Category: Featured

After some kind words of encouragement for your faithful bloggers, as they plow their lonely furrow, Pablo unleashes hell on the genetic erosion meta-narrative:

I hope we can finally move beyond the unsubstantiated pseudostats on worldwide erosion of crop genetic diversity, more important and easier to quantify would be how much is being used in production systems where and by whom. Also there is the question of whether it is forever lost or can be recovered or expressed in new cultivars and crosses or in new environments.

As we’ve seen, that quantification of diversity in production systems could be done by looking at landrace names. Or could it?

Jacob has an idea why using climate data won’t always make the haystack smaller:

To me, the potato results mean that we shouldn’t be looking at selection, but at migration and drift. Selection reduces diversity, migration and drift determine where it goes.

Nigel on reducing the size of the haystack:

The case of potatoes is very interesting indeed, but is it typical? There are numerous papers showing that using ecogeography as a predictor of patterns of genetic diversity does not always work, but ecogeography is still widely used because in the absence of clear genetic diversity or characterisation/evaluation data there is practically no alternative.

Practically no alternative, or no practical alternative? There is a difference.

Dirk tracks down Meyer’s giant peach in situ:

The giant is alive and well. The Feicheng peach is also known as Buddha peach…

Read more, you know you want to!

Jacob again, this time on genetic erosion:

Interesting! I have done some digging in this direction. I found that farmers were actually quite conscious about losses, knew the characteristics of the older varieties, but were not regretful about their loss, as these varieties were not resistant to certain diseases…

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