The Centro de Conservación de la Biodiversidad Agrícola de Tenerife (CCBAT) has a Facebook page on which they have just announced the release of an attractive new poster of bean diversity, reproduced here. There’s also one about potatoes. And a book summarizing traditional diversity in all the crops.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Brainfood: Red meat, Chocolate quality, Shea and livelihoods, Modeling extinction, Living collections, Sorghum & millet breeding, Hotspots, Ancient sesame, Breeding lovefest
- Red meat in global nutrition. Not as bad as people say. But then the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association would say that, wouldn’t they.
- Optimizing chocolate production through traceability: A review of the influence of farming practices on cocoa bean quality. Manufacturers really need data on how the crop was grown.
- Contribution of “Women’s Gold” to West African Livelihoods: The Case of Shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) in Burkina Faso. It is high, especially for the poorest households, for women, and when other sources of income are scarce.
- Herbarium records do not predict rediscovery of presumed nationally extinct species. Fancy probabilistic models based on number of sightings in different time periods are pretty useless predictors of whether news of the demise of a species was exaggerated.
- The importance of living botanical collections for plant biology and the “next generation” of evo-devo research. “Next generation” sequencing pretty useless without the actual plants in “last generation” genebanks and “first generation” botanical gardens/arboreta. Don’t believe me? Here come the vignettes.
- Breeding Strategies for Adaptation of Pearl Millet and Sorghum to Climate Variability and Change in West Africa. Involve farmers, bank on diversity, support seed systems.
- Plant species richness: the world records. They’re only found in oligo- to meso-trophic, managed, semi-natural, temperate grasslands and tropical rain forests.
- Sesame Utilization in China: New Archaeobotanical Evidence from Xinjiang. 5kg of white sesame seeds in a nice jug at the Thousand Buddha Grottoes at Boziklik dating from ca. 700 years BP means the crop was, well, used at that time and place.
- The twenty-first century, the century of plant breeding. Accentuate the positive.
Maps of Peruvian maize races
A very attractive map of the races of Maize found in Peru posted on Facebook sent me scurrying for the source. Turns out it was put out by the Ministry of the Environment last year. Here it is:
Much prettier than another version that one can also find online:
Of course, these types of maps underplay the diversity that you can find in any one locality within Peru, which can also be considerable. Nice to look at nonetheless.
Brainfood: Brassica breeding, NUS breeding, Soybean domestication, Bambara groundnut, Jatropha chain, Setaria drought tolerance
- Developing genetic resources for pre-breeding in Brassica oleracea L.: an overview of the UK perspective. Genebanks will set you free.
- Competitive underutilized crops will depend on the state funding of breeding programmes: an opinion on the example of Europe. Divert some subsidies paid directly to farmers to a Europe-wide breeding programme devoted to NUS.
- Analysis of average standardized SSR allele size supports domestication of soybean along the Yellow River. The middle part, to be precise, where it loops north.
- Bambara nut: A review of utlisation, market potential and crop improvement. Need some functioning value chains, for pity’s sake. That’s why previous promotion efforts failed miserably. Not because they’re, well, not that great a crop? In fact they’re drought-tolerant, tasty, nutritious; but difficult to process, prepare. So do market research to inform breeding.
- State-of-the-art of the Jatropha curcas productive chain: From sowing to biodiesel and by-products. Value chains? You want value chains? I’ve got a state-of-the-art one right here.
- Validation of an allele-specific marker associated with dehydration stress tolerance in a core set of foxtail millet accessions. The marker explains about 27% of total variation in dehydration tolerance in a core collection, which is apparently pretty good.