Category: Featured

Tim Robinson updates us on livestock data at FAO:

…We had, of course, been working on the collection of the underlying livestock statistics, and the spatial modelling to produce the maps, for many years prior to them being published on the FAO website … but that is all quickly forgotten when they are re-distributed by a third party.

For your information, we have been beavering away since then, collecting more recent and detailed sub-national livestock statistics and disaggregating these using a slightly modified modelling approach, and 1 km multi-temporal, Fourier-processed MODIS imagery from the University of Oxford…

Global datasets coming soon, apparently. We’ll keep you posted.

Mark Nesbitt knows who the Director of Agriculture is Tanzania was in 1934:

The sorghum collection – all 956 accessions – was acquired by J.D. Snowden while working on his 1936 book (still in print!) “Cultivated Races of Sorghum”. It’s a perfect example of a collection that 20 years ago would have seemed useless (old seeds, mostly dead) but thanks to new techniques (DNA analysis) suddenly looks very interesting as a record of landrace distribution before the Green Revolution.

So, any gene jockeys out there interested in extracting DNA from old seeds? Just for information, there are 1058 sorghum accessions from Tanzania in Genesys. How much can it cost to run a bunch of microsatellites on 2,000 samples?

Peterson Wambugu misses the Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter and doesn’t care who knows it:

We are still mourning the death of PGRN. What became of efforts to resurrect it which had been initiated about 2 years ago. The Newsletter was a vital source of information on genetic resources. We really miss it.

So how about it, guys? How are those plans for resurrection going?

On the lack of varieties selected to perform well under organic agriculture, David Tribe (aka GMO Pundit) asks:

Why not use the seed industry varieties already on the market? There plenty of money invested there. Why do you need to reinvent the wheel?

He clearly has other things on his mind.

In reference to the organic meta-analysis, Matthew asks:

What about crop genetics?? I read the actual Nature piece and no mention of seed or breeding.
Organic vs Conventional studies are often flawed in that they ignore that most organic farmers are using seed bred for conventional systems … The first axiom of breeding is to breed in area of intended use, and organic environments are quite different than conventional. Research from Washington State University shows evidence that when organic farmers used wheat seed that had been selected in organic systems for multiple generations there is as much as 20% increase in wheat yields, compared to when they plant conventional seed.

I think this is the research referred to.