- Bush tucker may be viable business proposition. But doesn’t it taste like crap? And do any crop wild relatives qualify?
- Europe mapping its high value forests. No word on whether crop wild relatives come into the assessment.
- Sorghum breeder reveals all.
- Embrapa supporting African agriculture with help from Gates Foundation.
- How many seasons are there anyway?
- Test yourself on Farmer Field Schools.
- Delve into abstracts for the 4th International Rice Congress (IRC2014).
- New Yorker replies to Vandana Shiva reply to her profile in the New Yorker.
- Some crops resist mechanization.
- Editing the horns from cattle genome.
- A young Amish farmer with big ideas.
- Your organic rat, sir.
- Crop pests and diseases are coming to get you.
- Fun reddit with Peter Giuliano, barista extraordinaire.
Brainfood: Goat diversity, Sheep diversity, Camel keeping, Weird Zambian cattle, Pepper diversity, Strawberry diversity, Breeding wheat, Sustainable cacao, Food supply diversity
- The characterization of goat genetic diversity: Towards a genomic approach. A single Neolithic origin.
- Genome-wide patterns of adaptation to climate-mediated selective pressures in sheep. Adaptation to local climates has been important.
- Characterisation of camel breeding practices in the Ansongo Region, Mali. Diversity of practices, diversity of breeds.
- Gynomimicry in the Dwarf Gwembe breed from Zambia. The males mimic the secondary sexual characters of females, presumably because they’ve been selected to do so.
- Evaluation of a diverse, worldwide collection of wild, cultivated and landrace peppers (Capsicum annuum) for resistance to Phytophthora fruit rot, genetic diversity and population structure. No completely resistant lines out of 177, 2 pretty good ones, the better ones confined to 2 of 4 genetic clusters.
- Evaluation of strawberry (Fragaria L.) genetic resources on resistance to Botrytis cinerea. Out of 107 accessions in the German national genebank, 5 were pretty good, 4 of them F. vesca.
- Redesigning the exploitation of wheat genetic resources. Allele mining is out, genome-wide selection is in.
- Making biodiversity-friendly cocoa pay: combining yield, certification and REDD for shade management. Even if you increase yields by 50%, that may not be enough to stop farmers converting from traditional agroforestry. Enter ecolabelling and REDD.
- Measuring nutritional diversity of national food supplies. Production diversity is a good predictor of dietary diversity, but only for low income countries; otherwise income and trade are better. Dietary diversity associated with key health outcomes.
Brainfood: Ethiopian wild veggies, Cold tolerant rice, Chickpea genomics, Improved tilapia, Wild cassava oil, Chinese horses, Chinese melon, Seed sampling, Tomato spp sequencing
- Wild and semi-wild leafy vegetables used by the Maale and Ari ethnic communities in southern Ethiopia. 30 of them.
- Collection and Conservation of Cold Adapted Indigenous Rice Landraces from Western Ghats, South India. 56 of them.
- Exploring Germplasm Diversity to Understand the Domestication Process in Cicer spp. Using SNP and DArT Markers. 3 populations among domesticated types; more diversity in the wilds.
- Genetically-Improved Tilapia Strains in Africa: Potential Benefits and Negative Impacts. Mean present value of introducing an improved strain to Ghana is 1% of GDP, but you could get same with better management. Both would of course be best.
- Diversity in oil content and fatty acid profile in seeds of wild cassava germplasm. Some species could be oil crops.
- The Study of Genetic Diversity and Phylogenetic Evolution in Indigenous Horses (Equus caballus) of Gansu. If I understand the abstract correctly, this suggests, among other things, that some local horse breeds can be traced back to Przewalski’s Horse, maybe.
- Microsatellite Diversity, Population Structure, and Core Collection Formation in Melon Germplasm. In China. Frankly not nearly as interesting as the horse story.
