Going, going, not gone?

My circles on GooglePlus alerted me to a report from NPR in the US, that the country’s oldest extant seed company is facing bankruptcy. The D. Landreth Seed Company has been going since 1784, and is credited with introducing the zinnia to the US and with popularising the tomato when it offered seed for the first time in 1820. Now the company is in trouble with its creditors.

That’s a great shame, the more so because it is happening in a country that, unlike some, ((And today is the deadline for signing up to a hopeless attempt to open up EU seed laws.)) does not enjoy legislation preventing the sale of specific varieties. So what about market demand? Don’t people want the seeds that D. Landreth has to offer? Could it be that the company’s website is, as one commenter suggests, not entirely up to date?

At G+ Anastasia Bodnar said “it’d be sort of sad if the company went under, but as it says in the article, it’s not like the germplasm would disappear, it’d be auctioned off”.

Well, maybe, but what guarantee is there that whoever buys it would maintain it? And if Landreth can’t make a living selling that germplasm, maybe the reason is that lots of other people have the self-same varieties and are selling them successfully.

My question is this: “how many varieties offered by Landreth are not offered by another seed company in the US or elsewhere?”

In the old days, I might have checked by looking in Seed Savers Exchange’s wonderful publication the Fruit, Nut & Berry Inventory, but I see there hasn’t been a new edition since 2001, and I can’t see the database on which it was based anywhere. Having produced a UK version myself, I know how hard it is to do this kind of information wrangling, but it is really worthwhile.

<dream>Maybe I should attempt to Kickstart that effort again. </dream>

Brainfood: Alfalfa, Date palm, Apricot, Collecting, Reintroduction, Ribes, Payments

Pitfalls in modeling the effects of climate change on genetic diversity

Don’t you just hate it when a striking message from an elegant model is complicated by, well, facts? I may have Nibbled a press release on a recent modeling study from Wageningen University. The crux of the results was that as species migrate north due to climate change, they shed diversity from the central, most diverse part of their distribution, which is bad for their ability to adapt.

Plant and animal species can lose their ability to adapt as a result of climate change. This is shown by research performed by Marleen Cobben with which she hopes to obtain her doctorate at Wageningen University (part of Wageningen UR) on 17 April 2012. Cobben used computer calculations to illustrate how the genetic base of plants and animals is seriously deteriorating due to climate change. The smaller genetic base makes species more vulnerable to problems such as diseases. Moreover, the fragmentation of landscapes and the loss of wildlife areas is accelerating this decline.

This was interesting to me because we routinely, and perhaps somewhat blindingly, these days say that climate change will lead to shifts in the distributions of species. Crop wild relatives, say. Shift that will absolutely require germplasm collecting and ex situ conservation. Nothing else will do. Forget about in situ, ex situ it must be. That’s because, when added up, these shifts in the distributions of individual species will result in profound alterations in the geographic patterns of species diversity. Some hotspots will disappear, some diversity-poor areas will be enriched. Difficult to plan in situ conservation under these conditions. Ergo, need to collect. Also, the distributional shifts required for a species to track the climate will in most cases surely be faster than the rate of migration of the species, leading inexorably to its extinction. Need to collect, and quick. I mean, what can a poor species do under climate change besides move or perish? Need to collect, I tell you.

Well, adapt, of course, that’s what it can do. And collecting is not going to help with that. Need to do in situ, maybe assisted migration, you clod.

So a study which suggests that climate change is likely to also result in a decrease in genetic diversity within species would seem to push the pendulum further towards ex situ. Without being able to delve into the particularities of the model, the results seemed plausible to me, assuming that the highest diversity was indeed found in the central part of the distribution. Genetic erosion ensues. Won’t be able to adapt. Need to collect!

I can’t remember if I did nibble it, but I certainly sent the link to the Crop Wild Relatives mailing list. And it elicited an interesting, skeptical reply from Prof. Jonathan Gressel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The professor pointed to a possible mechanism by which climate change could conceivably increase genetic diversity.

Unfortunately it is common for modelers to to say that their research “shows” (in this case), demonstrates or even proves something. As a sometime modeler (first model on herbicide resistance published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1978), the best models can do is suggest priorities for experimentation to validate them. Ignoring (or not knowing) one important parameter can skew the model. My mathematician colleague always kept mumbling at me: “Garbage in, Garbage Out”. I would hazard a guess that one parameter was left out of the simulations: the fact that sub-lethal stresses increase mutation rates. Thus, climate change stress will increase mutational diversity in pre-existing genes. For a discussion of this, see: Pest Management Science 67:253-257, 2011.

Oh no, you mean we have to do both ex situ and in situ? Well that won’t do at all. While I naturally hope Marleen Cobb successfully defended her PhD last week, I hope that when she comes round she’ll tweak her model and help us decide once and for all.

Mapping the 1970 corn blight

Here are my 2 maps ((Quick & dirty, without cross checking the numbers, but I think the maps speak for themselves.)) for this discussion. I used linear regression to predict corn yield for each county in the US, using time (year) as the independent variable. I used the years 1950 to 1969 to create the model, and to predict corn yield in 1970. This should be a reasonable estimate of the ‘expected yield’ for 1970 for each county, if it had been a ‘normal year’.

I then computed the difference between the expected yield and the yield obtained by farmers, and expressed that as the percentage of the expected yield. Negative numbers mean that yields were lower than expected in a county, positive numbers mean that they were higher than expected. Counties with data for less than 9 years were excluded.

1970 corn yields were indeed much lower than expected in the southeast. Corn blight hit very hard. But also note that yield was stable or up in the north and in the west, and look were US corn was grown in 1970. The map below expresses corn area as the percentage of the total area of a county.

Most corn is grown in the corn-belt. The southern parts of it were much affected by the disease (The Illinois Secretary of Agriculture’s estimate that, by August, 25 percent of his state’s corn crop had been lost to the blight may have been spot on). But 1970 was a normal or good year for corn yield in the northern and western parts of the corn belt, and that compensated for the losses incurred elsewhere. If you sum it all up, corn production was about 15% lower than what could have been expected. That is whole lot of corn — but perhaps not that exceptional as far as bad years go.

Here is a table of estimated corn yield by state, as percentage of the expected yield for 1970, and the corn area, as percentage of the national area (only for states with more than 1% of the national corn area in the counties data set).

State Yield Area   State Yield Area
Florida -36 1   Minnesota -12 8
Georgia -33 3   Missouri -11 5
Illinois -31 18   Nebraska -9 9
Indiana -27 9   North Carolina -5 2
Iowa -26 18   Ohio -1 5
Kansas -24 2   Pennsylvania 0 2
Kentucky -22 2   South Dakota 6 4
Michigan -12 3   Wisconsin 15 3

US government blames maize yield losses on Southern Corn Leaf Blight

Our friend Jacob’s Google-fu is stronger than mine. He found this annotated graph of maize yields in the US.

See how they’ve claimed that blight reduced yields by 18% in 1970? That would be the Southern Corn Leaf Blight that wasn’t a problem, and the yield loss wasn’t caused by lack of genetic diversity.

Well, of course, the government would say that, wouldn’t they, after shelling out all that money on plant breeding and stuff …