- Not totally wild genes protect wheat from Ug99.
- Not really wild Texas Wild tomato brings Texan back to gardening. These in Peru are wild though.
- Speaking of gardening, here’s Michael Pollan on his struggles with opium.
- Wild, healthy fruit flavours becoming more popular on the soft drink market, but not clear to what extent they will come from actual plants, wild or otherwise. You know, plants with yield variation and other inconveniences. Plants that some people rely on for nutrition, by the way.
- Descriptors for quinoa, including the wild species. And more, much more.
- I wonder if there are descriptors for wild yaks.
- New UK facility for phenotyping plants, including wild ones, I’m sure.
- And if those wild UK plants are trees, you can use this app to identify them, before phenotyping them. Assuming you can dig them up and squeeze them into the new facility. Anyway, maybe one of them will be European Tree of the Year.
- Of course, if you wanted access to the genetic resources of such trees, you’d have to deal with the Nagoya Protocol, which the EU is getting to grips with, don’t worry.
- Not many C4 species among UK trees, I guess.
- Teff is C4, but that isn’t stopping people trying to replace it with barley in injira.
- Next thing you know the Chinese will be swapping tea for coffee. No, wait.
Nibbles: Cornell & Stanford videos, Harbarium data, Urban food, Wine and conservation, Gujarat community seedbanks, Big Shots, Davis breeding
- Cornell has some really cool videos online, including on agriculture. And a nice short one from Stanford about that paper on exposure to high temperatures.
- Getting an herbarium online.
- Urban food plants go online.
- For wine growers, conservation should include growing obscure varieties. Which you can find online.
- Gujarat farmers don’t need to go online to save seeds. But they could. They really could.
- POTUS comes face to face with biofortified sweet potato, likes what he sees. Same for Bill Gates and pigeonpea.
- UCDavis has a course on programme management for plant breeders. No, not online. Not clear if it’s part of that African Plant Breeding Academy thing.
Haiti turns to its local crops
The Economist had an article on food security in Haiti in last week’s edition. It’s worth reading in full, but I’d like to highlight two points here. First, the official in charge of “arable policy” at the ministry of agriculture, one Marcel Augustin, is said to think that
…Haitians should be encouraged to change their eating habits and adopt the diets of their grandparents. Locally grown crops such as yam, manioc, sorghum, sweet potatoes and maize were the staples of previous generations, who had rice [only] as a Sunday treat. They grow easily in Haiti and provide a nutritious alternative to rice… ((And there are also local crops with commercial potential, as a piece Cedric Jeanneret linked to on Facebook pointed out.))
Second, the article points out that USAID has changed its policy from simply handing out foodstuffs imported from the United States to distributing cash vouchers instead, which of course people can spend on locally produced food. Encouraging developments, the effects of which, on agrobiodiversity as well as food security, it will be interesting to follow.
Nibbles: Global health journal, Agroecology, Sachs & the MVP, British trees survey, Tunisian pear disease, Obama & biofuels, Seed Savers, Chaffey, Indian phenotyping
- The Lancet goes open source. Well, kinda.
- Alt-World Food Prize winners. None of whom are at the Conference on Agroecology for Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: A Transformative Agenda, though.
- I guess there’s no chance of Jeffrey Sachs landing the actual World Food Prize. Well, you never know.
- If you’re in Britain and you get the urge to measure a tree, now you can share your results.
- Maybe the Tunisians should do something similar, at least for their pears, before it’s too late.
- “The plan notes biofuels have an important role to play in increasing our energy security, fostering rural economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.” Riiiight.
- “We started doing this before heirlooms were fashionable. We knew in our hearts it was the right thing to do.”
- Quite a bit of agrobiodiversity in the latest Plant Cuttings.
- India goes in for high throughput phenotyping for drought tolerance.
Brainfood: Pear history, Markets & biodiversity, Conserving small populations, Niche & range, Sustainability in the US, Production forecasts, Sheep differences
- The Pear in History, Literature, Popular Culture, and Art. An oldie, but worth reading just for the analogy between the pear connoisseur and the opera aficionado.
- Effects of market integration on agricultural biodiversity in a tropical frontier. Darien, Panama. Roads are bad for crop diversity, of the interspecific kind at least.
- Conservation genetics and the persistence and translocation of small populations: bighorn sheep populations as examples. Bigger is definitely better.
- Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern. Specialist species tend to have small range sizes, making them doubly vulnerable. Trebly so if they have small populations too, I guess (see above).
- Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest. …depends on on-farm diversity, and here’s three things you can do to promote it, because it ain’t getting any better: collect statistics, redirect subsidies, and think beyond peak yield. Ah but wait, you may have to change the IP system. As you were.
- Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050. For rice, wheat, maize and soybean, current rates of yield increase, if they continue, which I suppose is a big if, what with climate change and all, would mean about 50% production increases by 2050, rather than the supposedly needed 100%.
- Genome-Wide Genetic Diversity and Differentially Selected Regions among Suffolk, Rambouillet, Columbia, Polypay, and Targhee Sheep. Suffolk is different from the others, which we already knew were related. Ah, but now we know where exactly in the genome the differences are.