- UNEP-GEF crop wild relatives project makes Top 20 list.
- IRRI DG sings praises of IRRI genebank.
- Interview with Seed Savers founder.
- Danny watches heirloom spuds on the BBC. Too bad we can’t.
- If you want to intensify rice production in the coastal Ganges, you’ll need these varieties.
- And if you want to see pictures of the seeds of wild plants of Korea, you’ll need this website. But you might need some Korean.
The strange silence of the CGIAR on CBSD
Good to see CABI reacting to a slew of recent press reports on Cassava Brown Streak Disease in East Africa with a blog post summarizing what they and others have been doing about that very worrying problem lately. Interesting also that the best they can do as far as linking to what the CGIAR is doing is an IITA story from 2010, though they do nick IITA’s photo. I couldn’t find any reaction from the CGIAR on the CBSD story, which is surprising because the FAO press release which seems to have sparked the whole thing off does mention new IITA varieties that could help solve the problem. The best the CG seems to have been able to produce is a tweet and a blog post referring to a rapid multiplication technique which quoted an IITA video from 2009. Relevant, yes, but neither the tweet nor the post refers to the FAO story. Why is the CG not getting involved in this discussion more actively? What am I missing?
Tracing Arcadian wheat
One of those varieties is Arcadian, which was grown in New York State as recently as the 1920s; it had gone so thoroughly out of fashion that when officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture sought it for their seed bank in 1991, they had to get it from Russia. (And even that, he says, may not be identical to the New York strain.)
Well of course I’ve needed much less encouragement than that provided by this snippet from a Smithsonian Magazine piece on artisanal wheats in the US to don the fireproof suit and venture into Genebank Database Hell. Especially with Eurisco launching a new website on the same day and all.
So here’s what I found out. The USDA National Small Grains Collection did indeed receive in Oct. 1991 the accession WIR 22038 from the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR), being a sample of the wheat variety “Arcadian”, released in New York in 1895. It was given the number PI 565362 in 1993. There’s now a bunch of evaluation data on it in GRIN.
But where did VIR get it from? Well, Eurisco does have a record of a VIR100022038, 1 collected in 1928, country of origin the USA, but that’s about all. So was it collected by Vavilov himself? There’s nothing on the identity of the collector on VIR’s own online database. Vavilov visited the USA in 1921 and 1930, going to New York on the first occasion, but that seems too early compared to the VIR acquisition date of 1928. Maybe he sent a request for additional material to the contacts he had made? And with that I leave it to the Vavilov experts (or my next visit to St Petersburg) to continue following the trail…
Nibbles: Cassava bad and good news, Soybean domestication, Bitter gourd, Drought, Agrobiodiversity job, Heirloom turkey, Eurisco, Artisanal wheat, MSB, Food culture
- FAO really very worried about cassava. Does it know that the CGIAR has the technology?
- In today’s “crop X domesticated earlier than usually thought” story, X = soybean.
- The Deccan Chronicle discovers the Bitter Gourd Project and likes what it sees.
- How to drought phenotype crops.
- The Christensen Fund has a position open for a Program Associate – Agrobiodiversity and Biocultural Landscapes. Damn, that sounds interesting.
- “But, miraculously, the Ghost Turkey survives.”
- Eurisco has a new website!
- Artisanal wheat on the rise. I love the quip in the caption.
- Vancouver ♥ Millennium Seed Bank, and fawns over faux royalty.
- Amaranth and pizza offer entreés to culture and politics.
More on Pizzutello
Our post of a couple of days ago on Ruoppolo’s grapes found its way to an actual grape expert, Anna Schneider of the Istituto di Virologia Vegetale in Italy. I’ve translated her comments below:
I did some research on Ruoppolo and saw that he worked in Naples, so it is indeed possible that the grapes he represented are Pizzutello white, which is actually still grown in Tivoli together with Pergolese and still arrive in the markets of Rome.
On the difference between the painting and the image of the Dedo de dama of Portugal, which is synonymous with Pizzutello, I am not worried: the color obviously depends on environmental conditions, and also the elongation of the berry may be: a) an exaggeration of the artist (who usually tended to exaggerate the more unusual characters, b) intra-varietal diversity (often mostly present in some varieties), c) growing conditions in the absence of “forcing”.
Other synonyms of the same grape variety, which was one of the most popular table varieties in the Mediterranean basin, because of the shape of the berry, to the particular form of the berry, are Cornichon blanc (France), Corazon de cabrito and Teta de vaca in Spain.
These synonyms are the “official” ones; unofficial ones number in the hundreds are hundreds (Galletta, Uva corno, Cornicchiola, Lady finger, etc…)
As a final note, I have a Pizzutello look-alike I recovered in old vineyards that seems a distinct genotype. In fact, it is possible that there is more than one variety with such a berry (and called the same ), although this Pizzutello (Cornichon, Dedo de dama, etc..) Is probably the most widely cultivated both today and in the past and among the oldest documented varieties (perhaps the dactyli grape of Pliny? though as you know such correspondences can never be definitely proven…)
To find out more I would need to do a more thorough search in the literature and among molecular profiles, but for that I would need a little more time…
Many thanks to Anna for taking the time to provide more information than I would have ever have been able to get out of the databases.