- Seed savers: everyone’s got an angle, from Seeds of Hope and Change to Seed Bank Bingo.
- Italian lemons enjoying a renaissance. In California, natch.
- India registers Assam farmers’ traditional rice varieties. In other news, rice water “is also used as shampoo, according to community elders”.
- US$9 million to “implement and evaluate four approaches” to controlling Striga in Africa. One day we’ll know.
- Denver Botanic Gardens does amaranth.
- Evolution of bearded pigs. Good to know. Good to eat?
- Bioversity banana team guest blogs at Annals of Botany. But surely they have a blog of their own. No, wait…
- Agriculture is bad for your health.
A rare coconut described
Coconut-hunter Roland Bourdeix does it again:
Here is the first description with pictures of one of the rarest coconut varieties from French Polynesia.
This is a Compact Red Dwarf, producing big round fruit of red-orange color; the young fruits show inside the husk a typical pink color, like the pink color found in the Pilipog Green Dwarf from the Philipinnes. This dwarf seems to be mainly allogamous. Its stem and leaves are quite similar to those of the Niu Leka Dwarf from Fiji.
This kind of dwarf will be very precious in the future, especially for production of hybrid seednuts. If you plant in geographical isolation this red dwarf mixed together with a green variety (dwarf or tall); then you will obtain seednuts s recognizable in the nursery. Seednuts with green sprouts will be the green variety, seednut with red sprouts will be the red dwarf, and seednuts with brown sprouts will be natural hybrids between the red dwarf and the green variety. Both conservation of the two varieties and production of hybrid seednuts are done in a single location. In this process, no need to make costly emasculation, because the red dwarf is allogamous. No need also to plant this seedgarden in a research institute: such a design can be easily managed by farmers in farmer’s fields, as geographical isolation is available.
So in the future, even in a small Pacific country, we could imagine 20 farmers producing locally 20 differents kinds of hybrids using their own varieties as male parents… This idea needs to be refined, but this could lead to a complete change in the policies of coconut seednut production at world level. An illustration of a quite similar process of seed production is given here for Samoa.
A question is about the genetic origin of this Compact Red Dwarf: is it a late progeny of Marechal hybrids? Or is it the progeny of a natural cross between Niu leka and a red dwarf such as Haari Papua? We will do soon some DNA analysis to study this point.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA, Hotspots, Adaptation, Agrobiodiversity, Potatoes and climate change, Cowpeas and drought, Apios, Tree planting, Fairtrade, Egyptian archaeobotany, Bolivian video
- All about the International Treaty on PGRFA.
- More, much more, on that climate change hotspots study.
- IDRC on climate change adaptation in Africa. Almost nothing on agricultural diversity as a coping mechanism.
- Unlike this.
- Or this, for that matter. Never knew the Basque country was such a hotbed of potato research.
- Or…oh forget it.
- What, in the name of all that is happy, is hopniss?
- Danone buys some goodwill.
- Fairtrade chocolate: this looks like it should be really important. Is it?
- So, you say you want to know what plant remains were found in the baskets in Tutankhamun’s tomb?
- Bolivian agricultural biodiversity, anyone?
Brainfood: Baby’s veggies, Chickpea and drought, Vine cactus breeding, Paleolithic rabbits, California protected areas, Wild pigeonpea, Pecorino classification, Milk composition, Phenotyping, Wild peas
- Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
- Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
- In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
- Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
- Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
- Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
- Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
- The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
- Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
- Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.
The mother-in-law and the Useful Tree Species for Africa
ICRAF have a nifty new tool out called “Useful Tree Species for Africa.” I’ve been playing around with it and I have to say it’s impressive. Not altogether easy to use, but impressive. If you’re at all into using native trees in Africa — for whatever reason or purpose — you’ll want to explore it. Here’s a taste of what it can do.
You download the kmz files from the ICRAF website and open them in Google Earth. ((BTW, thanks again to Google for the Pro license.)) Then you think of somewhere you’re interested in. In my case, as usual in these situations, I chose the site of the mother-in-law’s spread above Limuru in Kenya. Useful Tree Species for Africa first tells you what sort of vegetation is potentially found there, according to White’s iconic Vegetation Map of Africa.
In this case, it’s “M19a Undifferentiated Afromontane vegetation (viii AMCE)”. What does that mean? Well, there’s a hyperlink which gives you more information on Mapping Unit 19a:
Crucially, this page, which opens in Google Earth, includes more hyperlinks, to four different species tables. Say you are interested in tree species found in this sort of vegetation that can support honey production. You click on the hyperlink labelled “Mapping unit 19a_uses.xls.” That in turn opens an Excel spreadsheet with a list of about 50 tree species and lots of different types of uses. You sort the species on “Bee fodder” and you get a shortlist of about 17 species, from Albizia gummifera to Syzygium guineense. Clicking yet again, this time on the species name, takes you to the PROTA page on the tree, with lots more information. Now, what would be really cool in due course would be a cross-link to ICRAF’s Tree Seed Suppliers Directory, so that you could work out where to get seed of your useful tree.
As I say, nifty. Lots of clicking, and opening of webpages, and of spreadsheets, and of more webpages, but you do end up with the information you want. If your query is place-based rather than species-based, that is. I don’t think the tool will let you start with a useful tree and work out where you can grow it, rather than start with a place and work out what can grow there. But let me play around with it a bit more. Maybe I’m wrong.