- Farm ponds for water, fish and livelihoods: The role of farm ponds in sustaining livelihoods.
- The nutritional value of Andalusian lupines. Domesticate ’em, someone.
- Saving the Akita … and other things.
- Bob Brockie wants to know what happened to the seeds his dad sent to Vavilov. Good luck with that.
- Q&A about sorghum farming for Guinness Ghana.
- Oca breeding in the UK. This is SO exciting …
Herbaria get it together
Looks like the Paris herbarium (P, to taxonomy geeks), one of the largest in the world at 8,000,000 specimens, is finally sorting itself out. That’s really good news, because Paris is also perhaps the most frustrating herbarium in the world, due to the backlog in processing specimens and the generally sub-par conditions. All that’s going to change.
Once work moving and reclassifying the herbarium is complete, it will also be the world’s largest collection of plant specimens available on the internet. “We shall have 8m images, with a photograph of each plate on the museum’s website,” says the senior curator Jean-Michel Guiraud.
But I was particularly intrigued by this little throwaway final paragraph in the Guardian piece on the catch-up project. ((Maybe someone could explain to me why it was that the Guardian Weekly thought its readers would be interested in a French herbarium. In any case, I for one am really glad it did.))
International collaboration is under way to avoid duplication between the world’s top herbaria: primarily Kew Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the two largest alongside Paris, but also smaller collections belonging to natural history museums or botanical gardens in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Washington and New York.
I need to find out more about what this really means. You certainly don’t want to avoid duplication of specimens entirely, for safety reasons. Maybe it’s more a question of exchanging information on holdings so that at least herbaria know the extent of duplication. Anyway, I want to know how they’ll do it. Because it will be a cold day in genebank database hell before “international collaboration” will be able to “avoid duplication” in the world’s top genebanks.
Nibbles: Forest smells, Paris herbarium, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Vertical farms, Biofuels
- Taking in the Atmosphere of the Forest is good for you.
- The Paris herbarium sorts itself out. ‘Bout time too.
- Some scientists are … keeping seeds on ice for future generations, but one Arizona seed farm is cultivating them in the desert sun.
- At last. Ford Denison blasts the vertical farm nuts. So we don’t have to.
- Fill ‘er up — with watermelon juice?
Millennium Seed Bank on the BBC
And also at the BBC, “Banking On Life.”
In this study of the history and future of seed banks across the world, Richard Scrase takes a look at the largest such store in the world, The Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex, as it takes in its billionth seed.
Although Svalbard gets a mention too. You can also listen to the programme here. Not clear if it is associated with the summer exhibition of the same name. Have we had enough about genebanks on the media of late, do you think?
Selling touselle
In 1482, in the month of December, King Louis XI was taken ill at Tours, and had Touzelle [wheat] brought from the diocese of Nismes, so that bread could be made for him. The prince, extremely weak in mind and body, and struck with the fear of death beyond all expression, believed that of all the corners of his kingdom, the diocese of Nismes produced the wheat most likely to bring him to health.
That’s Léon Ménard in his Histoire de Nîmes of 1755. The passage is quoted in a short post in what alas seems now to be a dormant blog about artisanal breadmaking. I got there because I was intrigued by this statement in a box in a GRAIN article by Hélène Zaharia (of Réseau Semences Paysannes) called Bread of life. ((This is a companion piece to breadmaker Andrew Whitley’s The bread we eat, published in 2007.))
Henri is an organic farmer in the south of France. In 1997 he was carrying out research into farming practice in the Gare ((Is this a misprint? I think it should read “Gard.”)) region when he discovered Touselle wheat. It is an early wheat, without whiskers, with a soft grain, very suitable for bread-making. It was once cultivated quite widely in Languedoc and Provence and was appreciated for its good yields, even when it was grown on poor soil in a difficult, dry environment. But by the time Henri became interested in it, it had been widely abandoned in favour of modern varieties.
Henri decided to try it out for himself and obtained a few seeds of four of the 13 varieties of Touselle held in the Department of Genetic Resources at INRA in Clermont-Ferrand.
It turns out that “Henri” (for some reason, no surname is provided in the GRAIN article) is Henri Ferté, and what intrigued me particularly about this passage is that he is a farmer who obtained germplasm directly from a genebank, in this case the Conservatoire de Ressources Génétiques, INRA Clermont-Ferrand. ((“[L]’une des premières collections européennes.”)) This doesn’t happen as much as it could, or should. Or at least I don’t know of that many examples. Henri knew about the genebank because he has “un diplôme d’agro en poche,” as Zaharia says in another, more recent, article (which I cannot find online, but is entitled “Gard: La relance des blés méditerranéens.”). How do less academically qualified farmers find out about what’s in genebanks? It would be great to do a review of such direct use of national genebanks, and why there isn’t more of it. Maybe there is one out there already? Not all users are breeders — we sometimes forget that.
Anyway, Henri seems to have been fairly successful in bringing back touselle, King Louis XI’s miraculous wheat. This was apparently still around — in a number of distinct forms — at the end of the 19th century, but later largely disappeared: “…by 2004 Touselle was being grown experimentally on a fairly large number of peasant farms in the south of France.” A Union for the Promotion of Touselle was established in 2005. It doesn’t look to me like their website has been very active in the intervening years, but that’s no doubt because niche wheat farmers in the south of France have better things to do than mess around on the internet.