- Breeders called on to save key Afghani crop. No, not really.
- GMOs not incompatible with organic, round 2.
- The Columbian Exchange. People though, not crops.
- USDA chief botanist was into Cannabis shock.
- Novel way of growing rice unveiled.
- Two livestock pdfs: What 2010 means for farm animal genetic resources conservation. And a book on European local breeds.
Deconstructing the spread of agriculture
Did agriculture move in the hands of people, or with the words of people? Or, somewhat more prosaically:
Two alternative models have been proposed to explain the spread of agriculture in Europe during the Neolithic period. The demic diffusion model postulates the spreading of farmers from the Middle East along a Southeast to Northeast axis. Conversely, the cultural diffusion model assumes transmission of agricultural techniques without substantial movements of people.
Actually not just Europe. And the jury is still out. Two recent paper both tilt towards cultural diffusion, both in Europe (which is where the above quote comes from; but not everybody agrees) and Island SE Asia. This sort of work is mainly done by anthropologists and human geneticists. Sometimes the genetics of livestock or crops are brought into play, but only rarely both at the same time. A grand synthesis of human, livestock and crop genetic data, archaeology and anthropology remains to be done…
Nibbles: Recognizing breeds, Cannabis in New Zealand, Farming systems data, Maize inbreds, Zinc in wheat, Markets for nature, Ramie, Milk and drought, ELBARN
- Computer program recognizes cattle breeds.
- NZ dope getting stronger? Maybe, and I hope so, but probably impossible to tell from this study.
- Need farming systems data?
- Psst, wanna know how to determine the essentially derived status of maize inbred lines?
- High zinc wheat works.
- Michael Jenkins of Forests Trends on using markets to save biodiversity.
- The phylogeny of ramie and its wild relatives sorted out. Sort of.
- Pearl millet landraces are the best under drought.
- Area action plans for local breeds in Europe are out.
San Francisco apes Svalbard global seed vault — locally
In our line of work it is common to hear people rave about the importance of informal seed systems for ensuring that farmers have access to the agricultural biodiversity they need and want — in developing countries. Not so common elsewhere. Now, from the Ethicurean, comes news of a project to build a Backyard Seed Vault, which sounds very like an informal seed system in San Francisco, California. The project’s instigator, who is co-executive director of a group called Agrariana (and check out their origins and mission statement), has this to say:
We’re looking for approximately 100 San Francisco Bay Area gardeners for the inaugural season who would like to work as a community to save heirloom vegetable seed. … Agrariana will lead hands-on workshops in participants’ gardens on properly saving seed. The Backyard Seed Vault is working in conjunction with the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL), a project of the Ecology Center, for their immense knowledge on properly saving, labeling, cataloging, and storing seeds. Seeds not redistributed to participants will be donated to BASIL, providing an opportunity for any community member to “check out” seed to grow in their gardens. Gardeners of all skill levels are welcome to participate.
Sounds like a lot of fun. And there are actually lots of similar seed exchanges all over Europe, North America, Australia etc etc. Will they, I wonder, ever attract the attention of people who study the value of informal seed networks elsewhere?
Early farmers got high on chickpeas?
A somewhat cryptic comment a few days ago on a year-old post on domestication eventually led us to an intriguing 2007 article in The Times which we unaccountably seem to have missed the first time around. The article quotes liberally from a Journal of Archaeological Science paper which puts forward something of an unorthodox take on chickpea domestication. ((KEREM, Z., LEVYADUN, S., GOPHER, A., WEINBERG, P., & ABBO, S. (2007). Chickpea domestication in the Neolithic Levant through the nutritional perspective Journal of Archaeological Science, 34 (8), 1289-1293 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2006.10.025))
The authors, from various Israeli institutions, start by saying that chickpea is an unusual member of the “founder package” of Middle Eastern crops, which also includes diploid einkorn wheat, tetraploid emmer wheat, barley, pea, lentil and bitter vetch. That’s because its wild precursor (Cicer reticulatum), unlike those of the other first crops, has a relatively narrow distribution and an indehiscent pod (that is, the pods don’t split open when the seeds are ripe), and the crop itself is grown in the summer rather than the winter, basically to escape the fungal disease Ascochyta blight. A rare precursor and a problematic agronomy: why bother with the damn thing? There must have been something special — or at least different — driving the domestication of chickpea. That something, according to the authors, is the amino acid tryptophan.
Free tryptophan levels are an average of three times higher in seeds of cultivated chickpeas compared to their wild precursor, but with a lot of variation among cultivars. The usual sorts of processing have no effect. The levels are such that the authors are able to suggest that “consuming domesticated chickpea will elevate the levels of tryptophan available for processes other than growth and maintenance.” What processes might these be?
Tryptophan is a precursor of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. More tryptophan in the diet means more tryptophan in the blood which means more serotonin in the brain, which has a whole suite of interesting effects. Apart from a feeling of satiety, these include higher ovulation rates in women, improved performance under stress, lowering of aggression and greater receptivity.
So the authors are suggesting that early farming communities consuming wild chickpeas would have been more fertile, less hungry, less depressed, more accepting of social complexity, more innovative and more self-confident. Sounds like I should be eating more chickpeas. Anyway, recognizing the effect that eating these wonder grains had on their mood — and farm animals are apparently able to recognize high tryptophan feeds — early farmers would have selected for ever higher levels, leading to the domestication of the species: “it seems that the inclusion of chickpea in the founder crop package is best understood in light of its high nutritional seed properties.”
Well, it’s a great story, and I really hope it turns out to be true, although I’m not entirely sure how one might further test the hypothesis. Shades of the tale of the domestication of coffee. But I think it might be worth revisiting that initial assumption. Is chickpea really all that different from the other members of the founder package? The distribution of its precursor is certainly limited compared to some of the cereals (the map is courtesy of GBIF).
But wild lentils are not exactly common, and much more inconspicuous. And anyway we don’t really know what the distribution of C. reticulatum was like in the Neolithic. Its pollen doesn’t turn up in cores, according to one expert I asked, so it’s going to be difficult to reconstruct its ancient distribution and frequency. And why should seed indehiscence make chickpea a poor candidate for domestication? Wouldn’t it have been just the opposite? What about tryptophan levels in the other early legumes? And finally, as suggested by a former legume breeder I consulted, was Ascochyta blight a problem in the Neolithic? And is C. reticulatum susceptible to it anyway?
It does seem that perhaps the authors may have erected a bit of a straw man, which they then attacked with a very ingenious, utterly plausible, but ultimately unnecessary argument. But that’s not going to stop me eating my pasta e ceci a bit more often than before I read this paper.