In situ

April 18, 2018April 19, 2018

A Nibble big enough to choke on

Yeah, yeah, it’s been quiet here for the best part of a month. Work, you know. When you notice lack of action here, though, that doesn’t mean that I’m being completely idle. Not always, anyway. Check on Twitter and Facebook, if you dare, and you’ll see new stuff on a fairly regular basis, because that’s easier to do than a fully-fledged blog post. Anyway, what I’ll do here is a mega-Nibble hoovering up snippets from the past few weeks that I posted on social media but not here.

Vegetable History 101.
If you have a heirloom of one of the above to name, try this neural network approach.
Just as long as the name doesn’t end up being racist.
It’s too late for some German veggies. Though not, it seems, for German forests. What’s the difference?
Not yet too late for Tanzanian wild veggies, but winter is coming. Maybe giving them cool names would help.
And for some North American indigenous crops too, thanks to some committed people.
And for beans in Mexico for that matter.
Why all the above is important.
And urgent.
And this is the resulting problem if you ignore that lesson.
You see, the Australians are on the case, with their bush tucker fixation.
Mind you, it’s not all sweetness and light: the quinoa bubble bursts.
Maybe we can make a game of this diversification lark. Oh, look, it seems we can.
You can even breed for it.
Wherein I pontificate about genebank data. Again.
Maybe these guys will listen?
These guys obviously did, and built a better peanut.
Yeah, but can you see them from space?
The cost of ending hunger. The cost of ensuring crop diversity conservation in genebanks seems, well, peanuts.
The archaeology of gardens. Two of my favourite topics, combined. If only there was beer too. And peanuts.
A banana is a banana is a banana. Not.
All those bananas? You can help to map them.
They’ll put them on Google Earth next, like Kew did for these beautiful natural areas, with all their crop wild relatives :)
A Japanese agricultural encyclopaedia. Illustrated to boot.
Or, for the more Euro-centric, food art at the Met…
This cheese should probably be at the Met there too.
And this weed strain may well soon be on sale in the gift shop.
The sweet potato made it to Oceania on its own.
Oh no it didn’t.
On the other hand, livestock generally need to be accompanied.
All the yeast belong China.

April 9, 2018April 9, 2018

Brainfood: Vine breeding, Moroccan veggie erosion, Potato charisma, Pigeonpea diversity, Dietary diversity, Cannabis breeding, Cattle domestication, Late blight gene

Vitis vinifera L. fruit diversity to breed varieties anticipating climate changes. Nice, but isn’t this leaving it rather late?
The Deterioration of Morocco’s Vegetable Crop Genetic Diversity: An Analysis of the Souss-Massa Region. 80-90% loss in 30 years.
Interspecies Respect and Potato Conservation in the Peruvian Cradle of Domestication. Some varieties have more charisma than others.
Quantitative Analysis, Distribution and Traditional Management of Pigeon Pea [Cajanus Cajan (L.) Millsp.] Landraces’ Diversity in Southern Benin. Larger farms have slightly more varieties, otherwise difficult to find socioeconomic correlates of diversity; main criterion for choosing varieties is market value.
Higher agrobiodiversity is associated with improved dietary diversity, but not child anthropometric status, of Mayan Achí people of Guatemala. Diversifying diets won’t help without better toilets.
Dwarf germplasm: the key to giant Cannabis hempseed and cannabinoid crops. The mainstreaming of weed continues. The Man unavailable for comment.
Early North African Cattle Domestication and Its Ecological Setting: A Reassessment. No early North African cattle domestication after all?
Identification and rapid mapping of a gene conferring broad-spectrum late blight resistance in the diploid potato species Solanum verrucosum through DNA capture technologies. From Mexico with love.