- Optimal sampling of seeds from plant populations for ex-situ conservation of genetic biodiversity, considering realistic population structure. 25–30 individuals per population from few but widely-spaced populations.
- Exploring genetic variation in the tomato (Solanum section Lycopersicon) clade by whole-genome sequencing. 20x more diversity in the wilds than the cultivated, correlated with habitat.
- Understanding Sustainable Diets: A Descriptive Analysis of the Determinants and Processes That Influence Diets and Their Impact on Health, Food Security, and Environmental Sustainability. The determinants of sustainability are agricultural, health, sociocultural, environmental and socioeconomic, and fiddling with one to improve it may screw up another.
- Anchoring durum wheat diversity in the reality of traditional agricultural systems: varieties, seed management, and farmers’ perception in two Moroccan regions. Farmers grow both improved varieties and landraces, the latter mainly for their quality characteristics.
- Unraveling the nexus between water and food security in Latin America and the Caribbean: regional and global implications. Production has increased, but at the cost of the natural capital of the region, and nutritional problems persist.
Nibbles: Fossil biodiversity, Culture & health, Cicer drought experiment, Endangered fish, Wheat hydridization, Food aid, Ag trade double, Sustainable diets, Fermentation book
- The Global Fossil Record. Visualized. Not agricultural, but couldn’t resist it.
- Malnutrition? It’s the culture, stupid.
- Check out the world’s largest chickpea drought trial.
- Overfishing the Amazon.
- Ah, so that’s how wheat did it!
- Food aid can support sustainable livelihoods too.
- Soon, most crop production will go to feed China’s pigs. And you’ll be able to follow that on FAOStat’s interactive thingie on agricultural tradeflows.
- But it can’t possibly be good for sustainable diets, can it?
- New book on fermentation. Never enough of those.
Remembering Dorothy Tamasia, barefoot banana curator of the Solomon Islands
Some bad news from Tony Jansen, via Facebook. He has kindly given us permission to reproduce his post here. This comes after more sad news from the Pacific just a few weeks ago.
I’m very sad to hear the tragic news that my very good friend Dorothy Tamasia has died. I dont know the hows or whats, only that she was too young. She was the true embodiment of the barefoot curator and lived out her life in very basic conditions with her people in the highlands of central Makira and passionately collected, protected and shared across her island and throughout the Solomon Islands over 108 varieties of bananas that she took part in collecting with Kastom Gaden Association. She was trained in morphological descriptors and management of germplasm collections despite having little formal education. Her work in documenting and maintaining her banana collection led to Solomon Islands being recognised as holding one of the largest remaining and least documented collection of banana diversity in the world – and she was a leading figure in a revival in banana diversity and its cultural connections in Makira through diversity fairs and other events.
Banana is the staple food in Makira. Dorothy was a hero for conservation in use of plant genetic resources and she dedicated much of her too short life to that purpose. She took part in pioneering work to test and promote high vitamin A fei banana varieties. A poster from that work can be seen here and she was part of banana diversity work supported variously by ACIAR, the SPC Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT) and Seed Savers Network.
I last saw her in late 2011 after making the 4 hour walk to her village from the coast — which has no roads and is one of the most remote parts of a remote country. She was happy, and had recently started a bush early-childhood pre-school in a leaf house in a remote riverside location where she lived on her own with her children. The room was full of brightly coloured creations from nearby village children who came to her school — and surrounded by her bananas and her cacao farm. She was excited to be studying early childhood education. She was also busy duplicating, on her own, the banana collection she had maintained for almost a decade — back breaking work with no reward other than the custodianship that she treasured. She had a deep grasp of the issues including the controversy around crop genetic resources. She chose to keep above all of it and just continue her humble work that she knew was the right thing and a useful thing to do.
Dorothy was a beautiful person and a kind hearted and generous soul. I hope that in her death her life work and commitment to the Solomon Islands indigenous plant genetic resources and to food security for her people will be acknowledged and that the collections she had maintained will be supported to continue.