- Next-generation sequencing strategies for characterizing the turkey genome. It never ends, does it. Meanwhile, we patiently await our jetpacks.
- Community-Based Management of Animal Genetic Resources (AnGR): Constraints and Prospects of AnGR Conservation in the Tropics. Best thing to do is improve the local breeds through village-level schemes. In Nigeria, that is.
- Comparison of seed viability among 42 species stored in a genebank. 80% loss in melon seed viability over 10 years sounds a bit high to me.
- Market Participation and Agro-Biodiversity Loss: The Case of Native Chili Varieties in the Amazon Rainforest of Peru. Selling to local retailers good for diversity, selling to wholesalers not so much.
- Stem and leaf rust resistance in wild relatives of wheat with D genome (Aegilops spp.). They all have it.
- Assessing rice and wheat germplasm collections using similarity groups. You can go quite far in identifying possible duplicates just with. passport data.
- Genetic Distinctiveness of the Herdwick Sheep Breed and Two Other Locally Adapted Hill Breeds of the UK. Close to each other geographically and ecologically, but quite genetically distinct. No word on whether village-level improvement necessary for their continued existence.
- Managing Potato Biodiversity to Cope with Frost Risk in the High Andes: A Modeling Perspective. Fancy maths confirms better to grow mixtures. Andean farmers nonplussed.
- Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) leaves as nutritional and functional foods. But they taste like shit. Just kidding, they’re good and good for you.
Brainfood: Weird coconut, Rainforest management, Pollinators and grazing, Pre-Mendel, Italian grapes, Indian fibre species, Cereal relatives, Brazil nut silviculture
- Scope of novel and rare bulbiferous coconut palms (Cocos nucifera L.). Produces bulbils instead of floral parts.
- Holocene landscape intervention and plant food production strategies in island and mainland Southeast Asia. Like the Amazon.
- Grazing alters insect visitation networks and plant mating systems. More outcrossing in grazed birch woods.
- Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders’ Society of Moravia: Mendel’s Forgotten “Research Network.” Before peas, there were sheep.
- Genetic Characterization of Grape Cultivars from Apulia (Southern Italy) and Synonymies in Other Mediterranean Regions. About half are also grown somewhere else.
- Fibre-yielding plant resources of Odisha and traditional fibre preparation knowledge − An overview. 146 species, no less.
- Functional Traits Differ between Cereal Crop Progenitors and Other Wild Grasses Gathered in the Neolithic Fertile Crescent. How do cereal progenitors differ from all the other grasses our ancestors used to eat? Adaptation to competition and disturbance. They were weeds, basically.
- Testing a silvicultural recommendation: Brazil nut responses 10 years after liana cutting. Biodiversity bad for Brazil nuts.
Nibbles: Czech agrobiodiversity, Food Sovereignty reports, Forest Watch, Mexican corn, Youth
- The Czech national genetic resources programme in a nice brochure.
- Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, by Patrick Mulvany. Another nice brochure. Not entirely clear why it’s not included in the Journal of Peasant Studies special edition on the relevant conference.
- Forests can have Big Data too. Yes, it’s Global Forest Watch. And more from WRI, but it’s really all over the intertubes. No sign of the brochure. Yet.
- “So when I eat this [corn] I eat with all the energy of my history.” No brochures needed.
- Making agroforestry and agriculture in general attractive to yutes. Would a brochure help?
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.
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.