Greetings from Mexico DF. I’m here for SIRGEALC, which is always a great opportunity to meet up with old friends working on agricultural biodiversity in the Americas, and see what they’ve been up to lately. I’ll try to blog about the highlights as the week goes on.
Maize preferences survey
Glenn Hyman at CIAT is doing a survey of the preference for different maize colours in Latin America. There’s a questionnaire you can take. The results so far are shown on the map to the left: dark brown is a strong preference for yellow maize, dark green for white. Glenn told us about it in a comment on a post of mine a couple of days back, but I figured he’d like some more publicity.
Brazil reaches out
The website of the Arab Brazil Chamber of Commerce has a long, fascinating interview with Silvio Crestana, president of EMBRAPA, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. Having set up shop in Ghana, EMBRAPA is now thinking of doing something similar in Morocco and Qatar. It is great that the considerable expertise of Brazilian agricultural scientists is going to be shared more widely with the rest of the world. But benefits — including agricultural biodiversity — are expected to flow both ways. Here’s a selection of quotes to give you the flavour:
The whole world will be experiencing … confusions caused by climate change, and if we manage to obtain a plant with a gene that is more tolerant to drought, it will attract a lot of interest.
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They are well developed in goat raising. They have goats that give birth to three lambs (usually they give birth to a single lamb). This is of great interest to Brazil, to our goat raising centres, which are located in the Northeast. This race is of interest to Brazil. There could be a transfer from there to here.
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Another field of interest is olives, olive trees. They are way ahead of us in that field, and the demand for those is growing in Brazil… It is an ideal field for us to cooperate, they have research, they cultivate many different varieties, they have an amazing variety of olives, small, large, of all sizes and features, for oil, edible ones.
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They also have varieties and research on wheat. They have a very interesting variety of wheat that we are interested in for hybridisations, germplasm banks.
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Our germplasm bank, from the vantage point of tropical biodiversity, is like no other. They would benefit from that.
High Plains Drifting
Wheat being nudged and prodded into perenniality, and local perennials the other way ((That’s the Land Institute stuff we’ve blogged about before.)); cows managed like bison, and bison managed like cows (including by media moguls turned restauranteurs); reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand, and Indian retirees going home to the reservation; farmers paid to retire some of their acres so grasslands can make a comeback, and high-tech plants turning corn into diapers. There sure is some funny stuff going on in the Great Plains, that sixth of the continental US between the foothills of the Rockies and the 98th (or possibly the 100th) parallel. Read all about it in National Geographic’s Change of Heartland. The feature is from a couple of years ago, but still well worth checking out, if only for the photos. And thanks to Kem and her friend for pointing it out to me.
NPGS award
Forages collector Doug Johnson honoured.