- Do they know it’s Christmas? Stocking-filling books for do-gooders.
- Wonder if any of them talk about using markets to deliver nutritious food.
- The surprising secrets of baobabs, among other plants. I thought we knew all there was to know about baobabs, what with all those factsheets.
- The Global Nutrition Report in 12 sound-bites. No sign of baobabs.
- Russians in a tizzy about their buckwheat. If only they’d had a factsheet.
- Everybody in a tizzy about European olive oil. Maybe they should try the American stuff?
- “When skunk was created the people doing it had no idea they were altering the ratios of CBD and THC — they just kept breeding the plants that gave the strongest high and threw the rest away.” Ouch. But fear not, help is at hand.
- Restoring wild turkey populations is screwing up its subspecific structure, pissing off taxonomists no end.
- Bolivians do not appreciate cheap Peruvian quinoa. Hipsters unavailable for comment.
- No, LA’s wild quinoa is not going to put too much of a dent in global food shortages, nor interest many hipsters, but it’s a fun story. Too bad wasn’t mashed up with the US crop wild relatives prize-winning paper.
- Cool crop domestication infographics.
- Plant geneticists are from Mars.
Nibbles: Farmers’ markets, Pacific news, Solanaceae news, Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, Tibetan barley, Rice roundup, David Lobell interview, Native American crops, Mesopotamian recipe, Insectophagy, Cities, Land purchases, Dormancy in evolution, Bad news from some crops, Good news from others, Creative Commons at Gates
- Hell of a week in the office again, so catching up on accumulated Nibbles on a Sunday. Because we’re here to serve.
- Cynical, funny take on farmers’ markets: “No, I don’t save seeds. That’s time-consuming nonsense for backyard gardeners. Yes, I’ve heard of Monsanto. I’m a farmer. I know about goddamn Monsanto.”
- Uncynical double from the Pacific: Samoa’s agricultural show and more detail on the aroid breeding work.
- High tech breeding of solanaceous crops. Nothing like this for aroids yet, alas. Yeah, but first you have to collect the little blighters.
- On the other hand, you also need an awareness of the past. Ask the Tibetans.
- And here’s kind of an example of that involving rice in India. Compare with that first Nibble: seed saving not just for backyard gardeners after all? Convinced? Go do it, no, really. Or read Bob Zeigler; you can listen to him too. We could go back and forward on this forever. I know: let’s get some data.
- And another example involving wild not-rice in the US and Canada. Though there are some things that haven’t survived quite as well among Native Americans as those wild rice recipes.
- And speaking of ancient recipes, here’s one from another wetland, far far away from the above.
- Yeah but not all ancient recipes are so resilient, take beetles for example.
- Urban farming is big, needs to be bigger.
- Meanwhile, agricultural land is being bought up all over the place, for what it’s worth, so maybe cities will be all we have to grow stuff.
- International Cocoa Organization calls bullshit on all those chocolate-is-running-out stories.
- Maybe we should chill about wine too? I dunno, I think I’d prefer to play it safe with both. Or get help from above. Or from the Fascists.
- The banana was going extinct too, wasn’t it?
- British apples (and other trees, to be sure) are of course perennially in trouble, but help is on the way, courtesy of Kew. And not just British or apples that get help from that quarter.
- “The potato will not only survive climate change, it will help us to survive it as well.” Good news at last.
- Mapping cassava, all of a sudden an exciting new crop, if you can believe it. No stopping it now that Bill Gates has called it the world’s most interesting vegetable.
- Incidentally, he’s also decided to go totally CC-BY.
- And that’s all she wrote. For now.
Nibbles: Chocolate, MAS, Cash crops, Medicinal plants, Rice domestication, Cat genome, Banana research, Artichoke history, Root vegetables, Diabetes data, eMonocot, Paris herbarium, Appleseed, Seed saving, Potato safety duplication, Seed atlas, Botanical Jurassic Park, Mapping urban fruit, Midwest road trip, Iraqi marshes, World Digital Library, World Parks Congress, Plant demography
- Ok here goes, there’s a week’s work of Nibbles we’ve got to catch up on.
- World running out of chocolate! Tell that to Cologne.
- Yeah well I prefer tea to cocoa.
- Greenpeace: “Smart breeding” will save us, not GMOs. Breeders: All breeding is smart.
- Guess the world’s biggest cash crop. Yeah, that one.
- Alas, it’s not included in the recent strategy for conserving medicinal plants. Not that it would need conserving.
- The domestication of the world’s biggest crop, period. Deconstructed. And if you want to drill down.
- And of the world’s biggest fruit.
- And of the world’s biggest pet.
- And of the world’s most difficult to eat vegetable.
- Root “vegetables” made simple. Because winter.
- And why you must eat your veggies, including the difficult ones.
- Videos on Kew’s monocot database and on the renovation of another famous herbarium.
- The real Johnny Appleseed.
- But you too can save seeds, just like Johnny.
- But don’t forget to safety duplicate, like CIP has done, at Embrapa.
- And this shows you what those seeds can look like.
- You don’t necessarily need seeds to save plants, though.
- Mapping fallen fruit. Because we can.
- Road trip!
- Boat trip!
- Selected Techniques in the Art of Agriculture. From French to Turkish to Arabic. One of many nifty agriculture-related resources in the World Digital Library.
- Oh yeah, the IUCN World Parks Congress has been on and its all over the intertubes. Including with neat visualizations, natch.
