- Head of Convention on Biological Diversity says nothing to Reuters about climate change and agriculture.
- Link farm lists Top 50 Botany Blogs. We reciprocate.
- “[M]ost of us are the beneficiaries of millennia of acclimatization“. Rachel disses the Columbian Exchange.
- “Men didn’t grind, let alone gentlemen.” Rachel disses Iberian explorers.
- Back40 has a beef with supermarket nonsense. There is grass-fed beef in America.
- The Naked Pint: beers gone wild
Which came first, beer or bread?
Rachel Laudan tackles the perennial question that keeps food and agriculture nerds awake long into the night … by saying it’s a bad question and asking some better ones.
What problems did grains solve, what tools did humans have? Well, the problem they solved was one of fuel. Humans need fuel. Grains, if you can process them for fewer calories than you get out at the end, are great sources of fuel. Maybe you can even increase the calories by processing.
Blast! That’s another blog I’m going to have to subscribe to. h/t The Scientist Gardener.
Nibbles: Rice domestication, H5N1, Fisheries, Crop maps, Grafting, Livestock video, Perennial conference, Goat genetic patterns, Satellites, Large seeds, W4RA
- Dorian Fuller rounds up rice domestication latest.
- Deconstructing the persistence of H5N1.
- Artisanal fisheries and climate change don’t mix. No-take reserves, anyone?
- Mo’ better crop mapping.
- Multi-variety fruit trees for sale. Perfect Christmas gift.
- For your consideration: video on livestock science.
- First International Perennial Grain Breeding Workshop. Tell us about it, please!
- History of goat pastoralism. The revenge of geography.
- SciDev on remote sensing for drought and other disasters. IWMI presumably knows all about that.
- Boffins find seed size gene. Oregon State University Seed Laboratory doesn’t care.
- Web Alliance for Re-greening Africa. New one on me.
It’s been a good week for the genomes
Cucumber. Tomato. Pig. Horse. A veritable cornucopia of crops and livestock. And from it will doubtless emerge fascinating scientific insights.
- “[H]orses have a newly forming part in their genetic make-up which shows the evolutionary process in action in a way that has not been seen before.”
- “[N]ew research applications and innovations at many points in the pork chain.”
- “[F]ar more is going on in the phloem than anybody … had previously expected.”
(The tomato is just an advanced map; no giant claims there, yet.)
This is really important science, no doubt about it. But I’d like to see a moratorium on claims that any of this is going to improve anybody’s food security. It hasn’t, yet. And personally I doubt that it ever will, but maybe that’s just me. I bought into the dream along with everyone else. Back in 1982 I agreed that cereals would fix their own nitrogen, that photosynthesis would be rejigged to become more efficient, that seed storage proteins would be made more completely nutritious.
The thing is, cereals don’t need to be engineered. It might help, but it hasn’t happened yet and in the meantime legumes are there to take up the slack. Changing C3 plants into C4 plants hasn’t happened yet either, and one has to wonder how much it will help poor farmers in the hot environments that make C4 more efficient. Seed storage proteins have been rejigged; Monsanto built a high-lysine maize, but it vanished more or less without trace because conventionally-bred high-lysine maizes are far cheaper and more attractive to the small-scale farmers who really need better nutrition. Nobody back then was too worried about drought or flooding; tolerance to submersion has now been engineered into rice and could be useful.
Overall, though, I wonder how much more progress might have been made had “ordinary” plant breeding been as easy and attractive as messing about with DNA directly. I also wonder how many surprises like this one are in store:
Indirect costs of a nontarget pathogen mitigate the direct benefits of a virus-resistant transgene in wild Cucurbita
Translation: Transgenic squashes — and almost all of them being grown commercially in the US and Mexico are transgenic — are protected from zucchini yellow mosaic virus. Plants that carry the resistance genes suffer considerably more wilt disease as a result. Hey ho, let’s see if we can add wilt resistance to the mix, shall we?
So, farewell then, Claude Levi-Strauss
Like the Archaeobotanist, I too was astonished by the news that Claude Levi-Strauss had died today because I was not aware that he hadn’t died many years ago. Rather than explain why a blog about agrobiodiversity should mark the passing of a centenarian and seminal anthropologist, let me just urge you to visit Dorian Fuller’s blog and read his appreciation and the sample myth on the origins of agriculture that Levi-Strauss collected.
It shows that almost all of us are ignorant of the origins of our foods and food-processing technologies. Bonus points if you spot the other ways in which the Munduruku explanation of the origins of their agriculture might be not the whole “truth”.