- Frank Rijsberman aims to build a “strong Consortium.”
- Teaching tools aim to improve capacity in plant breeding. And no, I didn’t mean anything by the juxtaposition, settle down.
- Kenyan reality show aims to enhance rural livelihoods. What, are you trying to be funny? No, I tell you, it’s all a massive coincidence.
- You know what, why don’t we just all go to the beach and relax? Nothing like combining work with pleasure…
- You could read the new Plant Cuttings there.
- Or look at 3D photos of cabbages.
- Or fiddle with the latest geeky plant gadget.
- PDF of the European dictionary of domesticated and utilised animals. From the folks at the European Regional Focal Point for Animal Genetic Resources (ERFP). Which is news to me. Relationship to the equivalent on the crops side unclear.
- Speaking of Europe, someone at the Dutch genebank studying gaps in the conservation of crop wild relatives. Welcome to the club.
- Well this sort of thing is not going to help with any gap analysis, is it? Qualifies as assisted migration though, perhaps, which is kinda cool. And may well be needed.
- I wonder what the Brazilian forest code means for crop wild relatives.
- Traditional Japanese rice variety grown in Queensland to help Fukishima victims. Well, yes, but it’s not exactly charity we’re talking about here. And what’s it going to do to all the wild rice there? Which I’m willing to bet is a gap of some kind.
- Speaking of altruistic gestures, the idea to, er, sell the Indian genebank encounters some, er, opposition.
- No plans to sell anything from this new Jersey apple genebank. Except maybe the cider? I wonder, any hazlenut genebanks out there? No, don’t write in and tell me.
- The genebank of the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre given a bit of a face-lift on VoA. At least in the trailer, starting at 0:45. Not sure how to get the full thing, but working on it…
- Latvian government plants small veggie patch in meaningless gesture. Paparazzi promptly tread all over it. Not that such things can’t be nice, and indeed useful. Oh, and here comes the history. But maybe they should have taken a slightly different tack.
- “Orange is the colour of curry.” Why spice is nice. And here comes the science on that.
- And speaking of heat, FAO very keen to tell you what zone you’re in. Oh, hell, there go another couple hours down the drain as I try to navigate the thing.
Brothers in farms
Jeremy’s recent piece of detective work with the current edition of the Garden Seed Inventory, coming hot on the heels of my own piece on how diversity in French wheat has changed during the past hundred years, reminded me of a post of ours a couple of years back that could now bear revisiting. It was about a paper that had re-analyzed historical data from vegetable seed catalogues old and new to suggest that maybe the metanarrative of genetic erosion had been overdone:
If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties, then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the multiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful. Perhaps the most accurate measure of diversity would be found in a comparative DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties, work that remains to be done.
The alleged grounds for hopefulness are that Drs Heald and Chapman, the authors, found 7100 varieties in 2004 catalogues, “only 2 percent fewer than one hundred years earlier. By this measure, consumers of seeds have seen almost no loss of overall varietal diversity”. Well of course that French wheat work is indeed as close as we’re likely to get to the “DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties.” And, alas, it shows what Jeremy said at the time was all too possible, and that is that genetic diversity can go down even when varietal diversity, meaning the number of cultivars of a crop, goes up. Grim after all.
Trawling seed catalogues is good fun, and can give you some clues as to what genetic erosion may be happening, but in the end it is diversity at the genetic level that really counts, let’s remember that. The geneticist JBS Haldane famously said that he would lay down his life for two of his brothers or eight of his cousins. That’s just a striking way of saying that you’re more closely related to your brother than to your cousin. The corollary of that is that there’s more genetic diversity in a group of cousins than in a group featuring the same, or indeed even a greater, number of brothers.
We still don’t know if those 7100 varieties in the 2004 catalogues are more brothers or cousins, but, if French wheat is anything to go by, the former is more likely. 1 You may think you have a “multiplicity of present choices”, but if in fact you only have brothers to choose from, you could be forgiven for the temptation to trade a whole bunch of them for a cousin or two.
Assuming you can get hold of them, that is.
D Landreth not so important to seed diversity
Thanks to the very good offices of our friends at Seed Savers Exchange, I now have a copy of the most recent (6th) edition of the Garden Seed Inventory. I wanted this in order to see whether the loss of The D. Landreth Seed Company, America’s oldest, as it happens, while tragic for the business and its customers, would also be a great loss for agricultural biodiversity. Long answer short: not so much.
The Garden Seed Inventory is a catalogue of catalogues, listing all the varieties available from all the catalogues SSE can get its hands on. That makes it a very useful snapshot of what is out there (in the US), how widely available it is, and the ebbs and flows in comercially-available diversity of crops and varieties. The Introduction to the book contains lots of analysis of this type, and I thought I remembered that it listed all the varieties that are available only from a single supplier and each supplier’s “unique” varieties. It doesn’t.
