- Do polycultures have a role in modern agriculture? Well, do they? h/t The Scientist Gardener.
- Texas breeders go for better melons.
- “Children from the city who try this yogurt don’t like it, but they’re not healthy like my children!”
- Hotspots for Aboriginal traditional medicinal plants mapped to within an inch of their lives, thanks to GBIF.
The price of hoes in Kenya
This post is not really about agricultural biodiversity, but I think it is worth stretching a point on some occasions. Take a look at the caption for this photograph. It’s the last in a gallery from The Guardian which goes with a nice write-up of what sounds like a very worthy Farm Africa project.
Forty-five pounds for a hoe? Forty-five pounds? I must say I’d missed that when I first went through the photos, but when Jeremy pointed it out I had to admit that seemed a bit steep for a hoe.
Well, is it just us? What do we know about the price of hoes in Kenya, right? Internal evidence in the article suggests that £45 is a lot of money, but a fair price for a hoe.
But low-tech can still be costly. Mwanza says she would like more hoes, but at £45 a hoe, it is far more than she can afford. The simple brick house she lives in with one of her children is no bigger than a small bedroom.
But googling comes up with a much cheaper price in Uganda:
“A hoe is a very cheap thing. It costs Shs 7,500 each and when I buy one it can last more than two years,” Nyakoojo said.
That would be about £1.70. And when the wife sent text messages to everyone she could think of in Kenya she got back figures closer to the Ugandan than The Guardian. A very fancy hoe goes for about KSh 1,200, or £8, we were told.
So what’s going on? Normally, I’d probably just dismiss it as a misplaced decimal point somewhere. Or perhaps a misunderstanding about what exactly the tool involved is. But it appears that this “hoe” is the weapon of choice in the Manichean fight against GMOs.
Small African farmers such as Mwanza stand on the frontline in the battle for higher productivity and agricultural development, a struggle being fought not with tractors and GM crops but with hoes, wheelbarrows and indigenous drought-resistant crops: cowpeas, pigeon peas, green grams, sorghum and millet.
So I think we should all be extra clear about what one costs. Starting with The Guardian. And the Gates Foundation.
Nibbles: Nigerian farmer speaks, Kenya meeting, Ecuador, Striga-resistant sorghum, Designer veg, Cottontail, Funding conservation, African adaptation
- Why one Nigerian agriculture student will not become a farmer.
- Meeting in Kenya on agricultural biodiversity, and other stuff, in October.
- Ecuador and access to genetic resources (in Spanish).
- “Scientists on the verge of releasing new striga-resistant sorghum.” Drought-resistant too! No need for push-pull then?
- One wacky plant breeder’s story.
- Attractive local bunny in trouble. Not what you’re thinking, get your mind out of the gutter.
- Forest bonds in the offing. Genebank bonds, anyone?
- Climate change adaptation in Africa: examples of genetic and agronomic fixes. Need both, I guess.
From sheep to crops
ILRI’s research report “Characterization and conservation of indigenous sheep genetic resources: A practical framework for developing countries” has a nifty flow diagram at the back which sort of summarizes what you have to do as a national programme to conserve your indigenous sheep breeds. I don’t think it would need to be tremendously dissimilar to be applicable to crop landraces. Any thoughts?
Double haploids or double Dutch?
It isn’t always easy to pick one’s way through the thickets of undergrowth that spring up in the wake of huge scientific breakthroughs. But honestly, I challenge anyone not intimately involved to make sense of this doozie from the University of California, Davis.
First off, the headline: “Plant breeding revolution for cassava, banana”.
Guess. Has it happened? Next year? Next decade? Who knows.
Now, what exactly are they doing? Here’s the background.
Most successful crop varieties are hybrids created by crossing two inbred varieties. While this is relatively easy to do in well-established annual crops like maize or wheat, it is much harder with slower-growing crops like cassava, banana and plantain. As a result, cassava, banana and plantain growers are currently forced to create new varieties by crossing two hybrid parents — a highly unpredictable process.
New crop varieties allow farmers to cope with pests, disease, drought and other problems.
Working with the small laboratory plant Arabidopsis thaliana, Chan’s lab recently discovered a method to create plant seeds that carry the DNA from only one of their parents, allowing breeders to immediately create a hybrid that “breeds true,” dramatically cutting the time required to create new crops with traits such as disease- or drought-resistance.
All clear? No seriously, this is seriously misleading in so many respects that I have to wonder whether any of the scientists involved actually saw it.
Being as how some of names in the press release are familiar to me, I did a bit of looking around, and discovered that this is merely a follow-up to a little piece we had already Nibbled, and groaned at. Going back to the full piece, I owe my friends at CIAT an apology.
The technique being studied at Davis (and IITA and CIAT) results in an adult plant that contains identical genetic information on all the sets of each chromosome. 1 And the main point seems to be that it enables the adult plant to produce seeds that are genetically identical to itself, rather than the genetic shuffle produced by sexual recombination of different chromosomes. So the big deal is that banana and cassava farmers will be able to plant itty-bitty seeds instead of offsets or suckers, which could help to avoid diseases carried inside the plant cells, and would reduce the costs of distributing planting material. If, of course, a good triploid banana can be induced to produce seeds. That remains unclear to me.
But how exactly do double haploids improve breeding? This was the mystery, to me, until I found this video from our friends at CIMMYT, and I’m still not entirely clear how this will help breed bananas.
The point I am laboriously making is that this stuff is interesting. The press release from UC Davis is really celebrating the fact that His Billness “was very interested in the science and had good questions for everyone,” but I wonder whether any of them were about how it will actually deliver on its promise. Call me old fashioned, but I think that a publicly-funded project owes the public a better explanation of what is being done with the money, and why. Or, of course, none at all.