Category: Information

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The multifarious history of healthy oats

News of a healthy new oat variety sent me scurrying to the Pedigrees of Oat Lines (POOL) website at Agriculture Canada, but alas BetaGene is not there. However, our source on all things oats tells us of another US cultivar, released some years ago, called HiFi, which is also high in those heart-friendly beta glucans. Our source thinks HiFi was probably involved in developing BetaGene.

HiFi, by the way, includes a whole bunch of wild relatives in its pedigree, including Avena magna, A. longiglumis and A. sterilis. Interestingly, when you check up on that A. magna in GRIN, it turns out that the accession used, which was collected in Khemisset, Morocco in 1964, was originally labelled A. sterilis. It looks as though seeds of a couple of different species were inadvertently placed into a single collecting bag on that far-off summer day in North Africa. The mishap was only recognized when the material was later processed in the USDA genebank, which led to the original sample being divided up. Ah, the perils of crop wild relatives collecting! And ah, the value-adding that genebanks do!

Incidentally, there’s material from at least half a dozen different countries in HiFi’s 1 pedigree. And that, of course, 2 is the standard argument for both genebanks holding diverse collections, and a multilateral system of access to (and sharing of the benefits deriving from the use of) that diversity. Too bad that point is not made in any of the news items about the new variety that have been appearing.

I don’t really understand that. I think “the public” would find it interesting that their porridge, or whatever, includes genetic material from all over the world, and that people have been working very hard for many years to put in place the conditions to allow such sharing to continue. Including an international treaty, no less. Which should really be telling us these stories.

LATER: …as opposed to these.

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Tomato expert’s field notes go online

We have blogged before about the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center at UC Davis and their tomato germplasm database. Now, via Dr Roger Chetelat, the director, we hear of a major addition to the data they make available.

The collecting notes of Dr Charles Rick, the world’s foremost authority on tomato genetics, who passed away in 2002 and after whom the center is named, are now online. You can see an example here, for LA1253, a Lycopersicon hirsutum f. glabratum (or Solanum habrochaites if you prefer) collected in Ecuador in 1970. The notes have been painstakingly transcribed from Dr Rick’s handwritten field notebooks, an example of which you can see below. Cannot have been easy work. And I mean both chasing after all those tomato wild relatives in the first place, and transcribing Dr Rick’s notes after so many years and with him gone.

There are plans to eventually also “scan the pages that contain drawings of fruit shape, maps of collection sites, or other tidbits that can’t readily translated into text.” As an old collector, I find this stuff fascinating. Although I’m really not sure I’d like my own field observations so mercilessly exposed to the world.

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Nibbles: Rio+20, Food security, Old seedsmen, New products, Camels, Informatics, Malthus lecture

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Happy International Day for Biological Diversity

Once again, May 22 rolls around as an opportunity “to increase understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues,” as the Convention on Biological Diversity puts it. This year the focus is on marine biodiversity. So we’re going to look at rainforests. And agriculture.

The Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting attempt to have a bunch of economists (usually) work out where to find the best return on investments in development. The deal is that people write a paper examining interventions designed to tackle a development problem (nutrition, AIDS, clean water …) and a bunch of other experts decide which interventions make most economic sense, given a limited pot of money. The big list of “16 investments worthy of investment” came out a week ago, with better nutrition at No. 1. At No. 6 is “creating an increase in agricultural productivity through research and development,” one of three policy options offered in response to the challenge to reduce the loss of biodiversity.

Here is Copenhagen Consensus Capo Bjorn Lomborg’s summary of the value of that:

The authors estimate that with a $14.5 billion annual infusion into research we can achieve 20 percent higher annual growth rates for crops and 40 percent higher growth rates for livestock, which over the next 40 years will significantly reduce pressures on nature and hence help biodiversity.

The other favoured option to reduce biodiversity loss is to “prevent all dense forests from being converted to agriculture”. Preventing deforestation has a benefit:cost ratio of between 3 and 30, while the benefit:cost ratio for increased agricultural R&D is between 3 and 20. (A third option — “increasing the amount of protected areas globally to around 20 percent” — is barely worth trying because it seldom reaches break-even, with benefit:cost ratios of between 0.2 and 1.4)

There’s a lot one could (but won’t) say about the Conpenhagen Consensus approach and assumptions; it is odd that investing in agriculture is part of the solution to biodiversity loss, although it is not a big part of solutions to undernutrition. And the value of agricultural biodiversity specifically is nowhere to be seen.

Which will do as our contribution to increasing understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues.