Category: Featured

Back40 sees hope even in the Horn:

[S]killfully managed pastoral systems help retain water and halt or reverse desertification in arid regions in Africa. See Allan Savory. (Link added. Ed.) That doesn’t solve the entire food problem, but it helps. Over time catching and holding more rain can improve a whole region and enable some amount of cropping as well as livestock. There are limits to what a place can produce. We may not know those limits precisely, but they exist.

We’ve written about Savory before. And slowing down the run off. But those are mavericks. Is the mainstream smart enough to find out how we can work with the existing system, rather than against it?

Dirk Enneking gives us chapter and verse on grasspea and neurolathyrism and flooding.

Despite the paucity of documented evidence on the association of lathyrism with floods, many documents repeat the mantra that grasspea survives droughts and floods better than other crops…

With multiple citation goodness.

Dave Wood has a question about genetic erosion in US apple varieties:

How many did they have in 1492?

A recent Nibble included some feedback from a user of the USDA genebanks. After receiving, but not yet planting, some wheat seed from the National Plant Germplasm System, the good people at the Seed Library of Los Angeles get all hot under the collar about USDA.

We don’t think we can trust the USDA with all this material for a long time — they have shown very poor judgement as regards to the proliferation of GMOs and their unwillingness to stand up for the consumer (and taxpayer) in how they allot their resources.

Which elicited this reply from Gardenprairie.

The feedback from the genebank user makes it sound like the USDA NPGS doesn’t know what they are doing — the genebanks have been around since 1948 — I think he should try working with them not treating them like the enemy.

Indeed. USDA told them what seed they had. They maintained it for years just waiting for their request. And then they sent it to them. Hard to say what more the Seed Library of Los Angeles people could reasonably demand of a genebank.

Jacob answers Luigi’s question about a contrast that doesn’t appear to be one thusly:

The contrast is:
Variation for seed dormancy controlled by one QTL in one population and two QTLs in the other (of which one is different from the first population).

versus

Variation for flowering time controlled by the same QTL in both populations.

One does rather wish the authors or editor would pipe up too.