- First off — a pretty big deal. Taylor & Francis have made a bunch of papers related to sustainable agriculture freely available, but only until the end of December. Happy whatever holiday won’t offend you.
- Twentieth-century changes in the genetic composition of Swedish field pea metapopulations. Metapopulations have become isolated populations. In genebanks.
- Effects of different irrigation systems on the biodiversity of species-rich hay meadows. Change from the traditional irrigation system has affected biodiversity levels, but not a huge amount.
- Research regarding the use of wheat biodiversity for obtaining some cereal-based fermented mashes. Let’s go straight to what we need to know here: the best mash come from spelt wheat. Oh, to be the one doing the organoleptic characterization.
- Cultivation and high capitalization of medicinal and aromatic plants in the Romanian-Bulgarian cross-border region. If you’re really interested, there’s a database that brings it all together.
- Crop biodiversity, productivity and production risk: Panel data micro-evidence from Ethiopia. More crops = more production. But the devil is in the details, I suspect.
- Identification of gaps in pearl millet germplasm from East and Southern Africa conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. We used to do this sort of thing by hand in my day.
- At3g08030 transcript: a molecular marker of seed ageing. This mRNA could predict germination performance of a dry seed lot across species. Good for genebanks?
- Assembling a core collection from the flax world collection maintained by Plant Gene Resources of Canada. You don’t hear much about core collections these days, why is that?
Nibbles: Vegetables, UK funding, Oz funding, Oz genebank, Jefferson, Hawaiian food, Markets, Tree seeds, NUS journal, Geographic targeting, ITPGRFA, Arabica and climate, Protected areas, European farmland biodiversity, Sustainable use, Ethiopian seed video
- Palestinian rooftop gardens. Including crucifers, no doubt.
- Brits support work with rice and wheat wild relatives. Among other things. They’ll probably use some of these genomics things.
- Aussies support sweet potatoes. HarvestPlus rejoices.
- That new Australian genebank. Will it have any sweet potatoes?
- The agricultural legacy of Thomas Jefferson. It doesn’t say here, but I bet he was into sweet potato.
- Hawaiian menus. What, no sweet potato?
- Forget biotech, the road to sexy agriculture is via the supermarket. Where you can buy sweet potato. Maybe even of the organic persuasion.
- Or maybe better tree seeds. Even in the Nordic countries. Or the US. Is cacao a tree?
- Plans for special edition of Sustainability on neglected crops. Like amaranth?
- Geographic targeting reaches roots/tubers. Using this newfangled atlas? Or no?
- Treaty and Consortium love-in filmed. Thanks for sharing. It’s all part of this CGIAR perestroika thing, no doubt.
- What that Kew coffee extinction paper really said.
- Protected areas need work. Especially for coffee (see above).
- Yeah but protected areas is not the only way to go, and Europe now has a bunch of biodiversity indicators for farmland. I guess it’s all part of some big plan.
- Policy brief on sustainable use of PGR. Or, as we used to call it, on farm conservation.
- Which you can kind of see happening here.
Taro in the Levant
I was reminded during a recent trip back to Cyprus (my first visit in 20 years after living there for quite a while) of the curious fact that taro is a staple of traditional Cypriot cuisine, something of an outlier in the Mediterranean. Called kolokassi, the tuber is prepared in a number of ways, and the young offshoots, or suckers, are also taken fried. You can see these in the photo, labelled “poulles.”. Peter J. Matthews has this to say in his “Genetic Diversity in Taro, and the Preservation of Culinary Knowledge“:
In Cyprus only one cultivar of taro is grown, but there are at least nine distinct ways of preparing taro (skhara, vrasto, souppa skourdalia, tiganites, kappamas, yiakhni, psito, moussakas, Matthews 1998a) (Figure 4). The fermentation of taro starch, and the edibility of leaves (petioles and blades) are not known in Cyprus. All the methods recorded use heat to reduce acridity — by simmering, boiling, stewing, frying, roasting, grilling, and baking (steaming was not reported). For each named dish, the details of preparation varied from person to person and village to village. The range of dishes is not large, compared to the range in Japan (Matthews 1995), but does involve a greater range of methods for applying heat.
You can find out more in the book “The Global Diversity of Taro: Ethnobotany and Conservation,” in which Dr Matthews has also had a hand. Poulles are not mentioned, which makes me think their consumption may be a relatively recent innovation.
It’s not clear where that one Cypriot cultivar may have come from, though Matthews says that the crop “is likely to have reached Cyprus in ancient times from India or Africa, via the Levant or Egypt.” That makes sense, but will be difficult to verify, as there is precious little in the way of germplasm collections in the region between Europe and India. I would imagine Egypt in particular would be fertile territory for a bit of collecting. I wasn’t able to find any ancient Egyptians representations of the plant, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they exist.
Nibbles: Biodiversity economics, ICARDA social network, Beyond food miles, Heirlooms on BBC, Cannabis, Research funding, Cacao diversity, Agriculture from the air, Sustainable intensification example, Research whine, Japanese botanic garden visit, European PGR network, Tribal Glycene, Youth in agriculture
- Oxford Review of Economic Policy has special volume on biodiversity economics. Not much ag, though, settle down.
- ICARDA announces on Twitter the existence of a new Facebook page which looks a bit like the old one.
- It’s the fertilizer miles, stupid.
- Great British Food Revival does heirloom carrots. Oh and beer.
- Good news for a particular agricultural biodiversity subsector from Amsterdam and Colorado. The Dude unavailable for comment. For obvious reasons.
- If you’re from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda and are doing research on Neglected and Underutilized Species you’ll be interested in this call or research proposals from ISF.
- Bioversity deconstructs that paper on the spatial analysis of Theobroma diversity. I still don’t quite get why they didn’t do the gap analysis.
- Farming from the air. And more along the same lines. Or polygons, I suppose I should say. Can you estimate diversity from the air? I bet you can.
- Sustainable intensification in (sort of) action.
- Damn rice farmers not playing ball.
- Oxford botany geeks visit Japan, identify wood of bench in noodle bar.
- 13th meeting ECPGR Steering Committee. All the documents you’ll need. And then some.
- Soybean as a vegetable. Possibly an acquired taste.
- How to keep young people on the farm? “Perhaps the first point to recognise is that the evidence base on which to build policy and programmes is frighteningly thin.”
Where is wasabi?
That Nibble yesterday about the BEGIN Japanology TV programme on roots and tubers led to some more digging around, as it were, and eventually I unearthed this gem on wasabi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qq30ya3ui4Which reminded me that one of my early posts on this blog was about Wasabia japonica. What’s strange about that old post ((Apart from the dreadful habit I had at the time of trying to alliterate every damn title.)) is that six years on I can’t imagine writing something like that without including a link to a WIEWS report on how many genebank accessions there are of the crop around the world. And I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing. Anyway, two, as is happens, and not where you’d think. There. I feel better now.