It does, however, list the 27 companies (10% of the total number covered by the inventory) that list the most unique varieties. D. Landreth is not among them. It also lists the companies that had introduced the most “new unique varieties”. Perhaps unexpectedly, there’s quite an overlap with the “most uniques”. and D Landreth isn’t in that list either. All of which suggests to me that while the passing of D Landreth would indeed be sad for its owners and customers, it would not be an immediate disaster for commercially-available agricultural biodiversity in the United States.
Does D Landreth have any varieties not available elsewhere? That one is difficult to answer using the Inventory. More than 450 pages of closely spaced entries is a lot to look through, searching for those with a single source coded La1. It ought to be a doddle from the database that stores the original records, but I’m sure SSE has much else on its mind at the moment. Mind you, if 45 owners of the Inventory were to scan 10 pages each …
Brainfood: Bee diversity, Fodder innovation, African agrobiodiversity, Quinoa economy, Fragmentation and diversity, Rice in Madagascar, Rice in Thailand
- Management increases genetic diversity of honey bees via admixture. No domestication bottleneck there!
- Enhancing innovation in livestock value chains through networks: Lessons from fodder innovation case studies in developing countries. Fodder innovators of the world, organize. If you don’t, you will lose your value chains.
- Introduction to special issue on agricultural biodiversity, ecosystems and environment linkages in Africa. Special issues? What special issue?
- The construction of an alternative quinoa economy: balancing solidarity, household needs, and profit in San Agustín, Bolivia. Despite the allure of fancy denominations of origin and the like, old-fashioned cooperatives, and the much-maligned intermediary, manage to hang on in there.
- Species–genetic diversity correlations in habitat fragmentation can be biased by small sample sizes. Can.
- The original features of rice (Oryza sativa L.) genetic diversity and the importance of within-variety diversity in the highlands of Madagascar build a strong case for in situ conservation. Actually the way I read it, the stronger case is for ex situ. But see what you think.
- Population structure of the primary gene pool of Oryza sativa in Thailand. In situ Strikes Back.
The how and why of indicators of agricultural biodiversity
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that one crop variety does disappear every single day. The question still remains: does it matter? After all, the variety that was just lost yesterday might be very similar to one that’s still out there today. That’s part of the reason why a group of French researchers has just come up with “A new integrative indicator to assess crop genetic diversity,” which is the title of their paper in Ecological Indicators. 2
Christophe Bonneuil and his co-workers thought that, given the data, they could come up with something more powerful and more widely applicable than richness (i.e. the number of different varieties) or the standard diversity indicators (i.e. various combinations of richness and evenness). So they started with number of varieties, but then they factored in the relative extent to which each was grown in their study area, the departement of Eure-et-Loire in France (which is the evenness bit), how genetically distinct each was (which is the bit which addresses the pesky question of how different the variety that disapeared today is from all the other ones left behind), and how much genetic diversity there was inside each.
They got the data on genetic differences among varieties by comparing genebank samples of all the wheat types grown in Eure-et-Loire from 1878 and 2006 at 35 microsatellite loci, and data on acreage of each variety at different points in time from various archival sources. Internal genetic diversity was set at one of three values derived from the literature, depending on whether the variety was a landrace, an old commercial line or a modern pure line.
They put all that together into this monster indicator of allelic diversity in the landscape,
and then calculated it for different times periods, and got this:
That shows a decrease in diversity as landraces are replaced with modern varieties, but, interestingly, something of a resurgence after the mid-1960s, as more diverse germplasm is introduced into breeding programmes. The indicator has been on a downward trend just lately, as the genetic relatedness of the most frequent varieties has increased. 3 Overall, it’s maybe a 50% drop since 1878. Not entirely dissimilar to the iconic 75% figure, and at least this wasn’t plucked out of thin air.
Interesting enough, but check out the trend in number of varieties over the same period:
Totally different. Pretty much an upward trend, albeit with some stuttering. Certainly no evidence from these data of massive erosion of diversity. Maybe the findings of Jarvis et al. (2008) that simple richness can be a useful indicator of diversity should be applied with caution if you’re not just dealing with landraces.
But how significant is it really that the value of this particular indicator of diversity, for all its fanciness, has decreased? Has anyone actually suffered as a result? I don’t know, but a second paper I came across this week suggests how one could find out. Roseline Remans and others associated with the Millennium Villages Project have a study out in PLoS ONE which adds yet another — different — nuance to diversity. 4 Their index considers not just how many different crops are grown on a farm, but also how different they are in their nutritional composition. Think of it as the nutritional analogue of the inter-varietal genetic diversity term in the French indicator. The more different in nutritional composition two crops are, the more complementary they are to local diets, the more important it is that both are there, the higher the resulting “functional” diversity index. And in fact the authors did find a positive relationship between their diversity indicator and nutritional status, at least at the village level.
Easy to imagine (though perhaps less easy to actually implement) a further refinement of Bonneuil et al.’s indicator which additionally integrates nutritional data, to yield an indicator of crop genetic and functional diversity. And, of course, once you have such a super-indicator, it might actually be possible to reward people on the basis of their success in maintaining it at high levels. Which, as it happens, is the subject of yet another paper I happened across last week. 5 But maybe that’s a paper too far for now. 6