- UN Special Rapporteur on food thinks “questions of the 60s are not the questions of today.” Does he think the CGIAR is answering the questions of the 60s? One suspects so, but surely there are points of agreement, e.g. nutrition, food systems, natural resources management…
- Farmers would be willing to pay quite a premium for drought tolerant (DT) rice hybrids, but for DT varieties not so much. That’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships. Or is that a 60s answer to a 60s question?
- Mr de Schutter probably knows all about this bibliography of agroecology in action. Which all seems so much more 60s than hybrid rice somehow.
- How 60s is it to want to produce decent amaranthus seed? It’s totally unfair, but I can’t resist linking to this now.
- Ethiopian genebank, set up in response to the genetic erosion of the 60s, gets nice, long writeup in The Guardian by way of introduction to a bare-bones couple of final paragraphs on some G8 poverty reduction plan. Nice video though.
- There was no Facebook in the 60s for genebanks to strut their stuff on.
Brainfood: Value of Chiloé, Zimbabwe sorghum, Rosa karyotypes, PSM diversity, Pear diversity, Medic clines, Wild rices, Barley adaptation, Coffee agroforesty
- Valuing cultural ecosystem services: Agricultural heritage in Chiloé island, southern Chile. Willingness to pay at US$50.5 per person per year, and not related to distance from site.
- Assessments of genetic diversity and anthracnose disease response among Zimbabwe sorghum germplasm. New sources of resistance (for the US) in even a moderately diverse collection.
- Karyotype Analysis of Wild Rosa Species in Xinjiang, Northwestern China. It’s just amazing to me that people still do karyopypes.
- Explaining intraspecific diversity in plant secondary metabolites in an ecological context. Trait variance in these things is considerable, partly genetic and can evolve, maybe even faster than mean trait values.
- Identifying genetic diversity and a preliminary core collection of Pyrus pyrifolia cultivars by a genome-wide set of SSR markers. Close relationship between China and Japan, and Sichuan a bit of a nexus.
- Genomic Signature of Adaptation to Climate in Medicago truncatula. Found genes associated with position along 3 environmental clines in a set of populations, then were able to predict performance of other populations based on genotype.
- Could abiotic stress tolerance in wild relatives of rice be used to improve Oryza sativa? Yes, and from these particular places.
- An efficient method of developing synthetic allopolyploid rice (Oryza spp.). Should make using those wild relatives a bit easier.
- Can barley (Hordeum vulgare L. s.l.) adapt to fast climate changes? A controlled selection experiment. Maybe not. Not even the landrace.
- Coffee landscapes as refugia for native woody biodiversity as forest loss continues in southwest Ethiopia. “Coffee farms could support a considerable portion, though not all, of the woody biodiversity of disappearing forests.” No word on what it does to the coffee, though.
Nibbles: New potatoes, Wild species, Native maize, Conservation course, Indigenous fishery, Yield trends
- Wild relative rescues potatoes. Which wild relative? Well for that you’ll have to read the paper. The FAQ on that. Or if you want an alternative. More the better, I guess. And just to remember what makes it all possible: diversity in fields and genebanks.
- Wild species not just useful to food security as sources of genes, of course. And more.
- Indigenous peoples save corn.
- Maybe some of them would be interested in this MSc at Bangor.
- Indigenous peoples can catch — and save? — fish after all.
- So is there stagnation in yield increases or what? Lobell reviews book that says maybe not.
Nibbles: Texan blackeyed peas, Pest distributions, Better eucalypts, City gardens, Allopolyploidy, Chilean agroforestry, Sahel agroforestry
- Texas A&M builds better
mousetrapcowpea. - Huge survey of the distribution of crop pests.
- Spanish tree breeders assisting in the despoliation of the Ethiopian plateau. Totally unfair, I know, there’s plenty of reasons why improving eucalyptus production in Ethiopia is a good idea. But I just wish similar effort had gone into local trees.
- They increased the biodiversity of city gardens and nobody noticed. Wonder if it would have been the same in allotments. Meanwhile, however…
- It takes 4-5 million years for allopolyploids to become different enough for their hybrids to be sterile.
- Save the Espinal!
- More water wouldn’t help sorghum in the Sahel. Yes, you guessed it, the World Congress on Agroforestry is still going on.
Let there always be Pane Nero di Castelvetrano
It all started with a photo of “tumminia bread” on Instagram. It looked yummie, but I’d never heard of tumminia. A picturesque hamlet? A time-honoured though back-breaking mode of preparation? Some ancient grain hanging on precariously on the outskirts of encroaching modernity? A treasured local variety of wheat nurtured by gnarled rustics? I had to know. A little googling revealed that the name refers to an ingredient in the Pane Nero di Castelvetrano, a dark bread made in a small town in the Sicilian province of Trapani.
The bread is made using a leaven system. The flour mix is 80% local and refined semolina durum, described as “blonde grain”. I believe this will be the equivalent grind to “rimacinata”, if I’m not wrong. The other 20% of the flour is from the tumminia durum wheat grain, which is milled quite coarsely, and is a wholegrain flour.
So the next job was to hunt down in genebanks that treasured local variety of durum. Because how long will it continue to be nurtured by gnarled Sicilian rustics in the picturesque hamlet of Castelvetrano, out there on the outskirts of modernity? Thankfully, Genesys says that there are two accessions of tumminia at ICARDA and another two at IPK. They’re not duplicates, I don’t think, the former having been collected in 1973 and the latter in 1985. They all come from Sicily, but the ICARDA accessions from near Aragona, some 100 km southeast of Castelvetrano along the coast, and the IPK accessions from Bisacquino, which is a bit closer, about 60 km east, in the mountains. So several picturesque hamlets are involved, or at least that was the case 30-40 years ago.
Anyway, if you go to the European Wheat Database you get a little bit of additional information, but unfortunately I can’t link to it, so I’ll have to hand-hold you through it. See that thing that says “single search” down the left-hand side? Click on it, and where is says accession name, type tumminia to get to the IPK accessions; now click on either accession number. You’ll get to the passport information on our Sicilian durum accession. Scroll down and on the right-hand side you’ll see a button marked “Link to pedigree catalogue.” If you click on that you’ll land on the entry for tumminia in Zeven’s Genealogies of 14000 wheat varieties, published in 1976. Which says that it is a Spanish landrace. 1 Awkward. Maybe the gnarled rustics that originally nurtured tumminia are in altogether a different picturesque hamlet, in a different country? Or maybe Zeven was wrong.
Be that as it may, I think we can rest assured that, genetically speaking at least, the key ingredient of Pane Nero di Castelvetrano is probably pretty safe. Even if fewer picturesque hamlets grow tumminia nowadays than formerly, and for all I know the opposite is true, there are those 4 accessions to fall back on, in two separate genebanks, plus safety duplications, and probably even Svalbard. Now to make sure that back-breaking mode of preparation is likewise safe from encroaching modernity.