History

February 11, 2019

Historical plant exploration film comes to light

You may not have heard of USDA plant explorers David Fairchild and Palemon Howard Dorsett, but they are among those who have had the greatest impact on what we eat in the United States. Now a silent film of their 1925–26 collecting trip to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Sumatra, and Java has been found by the National Agricultural Library (NAL).

Pretty stunning it is too.

February 11, 2019February 11, 2019

Brainfood: Salinity tolerance, Intensification & sparing, CWR templates, Cacao identity, Soybean CWR, Soybean & CC, Cassava adoption, Indian cauliflower, Bambara groundnut, CC breeding, NUS, Banana access, Enset

Salt stress under the scalpel – dissecting the genetics of salt tolerance. Could domesticate naturally salt-tolerant species and then breed for agronomic performance.
Exploring the relationship between agricultural intensification and changes in cropland areas in the US. Higher yields not necessarily associated with less agricultural expansion.
New tools for crop wild relative conservation planning. Lots of templates.
Genetic identity and origin of “Piura Porcelana”—a fine-flavored traditional variety of cacao (Theoborma cacao) from the Peruvian Amazon. Similar but not identical to Nacional from Ecuador.
Cytogenetics and genetic introgression from wild relatives in soybean. Intersubgeneric crossability barrier finally broken.
Increased temperatures may safeguard the nutritional quality of crops under future elevated CO₂ concentrations. Swings and roundabouts.
Poverty reduction effects of agricultural technology adoption: the case of improved cassava varieties in Nigeria. 1.62 million lifted out of poverty, give or take, depending on the breaks.
Frequent introgression of European cauliflowers in the present day cultivated Indian cauliflowers and role of Indian genotypes in the evolution of tropical cauliflower. More evidence of interdependence, if any were needed.
Bambara Groundnut is a Climate-Resilient Crop: How Could a Drought-Tolerant and Nutritious Legume Improve Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change? Isn’t it obvious?
Adaption to Climate Change: Climate Adaptive Breeding of Maize, Wheat and Rice. “The good news is that there is significant genetic variation for heat and drought/submergence tolerance in the global maize, wheat and rice gene banks.”
Crop Diversification Through a Wider Use of Underutilised Crops: A Strategy to Ensure Food and Nutrition Security in the Face of Climate Change. And a good one too. The last three items are from the same edited volume, which looks like should be worth getting: Sustainable Solutions for Food Security.
Seed degeneration of banana planting materials: strategies for improved farmer access to healthy seed. Decentralize.
Enset in Ethiopia: a poorly characterized but resilient starch staple. Maybe the above will work for enset too, but it will need better collections.

February 8, 2019February 8, 2019

Nibbles: I say potato, CATIE genebank, Wat, Teff war, Digitizing collections, Black History Month, Crop stats

Genebanks, crop wild relatives, friends, even a cool title — this one has it all: The New Potato.
Latest on the CATIE seed collection.
The wonder of Ethiopian food.
Which I guess can include teff again now.
Digitizing the Smithsonian — fast.
George Washington Carver celebrated.
Oh look, there’s a new version of SPAM. Let the GISsing begin.

February 7, 2019February 7, 2019

8000 years of agricultural history in two papers

A paper just out in Quaternary Science Reviews provides an overview of the first 3000 years of the spread of cultivated cereals around Eurasia, based on archaeobotanical evidence. The paper has some nice maps, but the press release has a really cool animated gif, which I had no hesitation in stealing.

via GIPHY

Here’s a quick summary:

Before 5000 BCE: farming communities used foothill, alluvial and catchment locations in different parts of Eurasia.
Between 5000-2500 BCE: crops move around, but remain ecologically constrained, with the Tibetan Plateau and the Asian monsoons separating east from west, and north from south.
Between 2500-1500 BCE: crops are taken to new thermal and hydrologic contexts, bringing previously isolated agricultural systems together.

And where are we now? Well, for that you need another new paper, this one in PLOS ONE: Regional and global shifts in crop diversity through the Anthropocene. As luck would have it, three phases here too, covering the past 50 years:

little change in crop diversity from 1961 through to the late 1970s
a 10-year period of sharp diversification through the early 1980s
“levelling-off” of crop diversification beginning in the early 1990s

No gif, alas, but there’s a little video accompanying the press release in which the author summarizes the results.

The title of that press release says it all really: “A small number of crops are dominating globally. And that’s bad news for sustainable agriculture.” Compare and contrast with the findings of Colin Khoury and friends from a couple of years back on the increasing homogeneity of global diets. Basically looking at the same data in a somewhat different way: pretty much the same result.

February 6, 2019February 6, 2019

Agriculture in watercolour

Before the invention of the camera, people used watercolours to document the world. Over the centuries, painters – both professional and amateur – created hundreds of thousands of images recording life as they witnessed it. Every one of these paintings has a story to tell, but many are hidden away in archives, albums and store rooms, too fragile to display. The Watercolour World exists to bring them back into view.

And pretty fantastic it is too. Search for agriculture and see for yourself.