This month’s Berry Go Round will be hosted by the illustrious founder of the internet’s best (and perhaps only) botanical carnival over at Seeds Aside. For some fun and inspiration, have a look at some of the other Berry Go Rounds hosted at Seeds Aside. You have until April 26th to get your plant-loving posts submitted. And if you would like to host this marvelous opportunity to share the botanical love, there’s a link for that too.
One silly thing is said about agricultural biodiversity every single day
You know, I think communicating about agrobiodiversity is really important. That’s why I contribute to this blog. Among various other things. But when I see the collective communication efforts of the agricultural biodiversity community culminate in the statement, made apparently in all seriousness, that “One crop seed becomes extinct every single day,” I do wonder whether the game is worth the candle. 1
LATER: Ok, maybe I was too sweeping in my vilification. Let me clarify. I don’t mind an editor crafting an attention-grabbing title for an article aimed at a popular audience. I can perhaps even live with a broad, “not even wrong” generalization about genetic erosion in such a title, if explained further in the text. No, what I really object to is the misuse of the word “seed” for “variety” in this particular context. Because it is unforgivably confusing, and simply not necessary. A seed, as the word is commonly understood, is just not something that goes extinct.
Nibbles: Transgenic American Chestnuts, Moraceae conference, Breadfruit uses, Coconut oil, Potato history, Rat meat
- Transgenic American Chestnuts on trial, as it were.
- 1st International Symposium on Jackfruit and other Moraceae to take place 31 August-2 September. Don’t expect access to the papers if you can’t be there. h/t CFF.
- Breadfruit better than DEET at deterring mosquitoes. Tastier too.
- Crawford Fund opening up opportunities for coconut oil producers.
- History of the potato among the Basques. Well, why not?
- Microkhan disembowels the rat-meat trade of Mozambique.
Nibbles: All singing and dancing, FAO meets Big Data, Clone this, Patent nonsense, Frozen fish
- Fisherfolk of the Amazon landed on film. But do they sing about it? (And it’s not just an Amazon thing, this dancing and singing about agrobiodiversity. Not by any means.) And should they be doing more slashing-and-burning?
- FAO to put all its data in one basket. But including AnGR? WIEWS? One asks more in hope than expectation.
- One of the many challenges of vegetatively propagated crops (like potatoes): rapid multiplication. (Well, they could always do an SNP-based tetraploid map of the damn things, couldn’t they.) No such problems with seeds, of course.
- There’s been a rapid increase in the patenting of adaptation-related traits, and the private sector in industrialized countries is mainly responsible. Well there’s a surprise. But was that discussed at the CCAFS meeting on breeding objectives for Africa? And it’s just as well to remember that it’s not just breeding that’s needed. Oh, but by the way, you better grab those adaptations while you can…
- Regional SE Asian fish genebank proposed. That I’d love to see. Maybe they could share germplasm with, I dunno, Chicago? And not just.
Where do Pallay Poncho and Puka Lliclla come from?
Late blight resistant potato varieties don’t just come from Hungary, for use in Europe. They’re also increasingly important back in potato’s homeland, Peru. The CGIAR Consortium had a short story a couple of days back about Pallay Poncho and Puka Lliclla, two late blight resistant clones that CIP has been developing in collaboration with 200 Andean families in an area where an outbreak in 2003 devastated the harvest, the first time that has happened at such high altitude. But hopefully now the last, at least for a while, because of these new varieties. I wanted to know if material from countries other than Peru was involved in this work, but a glitch in CIP’s online database doesn’t make it easy to check that. Although you do get a pedigree for each variety, when you click on the ancestors you mainly get an error, which just means that particular clone is not conserved. You’d have to search for the family from which that clone came to trace back the full ancestry of each variety (by cutting off the digits after the decimal point in the accession number), which would be interesting to do, no doubt, but too laborious for me just now in my fragile, jetlagged state. Maybe the CIP informatics unit will look into it? I’ll let you know if they do.