Ever google “onions” to get information on what varieties to plant or the crop’s nutritional composition or how to grow it and get bombarded with nothing but recipes for the first n pages? No, neither have I, but one of the things I learned at yesterday’s GlobalHort meeting on DOCNet here in Rome is that they have a nifty function on their website which limits searching to a number of technical websites, thus minimizing this problem. What it doesn’t do, alas, is return the results from searches of different online species databases, as we’ve seen in these case of the taxonomic information aggregator we discussed recently. I also learned that the GlobalHort website, for all its searching sophistication, lacks an RSS feed.
Nibbles: Beetle diets, Seed hunters, NUS, Food security, Indian malnutrition, Craft Irish beer, Nordic livestock, Prosecco DOC, Artemisia, CGIAR
- Predators hunt for a balanced diet. So it’s not just people?
- Seeds of High Asia. Saudi Aramco World gives respect to the seed hunters.
- Obscure crops and an obscure book. Dorian Fuller gives respect to the neglected.
- “For the time being, I genuinely believe we must maintain yield growth, but we need to ensure that we preserve the natural capital for the future.” UK Food Security Czar speaks.
- Indian PM mea culpa on malnutrition. Will he listen to the above? Would it help?
- Beer in Ireland. Not Guinness. I may be gone some time.
- Nordics discuss AnGR and climate change. Successfully, natch.
- Prosecco runs to the IPR ramparts.
- Video on growing Artemisia to fight poverty.
- Help the CGIAR with its tagline. Beyond irony.
Become a plant breeder, online!
News to me. Something called Extension “is an interactive learning environment delivering the best, most researched knowledge from the smartest land-grant university minds across America.” And next week, on January 21st, you can take part in 2 webcast workshops. Here’s the blurb:
This webinar is two 90-minute sessions with a 30-minute break between sessions.
Breeding for Nutrition: Organic eaters want nutritious food, but some modern breeding programs may be increasing yields at the cost of nutrition. Learn about breeding programs working with classical breeding methods (non-GMO) to breed nutritionally superior crops.Breeding for Microbial Interaction: Many beneficial soil microorganisms provide plants with access to nutrients, improve water uptake and even have the potential to suppress certain soil borne diseases. The ability to breed plants to optimize their interaction with the soil microbiology holds great potential to enhance organic farming systems. Hear about the latest studies in this important and expanding field.
Loads more at the Registration and further information page.
Erna Bennett: more on this unique person
Erna Bennett was unique. Well, not quite. There have been other Erna Bennetts, one of whom died almost exactly a year ago. Although I never met “our” Erna Bennett, I like to think that she would actually be tickled to have been confused with Erna Bennett of Richmond, VA in the United States. I say this because Erna seems to have taken some trouble not to be easily found, and a decoy would have been an appropriate ploy.
In the wake of her death last week, different people have drawn attention to her importance to the field of agricultural biodiversity and to the dearth of good biographical material. Although we were early pioneers in recent years, with the briefest possible post the day after her 83rd birthday, the hunt was taken up by our friend and colleague Danny Hunter, who also broke the news of her passing, at least to us.
Danny’s previous forays, like ours, drew forth some comments from people who had known Erna professionally and privately. Reading some of them, one longs to know more, and yet it would be sad also to think that only with her death will these things become known.
Hunting for more about Erna the person, I found a piece that The Ecologist magazine reprinted in 2010, 40 years after it first appeared. (Danny had found it first.) Two things are absolutely remarkable about this. First, it was reprinted from the FAO’s old journal CERES, which seems to have no recollection of it, and that alone encourages me to make it more widely available. Secondly, the arguments, not only from Erna but also from Otto Frankel and Jack Harlan Jr (and WK Agble), remain absolutely current. Apart from a slight quirkiness of language, you could read their answers to a modern audience and have them nodding sagely along. And you would be able to add a few more examples.
Bits of biography do exist, with tantalising hints that she may have been a pilot delivering planes in World War II, among other things. There is, however, so much more one could say, not least about the politics within FAO, and I hope that in time Danny is going to say it.
I haven’t been able to find either the Canadian film Fragile Harvest or the Youtube videos that people have mentioned, although I am sure I remember seeing some of that footage. If the material exists still, it should end up in Web of Stories, that’s for sure. Anyone know where those recordings might be?
Gregg Borschmann interviewed Erna on 21 November 1994 for an oral history project focusing on environmental awareness in Australia. The recordings and a corrected typescript of 89 pages are available from the National Library of Australia. While in Australia, Erna seems also to have been active in the Socialist Party of Australia, reporting on a meeting of the Central Committee (of which she was a member) that took place a month before the oral history interview. She wrote for organs of the Communist Party of Australia and served on the Editorial Board of the Australian Marxist Review. I wonder what she thought of Stalin’s persecution of the “bourgeois” science of genetics, and especially of the fate of NI Vavilov?
For her 83rd birthday, MS Swaminathan, another early pioneer of agrobiodiversity conservation, wrote:
Erna’s untiring efforts helped to create global awareness of the need for accelerated efforts in the area of genetic resources conservation and sustainable use. Her life and work will always remain a source of inspiration and guidance to all young scholars who wish to save plants for saving lives and livelihoods.
But Erna was having nothing of it:
I did what I had to do because I believed in it, just as you too believe in what you are doing. Your own work is as important as anything I have done, and students and workers trained and inspired by you are the army of the future, who will have to face battles even more difficult than those we faced in the past. I hope you agree, so let’s quietly drop ideas of pouring praise in my direction. The future will need not only the inspiration of past battles but also the toil and sweat of future struggles, greater — from the way things now seem to be developing — than any of our generation ever faced.
IRRI DDG has difficulty finding right rice variety shock
What we would have wanted is a simple, more concrete variety selection tool that could have guided us to a few specific options, and also provided us with enough variety performance information for making the final choice. The latter doesn’t seem to be easily accessible. On the other hand, informal feedback received from farmers and extension workers suggests that NSIC Rc 222 has performed well since it was released. So, we can also use this see with your own eyes or hear from others information for making our decision. Perhaps that is also what many farmers do.
That’s none other than Dr Achim Dobermann, the DDG of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), on the difficulties of finding the right variety to use in his attempt to grow a rice crop. 1
Will he do anything about it, I wonder. And wouldn’t it have been nice to have grown a local landrace side-by-side with NSIC Rc 222 (aka Tubigan 18, aka IRRI 154). Great idea for a DDG to get so down and dirty, though. Not to mention blog about it.
Incidentally, NSIC Rc 222 (aka Tubigan 18, aka IRRI 154) has an, ahem, interesting history, which you can explore by typing any of its names into IRRI’s International Rice Information System.