Category: Information

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Taro gets the social networking treatment

John Cho is a plant pathologist and taro breeder at the University of Hawaii. A few days ago he posted a youtube video on his Facebook wall. It shows some very successful trial results from the Dominican Republic. The experiment in question is the evaluation for taro leaf blight resistance of some hybrids from Dr Cho’s breeding programme. Unfortunately, the interview with pathologists Drs Graciela Godoy and Miguel Martínez of the Instituto Dominicano de Investigaciones Agropecuarias y Forestales (IDIAF) is in Spanish, and John doesn’t speak that language. So he asked his Facebook friends to help, and one of them, an agronomist from Puerto Rico, sent him a translation. Now John knows that the promising hybrids are 2002-21f (H2 to IDIAF), 2000-109 (H4) and MS3 (H6) — and so do we, 1 because John provided the gist of the results as a comment on the video on his wall. Isn’t social networking great? Now, if only that information would make it into some germplasm database. Any germplasm database.

LATER: It gets better. In the latest exchange of comments on the original video post, John’s Spanish-speaking agronomist friend tells him how some of his hybrids did in Puerto Rico. Who needs databases?

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What’s your favourite agrobiodiversity read?

A request comes in from our friend Danny Hunter. Help him out!

Now that the noughties have drawn to a close I would like to ask colleagues what they felt were their top agricultural biodiversity reads of the decade. It might be an article or a book. It might even be a blog or one of the new fangled ways of disseminating information. It could be something general or a specific piece of work that was fundamental to our understanding of agricultural biodiversity, how it is conserved, managed, utilised. As well as the details of the article or book, a brief explanation of why you thought the work important would be much appreciated.

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Nibbles: Pastoralists, Millennium Village, African agriculture

  • “The film showcases Bio-Cultural Protocols highlighting the Raika community of Rajasthan and the Samburu of Kenya. Developing Biocultural Protocols is an important means of implementing both paragraph 8j of the CBD and Strategic Priority 6 of the Global Plan of Action on Animal Genetic Resources.”
  • How Ethiopia’s Millennium Village is doing.
  • And along the same lines, what Pedro Sanchez has to say about African agriculture and that green revolution nit needs to have.