- Compost can boost yields, save water shock.
- Tom Wagner shows off new tomatoes and potatoes.
- Our pal Neil tells one tree man’s story: Maurice Kwadha: farmer, entrepreneur, and climate-smart.
- The UK has a policy on animal and plant diseases in the 21st century. Doesn’t everyone?
- NPR nips at our heels, with stories on heirloom seeds and that Chinese zombie insect fungus Cordyceps.
- What to do with star anise.
- Size matters; corn ear edition.
- Soil microfauna really diverse everywhere shock.
- How scientists should work with indigenous people (in the Arctic).
- “On the matter of seeds.” Art meets PGR. Danny, this one’s for you.
Brainfood: Ectomycorrhiza, Synthetic peanuts, Ancient Greek amphorae, European bison, Pea breeding, Animal domestication
- Ectomycorrhizas and climate change. One more damn thing to worry about.
- Meiotic analysis of the hybrids between cultivated and synthetic tetraploid groundnuts. It’s normal. The meiosis I mean. Why isn’t this sort of thing done with more crops?
- Aspects of Ancient Greek trade re-evaluated with amphora DNA evidence. More than just wine and olive oil.
- Reconstructing range dynamics and range fragmentation of European bison for the last 8000 years. More eastern and northern than thought, and more affected by the spread of farming than climate change in the Holocene.
- Resistance to downy mildew (Peronospora viciae) in Australian field pea germplasm (Pisum sativum). It comes from Afghanistan.
- Deciphering the genetic basis of animal domestication. Despite all that selection and all those bottlenecks, they really are diverse.
Don’t forget the open Mendeley group for the papers we link to here.
Nibbles: Book, Breeding, Labour, Tallante’s chickpea, Bacardi yeast, Solutions, Sandwiches, Mapping resistance, Cucumber history, Maya nuts
- Can a person called Rushing really have written a book on Slow Gardening?
- Genetic Engineering vs. Breeding. No contest, really.
- Georgia peaches, rotting in the sun. Can the consequences of clamping down on immigrant labour really have been unintended?
- Tallante’s chickpea back from the brink. No, I don’t know why as species of Astragalus is called a chickpea. Is it even a CWR?
- Bacardi and its yeast. A tale of derring-do and intellectual property rights. h/t CAS-IP.
- Back40 takes aim at Solutions for a Cultivated Planet, so we don’t have to.
- UK productivity 5,263 beef sandwiches per hectare(bsp/h), compared to 2,439 bsp/h in the mid-18th century. h/t The Tracing Paper.
- Another great interactive map, this time of bacterial diversity of the worst kind.
- Cucumbers in Europe: a history. AoB blog explains all.
- The good old Maya nut to the rescue again.
Back in Baku
I’ve been travelling so I missed the announcement a couple of days ago on their blog that our friends at CCAFS ((That’s the CGIAR’s research programme on Climate Change, Agriculture & Food Security, do keep up.)) have a new all-singing, all-dancing platform called the Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network. ((No, don’t ask me how it relates to this.)) Which is annoying because the issue of changes in the suitability of the climate for potato cultivation came up in the discussions at the meeting I’m attending here in Baku. And I would quite happily have stolen something else from CCAFS for my presentation. ((Not that it would have been easy. You can’t really share the AMKN maps.)) The conference is called “Diversity, characterization and utilization of plant genetic resources for enhanced resilience to climate change” and it was hosted by the Azerbaijan Genetic Resources Institute with support from a number of CGIAR Centres active in the region and FAO, which provided funding for the project of which the meeting is one of the activities.
There were researchers from pretty much all of the countries of the Central Asia and Caucasus (CAC) region, plus Turkey, Iran, Ukraine and Russia to boot. Many of the presentations brought home to me — and not for the first time — what a tremendously rich part of the world this is for agricultural biodiversity: wild asparagus with stems five meters long; grape varieties sporting bunches almost as long as your arm; strange interspecific wheat hybrids with branched spikes; medicinal plants for every ailment you can think of; wheat landraces phenomenally high in zinc and iron. And that’s just the lunch. Fortunately, the place is also rich in talented researchers busy studying their agrobiodiversity, conserving it, and using it for health, nutrition and food security.
Sure, they have problems. Where do they not? But there seems to be a real commitment to getting the job done, enthusiasm even. I was particularly struck by the relatively close linkages between genebanks and breeding programmes in many of the CAC countries. That you certainly don’t see everywhere. I wonder if it’s a legacy of the VIR system. They could do with more collaboration, coordination and sharing of responsibilities at the regional level, not to mention better integration with the rest of the world. But maybe this meeting will help. Anyway, all the presentations, abstracts and final recommendations will be online soon. I’ll post something when they’re up and you can make up your own minds.
Brainfood: Rice yield, Carrot evaluation, Caper chemistry, Rice fortification, Range shifts, Baobab, Tunisian thyme, Drought-tolerant rice
- Rice yields and yield gaps in Southeast Asia: Past trends and future outlook. If average farmers became like best-yielding farmers that would meet 2050 needs, except in the Philippines, where some more structural stuff is needed.
- Method of evaluating diversity of carrot roots using a self-organizing map and image data. The sound you hear is that of butterflies being broken on wheels.
- Bioactive compounds from Capparis spinosa subsp. rupestris. Are pretty much the same as those in subsp. spinosa.
- Constitutive Overexpression of the OsNAS Gene Family Reveals Single-Gene Strategies for Effective Iron- and Zinc-Biofortification of Rice Endosperm. So that’s a good thing, right?
- Analysis of climate paths reveals potential limitations on species range shifts. Corridors not the answer. Or not the only answer. Or not the full answer.
- An updated review of Adansonia digitata: A commercially important African tree. Do baobab scientists not sometimes long for the Time Before Reviews, when they actually, you know, did stuff?
- Genetic diversity, population structure and relationships of Tunisian Thymus algeriensis Boiss. et Reut. and Thymus capitatus Hoffm. et Link. assessed by isozymes. Dad, what’s an isozyme? Ah, son, it’s a thing people used in the Time Before DNA. The two species are different, they need to be managed in different ways.
- Potential Impact of Biotechnology on Adaption of Agriculture to Climate Change: The Case of Drought Tolerant Rice Breeding in Asia. Kinda pointless: “in severe drought both the [drought tolerant] and the conventional varieties were either not planted or, if planted, did not yield”.