- Talking to farmers. Gotta love it.
- ASTA’s Guide to Seed Management Practices. Need to register, but it’s not a big deal.
- The next Oxford Symposium will take place at St Catz on 12-14 September 2008. The Topic is Vegetables. Jeremy will be there.
- Fishy diversity … and not in a good way.
- Everything you ever wanted to know about Chioggia beets but were afraid to ask.
Tasteful breeding
A couple of days ago the Evil Fruit Lord complained — a little bit — about an article in a Ugandan newspaper which extolled the virtues of traditional crops and varieties over new-fangled hybrids. While not doubting the many attractive qualities of landraces and heirloom varieties, he quite rightly pointed out that there’s nothing to stop modern varieties and hybrids tasting just as good:
I get really sick of the tendency to talk about plant breeding as a process which makes crops into finicky, crappy tasting garbage in exchange for yield. You absolutely can create varieties which taste as good (or better) than traditional varieties, produce more, and resist pests. In fact, plant breeding is the only way to get to that.
Now there’s an article by Arthur Allen in Smithsonian magazine which basically says — not very surprisingly, I suppose — that both those things have happened in the tomato:
Flavor … has not been a goal of most breeding programs. While importing traits like disease resistance, smaller locules, firmness and thicker fruit into the tomato genome, breeders undoubtedly removed genes influencing taste. In the past, many leading tomato breeders were indifferent to this fact. Today, things are different. Many farmers, responding to consumer demand, are delving into the tomato’s preindustrial past to find the flavors of yesteryear.
Allen has a good word to say for the wild relatives:
The architect of the modern commercial tomato was Charles Rick, a University of California geneticist. In the early 1940s, Rick, studying the tomato’s 12 chromosomes, made it a model for plant genetics. He also reached back into the fruit’s past, making more than a dozen bioprospecting trips to Latin America to recover living wild relatives. There is scarcely a commercially produced tomato that didn’t benefit from Rick’s discoveries. The gene that makes such tomatoes easily fall off the vine, for instance, came from Solanum cheesmaniae, a species that Rick brought back from the Galapagos Islands. Resistances to worms, wilts and viruses were also found in Rick’s menagerie of wild tomatoes.
And he also plugs genebanks:
…we can take comfort in the tomato’s continuing, explosive diversity: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a library of 5,000 seed varieties, and heirloom and hybrid seed producers promote thousands more varieties in their catalogs.
Not quite sure where he got that number, as the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center seems to have about 3,500 accessions, but anyway.
Special publication on livestock genetic resources
Livestock Science has a special issue on animal genetic resources. Or it will have, it doesn’t seem to be out yet, although some corrected proofs are available. You can get a flavour of the thing with the introduction. Here are some of the highlights:
- Animal genetic resource trade flows: Economic assessment
- Genebank development for the conservation of livestock genetic resources in the United States of America
- Molecular characterization of breeds and its use in conservation
- Animal genetic resource trade flows: The utilization of newly imported breeds and the gene flow of imported animals in the United States of America
- Research opportunities in the field of animal genetic resources
- Present status of the conservation of livestock genetic resources in Brazil
- Saving threatened native breeds by autonomous production, involvement of farmers organization, research and policy makers: The case of the Sicilo-Sarde breed in Tunisia, North Africa
Nibbles: Hemp, Galip, Fort Collins, Dwarf cows, Persephone, Atolls
- No member of the plant kingdom has ever been so willfully and stubbornly misunderstood.
- EU funds US$ 300 million to develop galip nut (Canarium indicum) in New Britain.
- Happy Birthday, Fort Collins.
- First, pocket pigs. Now, mini-cows. Watch our hits go through the roof.
- The story of the mother who went to Hell to protect her daughter.
- Kiribati to get atoll agriculture development centre. But where will they put it?
News from the road
Apologies for the light blogging lately, but both Jeremy and I are on the road and busy with other stuff. When last seen, Jeremy was on vacation in Maine, dealing what will probably be the mortal blow to its lobster population. And I’ve been in and out of meetings all week, but I’ve got a couple of days off now and may have time to catch up on the old feed reader.
This is a good place to do that. I’m visiting the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica. They have a very pleasant campus in a spectacular area with a well-developed ecotourism industry:
CATIE has a botanic garden and an active seedbank for forest species. But it also has an interest in agrobiodiversity conservation, with very important field genebanks of cacao, coffee and peach palm, and a crop seed genebank specializing in local vegetables, maize and beans. More later.