The redoutable Coconut Google Group has a great story from Roland Bourdeix about the Philippines’ makapuno coconut variety, ((Now, you may have to join the Google Group to read Roland’s post. But that would be no bad thing.)) drawing from an article in the Philippine Star. Makapuno nuts have a delicious and very valuable jelly instead of water, but can’t germinate. A makapuno palm will only have 15-20% or so makapuno fruits. The only way to get makapuno nuts is to plant a normal coconut from a palm with makapuno fruits and harvest that precious 15-20%. But that meets only 3% of demand. So in the 1960s Dr Emerita de Guzman came up with a way of rescuing makapuno embryos in tissue culture. When she planted the resulting seedlings, all the coconuts were makapuno. There are now nine labs in the Philippines churning out makapuno seedlings, but they’re expensive and few farmers can afford to buy them. I’ll let Roland tell the rest of the story, but here’s a little spoiler to whet your appetite: tissue culture makapuno palms were planted on a kind of artificial island in Thailand and something wonderful happened there…
Watermelon vine decline culprit identified
Watermelon vine decline: new virus to blame.
Brazil reaches out
The website of the Arab Brazil Chamber of Commerce has a long, fascinating interview with Silvio Crestana, president of EMBRAPA, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. Having set up shop in Ghana, EMBRAPA is now thinking of doing something similar in Morocco and Qatar. It is great that the considerable expertise of Brazilian agricultural scientists is going to be shared more widely with the rest of the world. But benefits — including agricultural biodiversity — are expected to flow both ways. Here’s a selection of quotes to give you the flavour:
The whole world will be experiencing … confusions caused by climate change, and if we manage to obtain a plant with a gene that is more tolerant to drought, it will attract a lot of interest.
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They are well developed in goat raising. They have goats that give birth to three lambs (usually they give birth to a single lamb). This is of great interest to Brazil, to our goat raising centres, which are located in the Northeast. This race is of interest to Brazil. There could be a transfer from there to here.
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Another field of interest is olives, olive trees. They are way ahead of us in that field, and the demand for those is growing in Brazil… It is an ideal field for us to cooperate, they have research, they cultivate many different varieties, they have an amazing variety of olives, small, large, of all sizes and features, for oil, edible ones.
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They also have varieties and research on wheat. They have a very interesting variety of wheat that we are interested in for hybridisations, germplasm banks.
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Our germplasm bank, from the vantage point of tropical biodiversity, is like no other. They would benefit from that.
The gathering of the gooseberries
Cheshire is a veritable hotbed of gooseberry growing.
Walnuts in Wisconsin
Running a walnut farm is hard work.