- How many of the species in the COMPADRE database of plant demography information are in protected areas? How many are crop wild relatives? I need an intern.
Brainfood: Basil resistance, Maize quality & drought, Benin sorghum, Swedish farm size, E European grapevives, Lebanese olives, Brazilian sheep, Sudanese cattle, Egyptian bean rhizobia, Barley origins, Intercropping
- Selecting basil genotypes with resistance against downy mildew. Only the exotic basils were any good. I will resist the temptation to make Fawlty Towers jokes.
- High grain quality accessions within a maize drought tolerant core collection. Not so much a core collection, rather a set of local and exotic drought-tolerant varieties put together in the former Yugoslavia. Some of which turn out to have decent quality too.
- Diversity, genetic erosion and farmer’s preference of sorghum varieties [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] in North-Eastern Benin. Climate change, poor soils and striga are the main problems, according to farmers, and none of their current varieties will help much, apparently, which is why they are disappearing.
- Effects of Farm Size and On-Farm Landscape Heterogeneity on Biodiversity—Case-Study of Twelve Farms in a Swedish Landscape. Small farms = heterogeneous farms = biodiversity-rich farms.
- Identification and characterization of grapevine genetic resources maintained in Eastern European colletions. SSR revealed that of 1098 mainly Vitis vinifera accessions, 997 were indigenous to E. Europe, 101 were Western European cultivars, hybrids, rootstocks and new crosses; the 997 accessions were actually 658 unique cultivars, 54% of which were maintained in the countries of origin only.
- Extent of the genetic diversity in Lebanese olive (Olea europaea L.) trees: a mixture of an ancient germplasm with recently introduced varieties. Three genetic groups around the Mediterranean, most Lebanese material typical of the eastern group; monumental trees similar to Cypriot varieties. In other news, there’s a World Olive Germplasm Bank of Marrakech.
- Application of microsatellite markers for breeding and genetic conservation of herds of Pantaneiro sheep. Evidence of inbreeding means a proper genetic management scheme needs to be designed and implemented.
- Historical demographic profiles and genetic variation of the East African Butana and Kenana indigenous dairy zebu cattle. The only indigenous African dairy breeds, apparently, but with distinct genetic histories despite their similar distribution in Sudan and dairy use.
- Phylogenetic multilocus sequence analysis of native rhizobia nodulating faba bean (Vicia faba L.) in Egypt. Three species, and evidence of horizontal gene movement among them.
- Transcriptome profiling reveals mosaic genomic origins of modern cultivated barley. The Fertile Crescent and Tibet.
- Improving intercropping: a synthesis of research in agronomy, plant physiology and ecology. You can breed for it. Among other things.
Brainfood: Filipino rice synonyms, Jatropha breeding, Polish oats, Amazonian peppers, Wild lentils, Indian pigeonpea, Russian peas, Pulse markers, Wild pollinators, Phenotyping platforms, Almonds & peaches, Cerrado roads, Arboreta conservation
- Multiplex SSR-PCR analysis of genetic diversity and redundancy in the Philippine rice (Oryza sativa L.) germplasm collection. 427 rice accessions in the national collection with similar names resolve to about 30 unique profiles. I think. The abstract is a little hard to follow, and that’s all I have access to.
- Quantitative genetic parameters of agronomic and quality traits in a global germplasm collection reveal excellent breeding perspectives for Jatropha curcas L. 375 genotypes, 7 locations and 3 years get you quite enough data to plan a decent breeding programme.
- Studies on genetic variation within old Polish cultivars of common oat. Forward into the past.
- Morphoagronomic peppers no gender pungent Capsicum spp. Amazonia. Actually nothing to do with gender. That’s a mis-translation of “genus,” if you can believe it. Paper basically says that Amazonian peppers are really variable, which is not as interesting as it might have been.
- Global Wild Annual Lens Collection: A Potential Resource for Lentil Genetic Base Broadening and Yield Enhancement. The core collection of wild annuals (which is actually a somewhat novel concept) comes mainly from Turkey and Syria, and it’s got diversity that’s not in the cultigen.
- Pigeon pea Genetic Resources and Its Utilization in India, Current Status and Future Prospects. Indian genebank evaluates the ICRISAT core and mini-core. Then does some mutation breeding :)
- Molecular genetic diversity of the pea (Pisum sativum L.) from the Vavilov Research Institute collection detected by the AFLP analysis. Molecular data does not correspond with subspecies nor ecogeographic groupings. Back to the drawing board.
- Characterization of microsatellite markers, their transferability to orphan legumes and use in determination of genetic diversity among chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) cultivars. Chickpea SSRs are ok for other, less studied, crops too.
- From research to action: enhancing crop yield through wild pollinators. Go wild.
- Integration of phenotyping and genetic platforms for a better understanding of wheat performance under drought. You really need managed environment facilities. Didn’t a paper in Brainfood last week say what you needed was a network of field sites? I guess you need both.
- Wild almonds gone wild: revisiting Darwin’s statement on the origin of peaches. He was not entirely wrong.
- The role of roadsides in conserving Cerrado plant diversity. 70% of species is not bad, I guess. No word on whether that includes wild peanuts, but I suspect yes.
- Do living ex situ collections capture the genetic variation of wild populations? A molecular analysis of two relict tree species, Zelkova abelica and Zelkova carpinifolia. Yes and no. But this is in botanic gardens and arboreta, what about seedbanks? The cerrado people want to know…