Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Zachee Ngoko confirms many experts’ worst fears about a new taro disease in Cameroon:
Our investigation, confirmed by CABI showed that P. colocassiae is the agent responsible in Cameroon from lab. analysis and rapid mount… But we are in the process of having more information on the situation with the help from CABI/Global Plant Clinic, UK. More information will come out as soon as available.
Seek, and ye shall find:
Dear Bernard,
The variety can be accessed from Dr. Phinehas Tukamuhabwa, at the Department of Crop Science, Makerere University.
Thanks to wew for answering a request about a new soybean for Uganda.
Dave Wood asks the tough ones:
[I]s the person-in-the-street aware of a need for diversity for agriculture? With a few clicks of a mouse I can buy many hundreds of different varieties of seed for probably more than a hundred crops and the range is expanding by the year.
Lovely. Would that the farmer in her sub-Saharan field could do the same over her mobile phone. Now that would be a service to the ecosystem.
Rahul Goswami shares the history of fishing:
You know, on the west coast of India they wouldn’t go out to fish during the monsoon. Not because those amazing catamarans (the Malayali-origin word is ‘kattumaram’, more or less) can’t ride the big waves, but because the fish need time to breed.
There’s more, in the context of avoiding industrial meat … and fish is a meat, no?
Robert Koebner spills the beans on that Striga-resistant cowpea. It “has the boring name B-301”. and once you know that, it is easy to find out more. There’s a moral in all this too:
The presence of unexpected resistances crops up all the time. A celebrated example is the gene for resistance to wheat eyespot disease, which was detected in a wild relative endemic to the Mediterranean basin, where the eyespot fungus does not exist.
It does make one wonder … how many other things are hiding out there. It might be that it’s a mistake to take the rational view that suggest that it’s more likely that one will find a resistance gene among plant populations where the pathogen is present, or to find salinity tolerance in saline environments etc. But it’s hard to justify such irrationality when it comes to writing a grant proposal!
More’s the pity.