- Breeders called on to save key Afghani crop. No, not really.
- GMOs not incompatible with organic, round 2.
- The Columbian Exchange. People though, not crops.
- USDA chief botanist was into Cannabis shock.
- Novel way of growing rice unveiled.
- Two livestock pdfs: What 2010 means for farm animal genetic resources conservation. And a book on European local breeds.
Nibbles: Conservation, Women, Subsidies, Bees, Microbes, Rhizobia, Genebanks, Chicken history, Nordic genebank
- Academics say conservation of biodiversity does not benefit the poor. Maybe they’re talking about the wrong kind of biodiversity?
- Innovation of the Week: Feeding Communities by Focusing on Women. I think my irony detector may be on the fritz.
- All you ever wanted to know about farm subsidies in the US. h/t Food Politics.
- The Bittersweet Dreams of Uruguay’s Beekeepers. Sad.
- State microbes! Really fun, and informative. Any better ideas?
- More microbes: The evolution of nitrogen fixation. Absolutely fascinating.
- Slideshow on genebanks in southern Africa.
- Pre-Columbian, Polynesian chickens in Chile not Polynesian and probably not pre-Columbian. Blast! Why must fun theories always run up against the brick wall of facts?
- NordGen’s annual report: crops, forests, livestock.
Deconstructing the spread of agriculture
Did agriculture move in the hands of people, or with the words of people? Or, somewhat more prosaically:
Two alternative models have been proposed to explain the spread of agriculture in Europe during the Neolithic period. The demic diffusion model postulates the spreading of farmers from the Middle East along a Southeast to Northeast axis. Conversely, the cultural diffusion model assumes transmission of agricultural techniques without substantial movements of people.
Actually not just Europe. And the jury is still out. Two recent paper both tilt towards cultural diffusion, both in Europe (which is where the above quote comes from; but not everybody agrees) and Island SE Asia. This sort of work is mainly done by anthropologists and human geneticists. Sometimes the genetics of livestock or crops are brought into play, but only rarely both at the same time. A grand synthesis of human, livestock and crop genetic data, archaeology and anthropology remains to be done…
Nibbles: Recognizing breeds, Cannabis in New Zealand, Farming systems data, Maize inbreds, Zinc in wheat, Markets for nature, Ramie, Milk and drought, ELBARN
- Computer program recognizes cattle breeds.
- NZ dope getting stronger? Maybe, and I hope so, but probably impossible to tell from this study.
- Need farming systems data?
- Psst, wanna know how to determine the essentially derived status of maize inbred lines?
- High zinc wheat works.
- Michael Jenkins of Forests Trends on using markets to save biodiversity.
- The phylogeny of ramie and its wild relatives sorted out. Sort of.
- Pearl millet landraces are the best under drought.
- Area action plans for local breeds in Europe are out.
Carnival of Evolution
There’s a new edition of the Carnival of Evolution up at Evolution: Education and Outreach, the “official blog” of the journal of that name, and it contains three items of direct interest to agrobiodiversity fans (four if you count our submission, but you’ve already read that, right?).
- Christie Wilcox reminds us that domesticated animals have smaller brains, relative to their body size, than their wild counterparts. Are they actually not as intelligent though?
- Sticking with domestication, Jason Goldman reckons dogs have evolved to take advantage of the existing mechanisms that bond parents to their children. I can vouch for that.
- And the author of Byte Size Biology takes on the gene transfer that sees pea-aphids making for themselves the carotenoids that colour some morphs orange. That’s a first for animal synthesis of carotenoids, essential compounds for healthy human life. Where did the pea aphids get their genes? From a fungus, by means of horizontal gene transfer. which is interesting in itself and also suggests a much simpler and perhaps more acceptable alternative to making transgenic staple crops rich in carotenoids: let’s just stick the gene into people!