April 3, 2018April 30, 2018

Brainfood: Rice stress maps, Saline rice, Forage millet, Diversification, Deforestation & diets, CC impacts, Elite cassava, Indian quarantine, Chinese urban ag, Squash diversity, Tomato minerals, Hidden hunger

Mapping abiotic stresses for rice in Africa: Drought, cold, iron toxicity, salinity and sodicity. Now to mash this up with germplasm provenance information…
Screening of rice landraces (Oryza sativa L.) for seedling stage salinity tolerance using morpho-physiological and molecular markers. …you know, so that this sort of thing could be predicted, perhaps.
Identification of promising sources for fodder traits in the world collection of pearl millet at the ICRISAT genebank. 14 out of 326. Difficult to predict from environmental data, though, I suspect.
Agricultural diversification as an important strategy for achieving food security in Africa. More diverse households and farming systems are more food secure, but only up to a point, and it depends on various factors. 43% of African cropland will be difficult to diversify.
Deforestation and child diet diversity: A geospatial analysis of 15 Sub-Saharan African countries. Deforestation is bad for diet diversity. No word on overlap with the above mentioned 43%.
Two-thirds of global cropland area impacted by climate oscillations. I bet you that includes most of the above-mentioned 43%.
Exchanging and managing in-vitro elite germplasm to combat Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) and Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) in Eastern and Southern Africa. The devil is in the logistics.
Risk of pathogens associated with plant germplasm imported into India from various countries. See what I mean?
An exploration of the implication and feasibility of UAH (Urban Agricultural Heritages) in China. I for one really want to see the Xuanhua traditional vineyard system.
Genetic Resources in the “Calabaza Pipiana” Squash (Cucurbita argyrosperma) in Mexico: Genetic Diversity, Genetic Differentiation and Distribution Models. Balsas-Jalisco is a potential center of domestication. Isn’t it the same for maize?
Genetic differences in macro-element mineral concentrations among 52 historically important tomato varieties. Fairly strong and mostly independent, except for K and Mg.
The global burden of chronic and hidden hunger: Trends and determinants. Growth not as good on hidden hunger as on chronic. Let them eat tomatoes.

March 26, 2018March 26, 2018

Brainfood: Mesoamerican fruits, PES, Chinese vegetables, Controlled pollination, Pastoralist fodder, Taxonomy, African nightshades, Ag origins, Divortification

Human diets drive range expansion of megafauna-dispersed fruit species. Megafauna dropped the ball (or the fruit), humans picked it up and ran with it.
Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation. Maybe we should have paid the megafauna.
Vegetable genetic resources in China. 3 genebanks, 36,000 accessions, 120 species, about 1000 distributions per year (to research units).
A cost-effective ground pollination system for hybridization in tall coconut palms. I have seen the future of coconut pollination.
Determinants of pastoral and agro-pastoral households’ participation in fodder production in Makueni and Kajiado Counties, Kenya. Household heads who are female, have access to extension services, or are members of social groups are more likely to go in for fodder production.
Taxonomy based on science is necessary for global conservation. Incredible to me that needs to be said.
Development of next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based SSRs in African nightshades: Tools for analyzing genetic diversity for conservation and breeding. Solanum scabrum and S. villosum separate nicely, and show much diversity.
A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture. Large seed, awns and monodominance.
Development and Examination of Sweet Potato Flour Fortified with Indigenous Underutilized Seasonal Vegetables. Ticks all the boxes, lets call it divortification.

March 14, 2018March 14, 2018

Lost rice found, again

First there was Carolina Gold. Now there is “upland red bearded” or “Moruga Hill” rice.

Mr. Dennis had heard about hill rice…through the culinary organization Slow Food USA and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, the group that brought back Carolina Gold in the early 2000s. He’d also heard stories about it from elderly cooks in his community. Like everyone else, he thought the hill rice of the African diaspora was lost forever.

But then, on a rainy morning in the Trinidad hills in December 2016, he walked past coconut trees and towering okra plants to the edge of a field with ripe stalks of rice, each grain covered in a reddish husk and sprouting spiky tufts.

“Here I am looking at this rice and I said: ‘Wow. Wait a minute. This is that rice that’s missing,’” he said.

It is hard to overstate how shocked the people who study rice were to learn that the long-lost American hill rice was alive and growing in the Caribbean. Horticulturists at the Smithsonian Institution want to grow it, rice geneticists at New York University are testing it and the United States Department of Agriculture is reviewing it. If all goes well, it may become a commercial crop in America, and a menu staple as diners develop a deeper appreciation for African-American food.

And no, they couldn’t have found it in genebanks. ((Like Pawnee corn.)) This is what Genesys knows from the region. Trinidad is shown by the yellow marker, rice accessions in red. No rice accessions in Genesys from anywhere near Trinidad, alas.

Someone should really have a systematic look at all those red dots, though.