Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Luigi is trapped in the ultimate capitalist nightmare, unable to afford both vodka and internet access. But he managed to smuggle out a couple of images from a meeting in St Petersburg.
N.I. Vavilov looks down on the assembled conference attendees. I’m not sure I’d be able to concentrate under those circumstances.
And the Great Man’s desk. Would it have been too much to have sat in his chair?
Henry M. “Hank” Beachell shared the World Food Prize in 1996 with Gurdev Khush. Both IRRI rice breeders, they were responsible for breeding the first Green Revolution dwarf rice variety, IR8. IRRI’s channel on youtube has just posted an excerpt from a USDA-National Agricultural Library (NAL) video project called Precious Seeds which tells his story. The money quote: “…cooking quality was secondary, milling quality was secondary, the main thing was rice production.”
Yesterday was Ada Lovelace day, when bloggers around the world celebrated women in technology. We weren’t aware of it, and frankly, I’m not sure who we might have chosen. Erna Bennett? Fortunately, though, we can direct you instead to Oliver Morton’s fine post on Constance Hartt. Who she?
Hartt was a laboratory researcher at the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association Experiment Station, and her assiduous work on the biochemistry of sugar cane in the 1930s and 1940s convinced her that, for that plant at least, the primary product of photosynthesis is malate, a four carbon sugar. Later carbon-14 studies showed that she was right — and led to an interesting conundrum. Why did some plants — most plants, indeed, and almost all algae — make a three carbon sugar, phophoglycerate, while sugar cane and, it later became clear, various other grasses made a four-carbon sugar?
Some gene-jockeys seem to think that all that’s needed to double the yield of crop plants is “simply” to give them a C4 photosynthetic pathway. I’m not going to get into that one. But Morton gives a good account of how and why C4 differs from C3, and the part Hartt played in its elucidation.
Hot on the heels of of the illustrated Arabic botanical treatise I pointed to a few days ago comes a wonderful online exhibition about food, cooking and eating in medieval times from the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Some great pictures of agrobiodiversity: crops and livestock, and their methods of preparation and presentation at the table. Via.
