Category: Featured

Rick Jellen has an answer to our question about quinoa breeding:

Regarding the question of whether there has been a proportional increase in resources dedicated to quinoa breeding, the answer is … NO!

Allrighty then, Rick. Care to tell us more?

Geoff Gurr takes issue with what he interprets as our sarcasm:

The ‘no, really’ comment could be taken as suggesting that there is no great surprise contained in the title ‘…crop diversification promotes ecological intensification of agriculture’. In fact, the idea that ecological approaches such as crop diversification can have the types of beneficial effects that we report is often challenged. Had word counts allowed our title to be longer we’d have liked to have extended it to say something like ‘to the extent that the need for synthetic inputs was reduced by two thirds whilst increasing crop yield’.

Though actually what we were trying to do is point out that his results reinforce those of other papers in this week’s Brainfood.

Sergio Salvi sets me straight:

Varrone tomato IS in the VIR database, it is the accession No. 178 of the genus Lycopersicon and it was found firstly by consulting the database. After found it, a seed sample was requested to VIR.

Indeed. Sorry!

Cindy Cox of HarvestChoice sort of, kind of, maybe agrees with some parts of what we say in a recent post about the usability of data.

Although a new generation of development practitioners and analysts are increasingly taking advantage of so-called alternative data sources like we used in our paper, such resources are still underutilized in socio-economics. And without a story, data are meaningless.

Sure, and who has those stories? I suspect it’s not the people who can do the analysis.

There’s a lively conversation about grasspea going on.

With a better understanding of the population genetics of grasspea toxin metabolism in combination with adequate supplies of dietary sulfur amino acids, low toxin varieties may become obsolete as a breeding objective, so that breeders can focus more on yield.

Do join in.