viable substitutes in many locations, although these may experience yield reductions.
Alas, there’s more:
…in some areas in the southern Sahel and in dry parts of Southern and Eastern Africa even these drought-resilient crops might become increasingly marginal. For these areas, a more drastic transformation to livestock might be necessary, because cropping might not be a viable livelihood strategy in the long run.
Scary. Better get breeding.
Nibbles: CC & death, GBIF enhancements, Killer fungi, Lion trees, Old oaks, Gourmet ganja, Wild horses, Resistant cassava, Contested agronomy, p-values
- Climate change is going to hit us where we live. Or die.
- How to make GBIF more relevant for agrobiodiversity: a 10-point plan.
- Killer fungi on the loose? ‘Twas ever thus. But genomics will save us?
- Planting trees is good for lions too.
- There are still medieval oaks in England.
- “…where sommelier-like ‘budtenders’ sell gourmet ganja in a designer showroom.”
- Rewilding the wild horse.
- More about the cassava variety Kasetsart 50, poster child for CGIAR impact.
- It’s not just genetic resources that are contested. Yep, agronomy too.
- “Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.”