Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Sri Lanka’s farmers who grow paddy for their home needs are now discovering a new trend. Instead of the widely-cultivated hybrid varieties they have opted to grow more traditional varieties of paddy as the latter are more nutritious, rich in taste, pest-resistant and need no artificial, petroleum-based fertilizer.
Apparently some farmers are keeping more than 350 different traditional varieties.
I’ve been reading Mathilda37’s interesting blog about human evolution for a while now. What makes her particularly worth following from our eeyrie here at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog is that she frequently writes about domesticates too. Case in point: she’s just done a very useful roundup of DNA studies of cattle. Roundup. Cattle. Geddit?
How much crop genetic diversity have we lost? At one level, the question is easy to answer: three quarters over the last century. That’s certainly the number that’s most often quoted.
But that doesn’t make it right. In particular, I have it on very good authority that the figure may in fact be traceable back — a la Chinese whispers — to a statement in Fowler & Mooney’s 1990 book Shattering: “As the mid-1970s were reached, three-quarters of Europe’s traditional vegetable seed stood on the verge of extinction.”
Not quite the same thing. Anyway, be that as it may, the existence of a dominant narrative hasn’t stopped people going out into the field and — the horror! — actually collecting data.