- In praise of common names. Meh. You won’t see a Latin name in this whole Nibbles. See how you like it.
- Building a tomato. In Spanish.
- Tracking a tomato.
- The dark side of tomatoes.
- Amaranth to rescue Mexicans from obesity.
- Seeds of contention.
- Finding the lost Least Lettuce.
- Indigo goes back to the future.
- What if the monsoon fails? MS Swaminathan has some answers.
- Nice chocolate infographic from FAO.
- A diverse microbial community in and around roots helps plants thrive. The Science article is behind a paywall, but there’s a helpful infographic on Twitter.
- The US has a National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration. Vision? The right seed in the right place at the right time. Wish I’d thought of that.
- When otherwise useful trees attack. Ah, the irony of this coming right after the previous one.
- UK’s Global Food Security programme says extreme weather events are increasing and we must adapt agriculture. Good to know.
- And today’s Five Plants That Will Save the World are…
- Maybe add pawpaw to that?
- Japanese rice farmers: change gonna come.
- Nice coffee museum in Brazil.
- Early agriculture in the Caribbean: Cuba and Trinidad.
- The babaçu breakers of Maranhão are under threat. What’s babaçu? Yeah, well, look it up.
- “Seed banking began about 30 years ago as an improvement to individual farmers storing and using their own seeds.” Riiiiight.
- That Vilsak is a card.
Nibbles: Summer holidays, Tajik bread, Farm to pizza, Västerbottensost, Diverse bananas, Banana wine, Chinese agroforestry, Peak coffee, Responsible oil palm, Model chickens, Damn you NS
- Ah, summer and its funny medieval holidays.
- Making bread in Tajikistan.
- Making pizza in Sussex.
- Making cheese in (one village in) Sweden.
- Diversifying bananas in Queensland.
- Diversifying banana products in Kenya.
- Diversifying with trees in China.
- Better diversify coffee.
- I see your responsible soy and raise you responsible oil palm.
- Cocks of the walk.
- I’m so annoyed the New Scientist article on breeding less bitter veggies is behind a paywall that I won’t even link to it. Google it, if you must.
Nibbles: Native American foods, Responsible soy maps, Ocean blue, Social academics, Kenyan vendors, Coffee pix, Local food takedown, Ancient horses, Kava bar, Plantae, Root fungi
- Traditional foods fight Native American obesity.
- Round Table on Responsible Soy makes some nice maps.
- The Decade for African Seas and Oceans is off to a blue start.
- Face it, academics, social media are good for you.
- You think Pres. Obama checked out some Nairobi street food?
- Pics of coffee value chain. Wow, that makes it sound really boring.
- Calling bullshit on farm to fork.
- A day in the life of an archeologist of Iron Age horses.
- Kava reaches NYC hipsters.
- Plantae is coming!
- Rice plants colonized by mychorriza express different genes and have more lateral roots.
Brainfood: Pepper tree conservation, Buckwheat diversity, Seed drying, Grape database, Livestock improvement, Soil bacterial diversity, TLB in Nigeria, Humans & diversity double, Faidherbia @ICRAF
- Genetic structure and internal gene flow in populations of Schinus molle (Anacardiaceae) in the Brazilian Pampa. Try to keep what forest patches remain. And link them up somehow.
- Genetic Diversity of Buckwheat Cultivars (Fagopyrum tartaricum Gaertn.) Assessed with SSR Markers Developed from Genome Survey Sequences. Two groups, overlapping in Qinghai, China.
- Increases in the longevity of desiccation-phase developing rice seeds: response to high-temperature drying depends on harvest moisture content. Genebanks may have it wrong for seeds of rice (and perhaps other tropical species) harvested while still metabolically active: these you can dry at higher temperatures than is the norm.
- Vitis International Variety Catalogue (VIVC): A cultivar database referenced by genetic profiles and morphology. Now with added microsatellites.
- Options for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of research capacity for livestock genetics in, and for, sub-Saharan Africa. Embed in wider rural development, collaborate, and share data. Could apply to more than just livestock improvement.
- Mapping and validating predictions of bacterial biodiversity using European and national scale datasets. It’s the pH.
- Agricultural Extension Roles towards Adapting to the Effects of Taro Leaf Blight (Tlb) Disease in Nsukka Agricultural Zone, Enugu State. Basically, extensionists haven’t done a thing.
- Anthropogenic drivers of plant diversity: perspective on land use change in a dynamic cultural landscape. Abandoning farmland is not good for biodiversity.
- Agricultural landscapes and biodiversity conservation: a case study in Sicily (Italy). Ahem. Abandoning farmland is not good for biodiversity.
- Genetic diversity of Faidherbia albida (Del.) A. Chev accessions held at the World Agroforestry Centre. It’s not enough.
Early agriculture in the Old and New Worlds
Last week saw the publication of a couple of papers about early agriculture in two very different regions which will probably have people talking for quite a while. From Snir et al. ((Snir A, Nadel D, Groman-Yaroslavski I, Melamed Y, Sternberg M, Bar-Yosef O, et al. (2015) The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0131422. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131422)) came a study of pre-Neolithic cultivation in the Near East. And from the other side of the world, there was the latest in the controversy over the extent of Amazonian agriculture from Clement et al. ((Clement CR, Denevan WM, Heckenberger MJ, Junqueira AB, Neves EG, Teixeira WG, Woods WI. 2015 The domestication of Amazonia before European conquest. Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20150813. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.0813)).
Yes, I did say pre-Neolithic. The key finding of the archaeological work described by the first paper is that 23,000 years ago, or over 11 millennia before the putative start of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, hunter-gatherers along the Sea of Galilee in what is now Israel maintained little — and, crucially, weedy — fields of cereals. The archaeobotanists found remains of both the weeds and the cereals at a site called Ohalo II, as well as of sickles, and the cereals were not entirely “wild”, as the key domestication indicator of a non-brittle rachis was much more common than it should have been. To see what this means, have a look at this diagram from a fairly recent paper on agricultural origins in the region. ((Brown, Terence A., Jones, Martin K., Powell, Wayne and Allaby, Robin G.. (2008) The complex origins of domesticated crops in the Fertile Crescent. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vol.24 (No.2). pp. 103-109. ISSN 0169-5347))
Those “first phenotypic indications of domestication”, dated at 12,500 years ago, need to be pushed quite a bit leftwards on that timeline now, off the edge in fact. A non-shattering rachis, it seems, was quite a quick trick for wild grasses to learn. But the process by which they acquired all the other traits that made them “domesticated” was very protracted and stop-start.
Zoom over to Amazonia, and the transition to farming took place much later, probably around 4,000 years ago, according to the other paper published last week. But it was just as significant as in the much better-known “cradle of agriculture” in the Fertile Crescent, with perhaps 80 species showing evidence of some domestication. The difference, of course, is that Amazonian agriculture was based on trees, rather than annual grasses and legumes.
According to the authors, parts of the Amazon basin, in particular those now showing evidence of earthworks and dark, anthropogenic soils, were just as much managed landscapes by the time of European contact as the places those Europeans came from. But compare our collections of crop diversity from the Amazon basin (courtesy of Genesys, which admittedly does not yet include Brazilian genebanks)…
with what we have from the Near East…
If we want to know more about how the domestication process and transition to agriculture differed in the Amazon and the Fertile Crescent, there’s a whole lot of exploration still to do.