- US subsidy system prevents diversification. Via.
- Chicken domestication; possibly more than you could ever want to know.
- Red bananas; Raul unavailable for comment.
- Filipino community registers agrobiodiversity.
- Tropical fruit diversity conserved, studied and consumed in the US. That includes the citron. ((Note to Jeremy: that would be Citrus medica.))
Domestication galore
Not sure how we missed the special issue of Annals of Botany on domestication. All open access too.
Nibbles: Carnival, pomegranates, cattle, potatoes
- Berry Go Round No. 2 is up with lots and lots of botanical links.
- Pomegranate juice manufacturer says its juice is best.
- Cattle and aurochs did the wild thing.
- The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has a potato genebank. With pic goodness.
Nibbles: Peas, corn, marama, peaches, bees
- Follow along with the adventures of an amateur pea breeder. Mendel comments: “go for it, girl”.
- And the corn (maize) genome is announced, apparently with recipes. Via.
- Namibians domesticate nutritious wild legume. Mendel comments: “what’s wrong with peas?”
- New Zealand (re)discovers square peaches. Mendel unavailable on this one.
- Honeybee evolution summarized.
Why organic tomatoes are good for you
I’ve been meaning to blog this for almost a month. R. Ford Denison (a name to reckon with) blogged about some of his own research that summarizes 10 years of research into the flavonoid content of tomatoes grown conventionally and organically. Bottom line is that the organic tomatoes contained almost double the flavonoids of conventionals. I’m not going to go into whether that’s a good thing or not. Instead, I’ll stress the point that Denison himself makes, about Darwinian agriculture.
Why do the organic tomatoes contain more flavonoids? Maybe because flavonoids play a part in combatting herbivory. And they are often produced in response to pest attacks, rather than all the time. So one reason that organic tomatoes contain more of these compounds — which are believed to be good for human health — is precisely because on an organic farm there are a few pests that attack the plants. No pests, no need for defense, no benefits for human health.
This is just one aspect of what Denison calls Darwinian agriculture, a fascinating approach to the whole question of just what is being selected. There is, as someone else wrote, grandeur in this view of life …