- If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
- The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
- As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
- New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
- Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
- And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
- Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
- CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
- Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
- Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
- Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
- The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
- Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
- Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
- Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
- The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
- Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
- Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
- Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.
Brainfood: Phleum breeding, Rice resources, US corn breeding, Ecuadorian trad foods, Mixed systems, Musaceae history, Berry nutrition, Alaskan cattle
- A Molecular Phylogenetic Framework for Timothy (Phleum pratense L.) Improvement. We have the tools, and the instruction manual, but lack the raw materials.
- Open access resources for genome-wide association mapping in rice. Tools, manual AND raw materials, all on one handy platform.
- Why do US Corn Yields Increase? The Contributions of Genetics, Agronomy, and Policy Instruments. Pioneer “era” hybrids released 2000-2009 were more diverse than landraces cultivated in central Iowa during the late 19th century.
- Barriers to Eating Traditional Foods Vary by Age Group in Ecuador With Biodiversity Loss as a Key Issue. Young people liked traditional foods for their health benefits and good taste; adults for the money they brought in.
- Do Smallholder, Mixed Crop-Livestock Livelihoods Encourage Sustainable Agricultural Practices? A Meta-Analysis. Size doesn’t matter.
- Evolutionary dynamics and biogeography of Musaceae reveal a correlation between the diversification of the banana family and the geological and climatic history of Southeast Asia. We have geology and climate to thank for bananas.
- High variability in flavonoid contents and composition between different North-European currant (Ribes spp.) varieties. Smaller is better in redcurrants, but not in blackcurrants.
- Origins of cattle on Chirikof Island, Alaska, elucidated from genome-wide SNP genotypes. A unique mixture of East Asian and European breeds, plus strong selection.
Autonomous potato innovation in the Andes?
I have nothing against jua kali. In fact, I love the informal sector, without which life would be a lot more expensive, and less interesting, back home in Kenya. But a piece in The Guardian extolling its virtues, by Aditya Bahadur and Julian Doczi, researchers at the Overseas Development Institute, says some funny things about “frugal”, “bottom-up” and “autonomous innovation” in potato cultivation in Peru.
Some organisations already recognise the value of autonomous innovations for resilience. Practical Action supported indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes to find a local solution to food shortages caused by bouts of extremely cold weather.
An externally led response might have led to these communities importing food or relocating. Instead, Practical Action helped them to rediscover an ancient process of cultivating native potato varieties that can survive temperatures as low as -35°C. In this way, communities have found a solution that is aligned with their culture and diet to survive extreme weather.
At first I thought this was something to do with chuño, the freeze-dried potato of the Andes. But the link to the Practical Action website doesn’t mention anything like that.
There are 256 varieties of potato that can survive the harsh conditions of the high Andes. Practical Action is helping families living at altitudes of 3800ft to maintain this crucial biodiversity by developing varieties of local potatoes, as well as improve technical aspects of production. These methods ensure people are able to get enough to eat, as well as an income at local markets.
A revolving fund for accessing native potato seeds and seeders for local production has been set up. Ongoing technical assistance is being established through the training of 40 Quechuan farmers, chosen by the community themselves, as technological leaders.
So, help with conserving and accessing adapted local varieties, and technical advice and training on production methods. Worthy, no doubt, but hardly “autonomous innovation,” nor can either really be described as “rediscover[ing] an ancient process of cultivating native potato varieties.” I’m sure there’s some cool jua kali going on to do with potatoes in the mountains of Peru. But this isn’t it.
And 256 hardy Andean varieties? Really? Not 257, perhaps?
Brainfood: Species shifts, Rewilding caution, Managing grassland, Natural control, Expansion, Rutin, Citrullus core, Open source seeds, Nagoya consequences, Tree diversity
- Altitudinal shifts of the native and introduced flora of California in the context of 20th-century warming. Introduced species are better at spreading upward than the native flora.
- Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation. Step away from the shiny new box.
- Threatened herbivorous insects maintained by long-term traditional management practices in semi-natural grasslands. Because they can’t compete with generalists better adapted to the new-fangled conditions.
- Agricultural landscape simplification reduces natural pest control: A quantitative synthesis. Aphid control 46% lower in simple landscapes with lots of cultivated land, compared to more diverse landscapes.
- Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security. Expansion could really help with food security, also in importing countries, but is likely to occur in biodiversity hotspots, which means the devil will be in the spatial detail.
- Quantitative analysis of rutin content using silkworm genetic resources. Wait, silkworm powder?
- Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Formation of a Core Collection of 1197 Citrullus Accessions. Microsatellites detect differences between American and E. Asian ecotypes and select diverse subset of 130 accessions from Chinese collection.
- Open Source Foodways: Agricultural Commons and Participatory Art. Seeds as art.
- Implications of the Nagoya Protocol for Genome Resource Banks Composed of Biomaterials from Rare and Endangered Species. There are many, some of them unforeseen.
- Functional Resilience against Climate-Driven Extinctions – Comparing the Functional Diversity of European and North American Tree Floras. Loss of species diversity may be decoupled from loss of functional diversity.
Nibbles: Cover crops, Viet coconut, Water maps, Mao’s mango, Tudor bread, Belgian gardening, IRRI fingerprints, Stay green barley, Miniature donkey
- Uncovering cover crops, the NY Times way.
- Uncovering coconut cultivation in Vietnam, the Roland Bourdeix way.
- Where to expect water shortages, and irrigation. Crying for a mashup.
- When a mango is not just a mango.
- Bread, and much else, according to the Tudors.
- A Belgian plantsman is revolutionizing gardening. No, really.
- How genomics will revolutionize rice breeding. No, really.
- How to get deeper barley roots for drought tolerance? Look to sorghum.
- And today’s miniature livestock is…a donkey.