- The annual Wageningen agrobiodiversity conservation course is in India this year. Hannes says it’s really good.
- AVRDC’s veggie seed kits are a hit in Orissa.
- CIMMYT swimming in data. Waving, not drowning.
- IRRI not doing badly either. But “quantitative train loci” is a new one on me.
- Australia thinking about introducing elephants. Yeah because that sort of thing has been such a success in the past.
- Well, actually, with sheep, I suppose it has, in a way. And the genetics says breeders have a lot of diversity to play with still.
- Your mama is a llama.
- The Island of Dogs has crop wild relatives. No, not the one in London.
- Cuba goes for new urban crops. And not for the first time, Shirley. But what about the old ones?
- Quick, duck! This piece has been rather a hit for me over on Facebook.
- VII International Symposium on Artichoke, Cardoon and Their Wild Relatives: The (Very Expensive) Book.
- Food sovereignty “started in New England”. Huh? And proponents “want to eat and sell the food they grow free from interference from state and federal regulators”. Huh?
Consolidation in the seed industry
We’ve written before about consolidation in the seed industry making the same tired joke that I want to make again now, that a picture is worth 1000 words. It doesn’t hurt to stay up to date though, which is why I am grateful to Resources Research for finding, and colouring in, the diagram from the USDA report on Research Investments and Market Structure in the Food Processing, Agricultural Input, and Biofuel Industries Worldwide.
The USDA report is not, as far as I can tell, anything to do with the US Department of Justice’s investigation of antitrust practices in the seed industry, announced a couple of years ago. So what has become of that? Anyone know?
Brainfood: Falcons, Wild soybean squared, Horse domestication
- Effects of Introducing Threatened Falcons into Vineyards on Abundance of Passeriformes and Bird Damage to Grapes. Potential savings of US$234/ha for Sauvignon Blanc, more for Pinot Noir.
- Genetic characterization and gene flow in different geographical-distance neighbouring natural populations of wild soybean (Glycine soja Sieb. & Zucc.) and implications for protection from GM soybeans. There is a small amount of outcrossing, which decreases with distance. GM crops should be grown far from wild populations, certainly more than 1.5km. And we can work out better ways to collect for ex situ conservation.
- Phylogenetic relationships, interspecific hybridization and origin of some rare characters of wild soybean in the subgenus Glycine soja in China. Intermediate forms are closer to the wild than the cultivated species.
- Mitochondrial genomes from modern horses reveal the major haplogroups that underwent domestication. A diversity of maternal lines were domesticated about 150,000 years ago, leading to about 18 modern haplogroups. One of them is only found in the only remaining wild horse, E. przewalskii.
How to react to emergencies
From early 2000, various agencies and individuals involved in livestock relief work began to question the quality and professionalism of their interventions.
Wow, thanks for sharing. Anyway, out of that crisis of self-esteem was LEGS born, the Livestock Emergency Guidelines and Standards. It’s not immediately clear to me after a brief browse of the website to what extent agrobiodiversity considerations come into these standards and guidelines, but I’ll explore some more and get back to you. Anyone out there aware of a similarly formalized initiative for seeds? It’s not as if guidelines for seed interventions are not needed. But they may be there already for all I know, embedded in the WFP and FAO seed relief playbooks.
LATER: And indeed they are. Good to know. Thanks to Tom Osborn from FAO.
Brainfood: Tea, NGS, Grandmothers, Anti-scorbutics, Barley population structure, Climate change below ground, Rice
- Genetic structure and diversity of India hybrid tea. It’s complicated. It’s important because the success of tea outside its core are is due to hybridization between Indian and Chinese types in Assam starting in 1875. It’s limited.
- NGS technologies for analyzing germplasm diversity in genebanks. That’s Next-Generation Sequencing. Can be used to “identify patterns of genetic diversity, map quantitative traits and mine novel alleles.” Recommendation is for “genotyping by sequencing” to be applied stepwise, starting with a core collection. That’ll be complicated, but the real bottleneck will be the phenotyping.
- The role and influence of grandmothers on child nutrition: culturally designated advisors and caregivers. Wise up, nutrition advocates. You are, apparently, ignoring egg-suckers, a primary force for good.
- The importance of eating local: slaughter and scurvy in Antarctic cuisine. Who needs oranges when you have fresh penguin at hand?
- Islands and streams: clusters and gene flow in wild barley populations from the Levant. There is ecogeographic patterning in the wild material, once you remove the effect of recent admixture with cultivated barley. Geneflow is more N to S than vice versa.
- Global change belowground: impacts of elevated CO2, nitrogen, and summer drought on soil food webs and biodiversity. It’s complex, really complex; increased CO2 and N may result in new, simpler belowground assemblages.
- Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change. An entire issue of Rice journal.