- Funky vegetables from around the world.
- Ft Collins genebank on CNN.
- India gets a litchi genebank. None of that in Ft Collins.
- Honeybees get help from museum collections.
Nibbles: German zucchini, Nice tomatoes, Genebank Database Hell, Pakistan genebank, Brachiaria genomics, Haiti agriculture, Chinese potatoes, Green green grass of home, Domestication book, Rudisha returns!
- Deadly zucchini sweep through Germany. Actually just one possible hybrid with ornamental squash, apparently, probably, I’m told by a vegetables expert.
- Everybody loves photos of heirloom tomatoes.
- Sorting out genebank data management at IRRI.
- It’s very tricky to move the Pakistan national genebank.
- Where are the Al-resistance genes in Brachiaria?
- Le jardin créole in Haiti as a model of sustainable agriculture.
- China’s spud revolution. And more.
- Grass is America’s biggest crop. Tell me something I don’t know. What’s that you say? Not that kind of grass?
- Nice excerpt on cats from recent book on domestication by Richard C. Francis.
- The plant-based diets of East African long-distance runners.
Brainfood: Citrus colours, Soil biodiversity portal, Bean genome, Food diversity & security, French landscape diversity, US pigs, Alien crops, Thai food retail
- Exploring the diversity in Citrus fruit colouration to decipher the relationship between plastid ultrastructure and carotenoid composition. New, weird plastids mean new, weird colours.
- Towards a global platform for linking soil biodiversity data. A DivSeek for soils?
- A reference genome for common bean and genome-wide analysis of dual domestications. Not sure how we missed this. Two domestications confirmed, with distinct genomic signatures.
- Variability of On-Farm Food Plant Diversity and Its Contribution to Food Security: A Case Study of Smallholder Farming Households in Western Kenya. No relationship between farm diversity and food security. Say what?
- What is the plant biodiversity in a cultural landscape? A comparative, multi-scale and interdisciplinary study in olive groves and vineyards (Mediterranean France). Low intensity management with an eye to heritage is good for diversity. But, given the above, so what?
- Relationships among and variation within rare breeds of swine. American pig breeds are real. Mostly.
- Alien Crop Resources and Underutilized Species for Food and Nutritional Security of India. Bring them on!
- Traditional, modern or mixed? Perspectives on social, economic, and health impacts of evolving food retail in Thailand. It would be a pity of fresh markets were to disappear.
Nibbles: Plant names, Tomato trifecta, Amaranth, Corn wars, Wild lettuce, Dying, Indian ag, Chocographic, Root symbionts, Rehabilitation, Mesquite, Extreme weather, Saviour plants, Pawpaw, Japanese rice, Coffee museum, Caribbean early ag, Amazonian livelihoods, Vislak on corn
- 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.
Evaluating evaluation networks
Mike Jackson, who ran the IRRI genebank 20 years ago, has some provocative things to say on his blog about the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER), which has just turned 40. Here is Mike’s main point:
In my opinion, INGER could—and should—have been more. According to the riceTODAY article, INGER is today, 40 years after it was founded, at ‘the crossroads’. But it was already at a crossroads almost 25 years ago when it became clear that UNDP support would end. Opportunities were not seized then, I contend, to bring about radical and efficient changes to the management and operations of this important rice germplasm network, but without losing any of the benefits of the previous 20 years. I also believed it should be possible to add even more scientific value.
If I understand Mike correctly, he thinks INGER has gone for quantity (of trials) rather than quality of late, and missed out on some clear opportunities to be even more successful than it has been. Counterfactual history is always tricky, but I wonder whether this is a testable proposition. Maybe there’s a natural experiment out there? For example, are there countries that have not taken much advantage of INGER in the past couple of decades. How have their rice improvement efforts fared in comparison to countries which have?
Coincidentally, there was a short article in the Times of India recently trumpeting the release of rice varieties of low glycemic index. Can INGER take some of the credit for that, I wonder? Well, let’s have a look.
One of the varieties in question is Sampada. The Indian Directorate of Rice Development’s catalogue of released varieties (1996-2012) has the following entry for this variety:
The immediate parents are therefore Vijaya and C 14-8. You can look these up in the International Rice Information System. Vijaya has featured in INGER’s nurseries:
And C 14-8 is safely in the IRRI genebank:
We saw it for wheat and maize, and now for rice. Partnership with the relevant CGIAR centre has been extremely important in the success of the Indian national breeding programmes for these crops.
Now, are there countries for which these partnership have not been so strong? And how successful have their breeding programmes been?