- From SRI to SARI. Rice has never had it so good.
- Look there’s even a guy in Orisha who grows 920 varieties.
- Biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction: Unproven. Doesn’t sound like they looked at agricultural biodiversity though.
- Contrary take on the Borlaug legacy.
- From Map Your Recipe to Compare Your Recipe. h/t Rachel Laudan.
- Follow that biofortification conference in Kigali. Maybe they’ll talk about recipes.
- Guardian Environment blogger breaks down the agricultural bits of the IPCC report for you. Lots of that going around.
- No conceivable reason for growing jatropha in Kenya. One of those times when you wonder whether anyone had predicted this would happen at the time.
- So does anyone know now whether switching from coffee to banana might be a bad idea in the long run? This is your chance.
- Wild chickpea to the rescue.
- The ups and downs of groundnut research in Africa.
- Islamic insurance for herders. Demand, meet supply.
- Celtic fields can still be seen, if you know what to look for.
- Seed fair in Senegal exchanges pearl millet. Could usefully do the same in Namibia, it looks like.
- Does economic growth help in reducing child malnutrition? It depends on whether you plot % malnutrition against GDP per capita or annual change of the first against annual change in the latter.
- The complicated story of yeast, unravelled.
Brainfood: Sunflower genomics, Omani chickens, Ozark cowpea, Amerindian urban gardens, Thai homegardens, Global North homegardens, African pollination, Ugandan coffee pollination, Use of wild species, Wheat and climate change, Iranian wheat evaluation, Tunisian artichokes, Fig core, Onion diversity, Distillery yeasts
- Genomic variation in Helianthus: learning from the past and looking to the future. Paleopolyploid events, transposable elements, chromosomal rearrangements. Is there anything these plants don’t have? But then these guys would say that, wouldn’t they.
- Assessment of genetic diversity and conservation priority of Omani local chickens using microsatellite markers. Unsurprisingly, the Dhofar (far S) and Musadam (far N) populations are the most different. I collected crops in both places way back when, and I bet you it would be the same for things like alfalfa and sorghum. Or cowpea, which brings me to…
- Just Eat Peas and Dance: Field Peas (Vigna unguiculata) and Food Security in the Ozark Highlands, U.S. Still important after all these years. (I suspect Gary Nabhan would have predicted this, but I can’t even get an abstract of his paper Food Security, Biodiversity and Human Health: Ethnobiology as a Predictive Science.)
- Amerindian Agriculture in an Urbanising Amazonia (Rio Negro, Brazil). Traditional systems survive move to cities just fine.
- Human-Induced Movement of Wild Food Plant Biodiversity Across Farming Systems is Essential to Ensure Their Availability. Just like in Brazil, people move wild species to their homegardens in Thailand too.
- Urban home food gardens in the Global North: research traditions and future directions. Uhm, could maybe Brazilian and Thai homegarden studies guide similar work in the North… Yep, and here’s how.
- Priorities for Research and Development in the Management of Pollination Services for Agricultural Development in Africa. Old and traditional may not mean weak and out of date, but change gonna come anyway.
- Social and Ecological Drivers of the Economic Value of Pollination Services Delivered to Coffee in Central Uganda. No wait, change here already.
- Use it or lose it: measuring trends in wild species subject to substantial use. Wild species which are being used by people tend to be doing better than those that are not. Yeah, but settle down, the data are not that great.
- An assessment of wheat yield sensitivity and breeding gains in hot environments. The successes have been coming from the lower potential material, not the elite of the elite.
- Adaptation Patterns and Yield Stability of Durum Wheat Landraces to Highland Cold Rainfed Areas of Iran. It’s not always about heat. Anyway, in either case, thank goodness for diverse worldwide germaplasm collections.
- Karyological and genome size insights into cardoon (Cynara cardunculus L., Asteraceae) in Tunisia. The wild populations from Sicily and Tunisia are closest to the crop.
- Ex situ conservation of underutilised fruit tree species: establishment of a core collection for Ficus carica L. using microsatellite markers (SSRs). Fancy maths allows Spanish researchers to recover all microsats within a collection of 300 figs in only about 10% of the accessions. So who gives a fig for the rest, right?
- Assessing the genetic diversity of Spanish Allium cepa landraces for onion breeding using microsatellite markers. Alas, all the Spanish Allium cepa landraces fall in the same cluster, so a core could be tricky. These guys really know their onions.
- Biodiversity of non-Saccharomyces yeasts in distilleries of the La Mancha region (Spain). Gonna need some booze to wash down the figs and onions, right?
Nibbles: Date palm protection, IPCC report, Israel flora, Horsham genebank, Jubrassic Park, Broomcorn millet origins, Synthetic yeast chromosome
- UAE date palms to get FAO recognition. So they’ll be ok then. Phew!
- Unlike African agriculture, according to the IPCC.
- Or Israel’s wild plants. Though what they intend to do about that is hidden behind a paywall. Can anyone tell me the answer?
- The Australians know what to do. Build a new genebank…
- …and grown ginarmous brassicas.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison for his part thinks we should collect more wild Panicum. And who are we to argue with him?
- Hey, worst comes to worst, we can always build our own beer yeast.
Nibbles: Agavins, Women in Ag, Teacup shattered, Quinoa, Rice, PGR course, Seeds for Africa, Tomato, Global cookbook, Cover crops, Sheep
- Tequila plant is possible sweetener for diabetics. Talk about a waste of raw material.
- Would you Adam and Eve it? Women do not own 2% of the land. What next for the killer factcheck?
- In related news, teacup pigs are a fraud.
- Quinoa to feed the world, in Spanish.
- The rice warrior! Isn’t that overegging the pudding just a smidgen?
- Learn about plant genetic resources and seeds at Wageningen University.
- African Agriculture Technology Foundation “to avail adequate quality seeds at the right time and affordable price”. You might think some of the folks at the AATF should avail themselves of Wageningen’s course.
- Tough, flavoursome and bug resistant. Not Richard Markham, but a tomato bred specially for the Solomon Islands he’s talking about.
- Kew’s new global kitchen cookbook narrowly avoids being crushed by bandwagon trundling by.
- Cover crops are even more valuable than previously thought shock.
- Indigenous sheep breeds even more valuable than previously thought shock.
Wild peanuts hotspot visited
The light blogging during the past couple of weeks has been due to me travelling and Jeremy being submerged in work. We’re trying to get back into it, but things are still going to be a bit slow as we catch up. Just to tide you over for a while, though, here’s a quick taste of where I went. The guy on the right is Dr José Valls of Cenargen, which is part of Embrapa and houses the national plant genetic resources collection of Brazil. He’s showing us (that would be myself and Nora Castañeda of CIAT, who took the photo, which you can see better by clicking on it) the entire range of colour diversity in wild peanut flowers. He should know about that, because he is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on these plants, and manages one of the world’s most important collections of Arachis diversity. And here’s a quick view of only part of it, in which you can probably see about 50 (out of a total of maybe 80) different wild relatives of the peanut.
It is efforts such as those of José and a small band of like-minded peanut taxonomists, geneticists and breeders around the world that have led to the success of the peanut from the American South to East Timor, by way of Africa.
Incidentally, though I call, rather facetiously, José greenhouse a hotspot of agrobiodiversity in my title here, he pointed out to me that he thinks the centroid of wild Arachis species diversity is probably within walking distance of his desk in Brasilia. I think we have the data to test that…