- Do you want to be a Plant Guardian?
- Some people are already getting busy guarding Solanum in Peru.
- The sunflower family gets a molecular makeover.
- What the California drought means for food.
- And the one in Brazil for coffee.
- And tea in Sri Lanka is also in trouble, though for once drought is not to blame.
- Minnesota has a wine industry thanks to wild relatives. But I won’t hold that against them.
- In today’s Seeds of X story, X=hope and the place is Aceh.
- If sugarcane was a cold-tolerant oil-producing crop, would it still be sugarcane?
- Cotton has a lot to answer for. Or rather, the people who grew it do. Or did. Oh crap.
- Rubber too. Though not as much. I guess. Oh crap.
Nibbles: Sorghum beer, No beer, Malaysian rice, Soil diversity, World Food Prize, Photo prize
- Brewery opens sorghum demonstration farm in Tanzania.
- Maybe California’s barley barons need to get into sorghum.
- Paddy Gene Bank nothing to do with Guinness.
- I really dislike the US habit of calling soil dirt, even when that allows alliteration about diversity and dirt.
- Who do you know worthy of the Word Food Prize?
- And the prize for jolting a dead cliché back to life goes to CIAT, for this stunner: International Photo Competition ‘Forest-Agriculture Interface: Gender Lens’.
Nibbles: Czech agrobiodiversity, Food Sovereignty reports, Forest Watch, Mexican corn, Youth
- The Czech national genetic resources programme in a nice brochure.
- Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, by Patrick Mulvany. Another nice brochure. Not entirely clear why it’s not included in the Journal of Peasant Studies special edition on the relevant conference.
- Forests can have Big Data too. Yes, it’s Global Forest Watch. And more from WRI, but it’s really all over the intertubes. No sign of the brochure. Yet.
- “So when I eat this [corn] I eat with all the energy of my history.” No brochures needed.
- Making agroforestry and agriculture in general attractive to yutes. Would a brochure help?
The rice in Spain grows mainly for the snails
With the floods in UK perhaps UK research institutes should turn their attention to rice as a crop. Need more rice experts! #UKrice
— GaryFoster (@Prof_GD_Foster) February 20, 2014
I suspect Prof. Foster was being facetious, and in any case would have to fight it out with other researchers working in a different direction, but maybe temperatures in England will soon be as suitable for rice cultivation as the rainfall regime. In Europe (and indeed Japan and New Zealand) the northern limit of rice cultivation seems to be at about 40-45 deg N, which covers the famous growing regions of the Po Valley in Italy and the Camargue in France. However, the very northernmost limit of rice cultivation in the world is at about 53 degrees N, which would put it at the latitude of Liverpool, say. So the south of England may not be entirely out of bounds in the future, if you factor in climate change and clever plant breeding.
Of course, as we read yesterday, temperature is not the only constraint to rice production in Europe. Spanish rice farmers are fighting an exotic snail, which may spread from the Ebro delta, which incidentally is on the 40th parallel N or thereabouts. Although rice has been in Spain since maybe the 8th century, its cultivation in the Ebro is relatively recent.
The first Designation of Origin for rice in Europe was granted to Calasparra rice which is grown in a mountainous area along the river Segura in the region of Murcia, the varieties being Bomba and Balilla X Solana. Both are sold as either brown or white rice. Bomba rice is the best-known of the Spanish varieties. Its grains are rounded but they increase lengthwise by almost fifty per cent during the cooking process and are very absorbent.
Also protected by a Designation of Origin is the rice grown traditionally in the Júcar river basin and in the Albufera, the most famous of the natural wetlands in Valencia where the varieties are Senia, Bahía and Bomba. The rice, mostly Bahía, grown in the Ebro delta in Tarragona (Catalonia) is also covered by a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).
For the benefit of prospective English rice farmers, Bomba is available from the Spanish genebank, and elsewhere too. No word on whether there is material somewhere resistant to the ravages of Pomacea insularum.
Nibbles: CGIAR priorities, Drought tolerant rice, Agroecology bibliography, Amaranthus seed production video, Ethiopian genebank, Yemeni genebank
- UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
- Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
- Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
- How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
- Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
- There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.