- Wild relative rescues potatoes. Which wild relative? Well for that you’ll have to read the paper. The FAQ on that. Or if you want an alternative. More the better, I guess. And just to remember what makes it all possible: diversity in fields and genebanks.
- Wild species not just useful to food security as sources of genes, of course. And more.
- Indigenous peoples save corn.
- Maybe some of them would be interested in this MSc at Bangor.
- Indigenous peoples can catch — and save? — fish after all.
- So is there stagnation in yield increases or what? Lobell reviews book that says maybe not.
Nibbles: Nutrition, Economic plants, Forest food, Banana descriptions, Taro leaf blight, Rwandan gardens, ECHO seed workshop, Aquaculture
- Nutrition is so confusing.
- There are so many plants, for a start.
- And it’s so difficult to get them from the forest.
- And they’re difficult to describe.
- And they get all kinds of diseases.
- Could grow them in nutrition gardens, I suppose.
- Learn to save their seeds.
- Or just go for fish.
Nibbles: Agroforestry slides, Sub1 slides, Fish slides, Fish in Neolithic, Silver bullets, Carbon credits, Camel domestication, Cuneiform barley
- All of the presentations from the World Congress on Agroforestry.
- Scuba rice in 13 slides.
- You got off easy on that last one. Here’s 55 slides on fish biodiversity and the food supply.
- Not much fish in the food supply of early farmers in Britain.
- New IFPRI book highlights technologies to beat hunger. Includes plant breeding. But no fish?
- Kenyan agroforestry organization gets C credits. Details sketchy though.
- The Bible got it wrong on camels. And that’s all I’m saying about that.
- Cuneiform tablets are so beautiful. Especially when they depict agricultural biodiversity. Via.
French grape genebank on the move?
After Pavlovsk and Brogdale, it is now the turn of a French fruit genebank to feel the heat. According to Declan Butler’s somewhat breathless piece in Nature:
Uncertainty hangs over one of the world’s largest and most important grapevine collections. The Domaine de Vassal vineyard, on France’s Mediterranean coast, houses a vast sweep of grape biodiversity that is essential to research and winegrowers in France and around the world.
That would be the Station de Recherches Viticoles of the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA). For those that know genebank-speak, that is institute FRA139. Plug that into the “institute code” slot on ECPGR’s Vitis database page to get the details of its holdings. Or you can get summary data from WIEWS. It’s actually not the only grape genebank in France, but there’s no word on overlap with other French collections, or indeed with collections in other parts of the world. Numbers vary among the sources, but this collection represents maybe half of France’s holdings of cultivated grape accessions, and a tenth of the world’s. 1
So it’s an important collection, large and well documented, both phenotypically and genotypically. What’s the problem? Well, the lease is running out on the land it’s been on for the past 138 years, and it needs to shift. The move will cost €4 million, and the money isn’t in the budget. INRA says it’s committed to maintaining the collection, and will find the cash. The boffins fret and worry about the disruption to research and possible losses in the process. I asked our friends at the Myles Lab in Canada for their opinion and they do see an upside:
@AgroBioDiverse @BrianFLloyd @plantbiology 1/2 The move is a good idea – offers chance to plant collection in specific experimental design
— Foodimprover (@foodimprover) February 7, 2014
But it is worrying. We’ll keep an eye on it for you.
Brainfood: Genomics trifecta, Ex/in situ, Oat disease resistance, Drying beads, Biodiversity assessment, Maize models, Trees & nutrition, NTFP, Fortification
- Maintaining Food Value of Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.) Using Comparative Genomics. Cultivated cultivated rice assists in the breeding of cultivated wild rice. If you see what I mean.
- Mining the Genus Solanum for Increasing Disease Resistance. The key is distinguishing the alleles from the paralogs.
- Genetic Dissection of Aluminium Tolerance in the Triticeae. And the trifecta from the Genomics of Plant Genetic Resources book. Rye has most, barley least, and we know how they do it.
- Dual Threats of Imperiled Native Agroecosystems and Climate Change to World Food Security: Genomic Perspectives. Genebanks are necessary but not sufficient.
- Identification of new sources of resistance to powdery mildew in oat. In the wild species, natch.
- Optimum ratios of zeolite seed Drying Beads® to dry rice seeds for genebank storage. 1:1 by weight.
- The Biodiversity Forecasting Toolkit: Answering the ‘how much’, ‘what’, and ‘where’ of planning for biodiversity persistence. Yeah, but will it work with agricultural biodiversity?
- How do various maize crop models vary in their responses to climate change factors? Enough to make using an ensemble best, not enough to doubt that temperature will be the main factor affecting yields by the end of the century.
- Dietary quality and tree cover in Africa. More trees, more dietary diversity, more fruit & veg consumption, though up to a point.
- The importance of local forest benefits: Economic valuation of Non-Timber Forest Products in the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania. $42 million a year, spread over 2000 households.
- Fortification: new findings and implications. It’s worked in the US for some nutrients, but not for others, and in some case we don’t understand how and why. We know in other cases it is unlikely to work. Nutritionists have to work together with plant breeders. And, we would add, the agricultural sector in general.