- Pearl millet is getting the hybrid treatment. And, loving it.
- Want to know what to grow in your garden? Yes, even pearl millet.
- Nice pics of Armenian landscapes, food and foodways. No pearl millet in sight.
- The latest monthly newsletter from The Botanist in the Kitchen does seeds. Pearl millet unavailable for comment.
- China is genotyping and phenotyping (almost) everything. Pearl millet feeling left out.
- If pearl millet fails, there is always pastoralism. No, wait…
Brainfood: Targets, Plant Treaty, Decolonization, Fonio germination, Recalcitrant seeds, Microbiome, Taro seed system
- Status and future of seed conservation of threatened plants in the post-2020 era. 21% of threatened plants are conserved in genebanks across 44 countries in Europe and western Asia. Not bad, but not good enough. I wonder how many of those 21% will be of interest to breeders?
- How the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture can support effective germplasm exchange: four Colombian case studies. The Plant Treaty can really help a country’s genebanks and breeders drive agricultural development, given half a chance.
- Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism. Indigenous communities need to be careful in collaborating with genebanks and breeders.
- Impacts of climate change on fonio millet: seed germination ecology and suitability modelling of an indigenous West African cereal. Climate change will screw up the germination of fonio in some places, so genebanks and breeders better get cracking.
- Euterpe edulis seed recalcitrance: difficult, yes, but not impossible to genebank. Tricky seed storage behaviour need not deter genebankers.
- Accelerated aging caused diversity and specificity loss in the bacterial communities of Brassica napus seedlings. Genebanks should be careful with their seed aging experiments, because they might screw up the seed microbiome.
- Understanding Biotic Constraints to Taro (Colocasia esculenta) Production in the Derived Savanna and Humid Forest Agroecosystems of Nigeria. Genebanks need seed systems though.
Gaps galore in collards collections
Quick follow-up to my post a few days ago on the recent study of the origin of the collard greens grown in the Moroccan oases of the Draa and Ziz valleys.
Ethnobotanists Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi used historical texts, linguistics, and Indigenous knowledge in their investigation, but of course it’s also possible to use genetics to figure out where the plants may have came from. Especially as there are plenty of accessions labelled Brassica oleracea var. acephala in the genebanks that share their data on Genesys — just over 1500 in fact.
Alas, that might in practice turn out to be tricky, though, due to the somewhat — ahem — skewed geographic distribution of the accessions in question. The yellow circles in the map below show the approximate locations of those oases on the edge of the Sahara.
Still worth trying, in my view, but really more than anything this should be an encouragement to do some more collecting. Or get more genebanks on Genesys. Or identify more B. oleracea accessions to variety level. Or…
What else has been collected in the Draa and Ziz valleys or thereabouts? Surprisingly little, mainly wheat, barley, chickpea, faba bean and alfalfa. The general location of the valleys is now shown by white squares.
Incidentally, the. map below is where ChatGPT thinks collards are grown around he world. I really have no idea how accurate it is. I hope someone will tell us.
Nibbles: Crop mapping, Climate change impacts, Rice cheese, Andean blueberry, Rare apples, Hungarian genebank, Old seed collection
- AI doesn’t recognize tropical agriculture very well.
- So presumably it can’t easily be used in assessing climate change impacts in agricultural heritage systems? FAO has some ideas on how to do it.
- Maybe rice heritage systems can be used to make cheese.
- I bet Andean blueberry (Vaccinium floribundum) goes great with rice cheese.
- But if not, heritage apples will probably do.
- The Hungarian genebank is hoping to inject heritage grains into non-heritage agricultural systems. AI and FAO unavailable for comment.
- Maybe AI can help with the mystery of this old seed collection at the Natural History Museum, London.
Brainfood: History edition
- Phylogenetics and evolution of Digitaria grasses, including cereal crops fonio, raishan and Polish millet. The history of wild Digitaria goes back 2–6 million years.
- Biogeography of Crop Progenitors and Wild Plant Resources in the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene of West Asia, 14.7–8.3 ka. This is what the distribution of crop wild relatives looked like in West Asia 10 thousand years ago or thereabouts. No Digitaria, but plenty of other stuff.
- Ancient use and long-distance transport of the Four Corners Potato (Solanum jamesii) across the Colorado Plateau: Implications for early stages of domestication. At roughly the same time, a couple continents and an ocean over, a local potato species was being processed outside its rage. Was it cultivated? Do the math.
- State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing. And a few thousand years later, there were domesticated grains, states, and taxes. In that order. Do the math.
- The Archaeology of Olive Oil Production in Roman and Pre-Roman Italy. Pretty sure the Romans had a state and taxes. They also had domesticated olives.
- Wines of Fire and Earth: Exploring the Volcanic Terroirs of the Canary Islands – a Case Study. No Romans on the Canaries, but plenty of vines.
- Black Death Land Abandonment Drove European Diversity Losses. The Romans and their successors, with their cereals, olives and grapes, were surprisingly good for landscape floristic diversity. The Black Death, not so much.
- The decades-old fantasy of enhancing pigeonpea productivity. Well that’s a bit of a letdown after a 6 million year journey.
- Past, present and future of local crop evolution. That’s because we needed Indigenous people and local communities to show us the way.