- Rice, beans and trade crops on the early maritime Silk Route in Southeast Asia. At trade crossroads, crops had to audition for inclusion in the local menu.
- Cryopreservation of somatic embryos for avocado germplasm conservation. Still needs work.
- Soil fertility, crop biodiversity, and farmers’ revenues: Evidence from Italy. Diverse farms are more profitable, and can make up for poor soils.
- Native and Non-Native Sheep Breed Differences in Canestrato Pugliese Cheese Quality: a Resource for a Sustainable Pastoral System. Traditional local cheese is better when made with milk from traditional local breeds.
- Agrobiodiversity conservation enhances food security in subsistence-based farming systems of Eastern Kenya. But correlation is not causation.
- Estimating demand for perennial pigeon pea in Malawi using choice experiments. It won’t be liked everywhere.
- Genome-wide analysis highlights genetic dilution in Algerian sheep. Two of the 7 local breeds studied are in trouble due to uncontrolled breeding with a third, but may be doing better in neighbouring countries.
- Multicriteria optimization to evaluate the performance of Ocimum basilicum L. varieties. Fancy maths allows you to pick the best basil variety out of 8.
- The challenges of maintaining a collection of wild sunflower (Helianthus) species. Are many and varied…
Brainfood: Wilderness loss, Indian rice breeding, Wild barley, Korean millet, Jute mallow diversity, Wheat yields, Orange cassava
- Catastrophic Declines in Wilderness Areas Undermine Global Environment Targets. 10% of supposedly remote wilderness areas gone since the early 1990s.
- Genetic diversity trend in Indian rice varieties: an analysis using SSR markers. The diversity of rice varieties released in India has been decreasing, but only of late.
- Genotypic and phenotypic changes in wild barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum) during a period of climate change in Jordan. There were changes in climate on one side and phenotype and genotype on the other, but it was difficult to find a connection between the two.
- EST-SSR Based Genetic Diversity and Population Structure among Korean Landraces of Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica L.). As is often the case, there’s no geographic structure, unless there is.
- Domestication of jute mallow (Corchorus olitorius L.): ethnobotany, production constraints and phenomics of local cultivars in Ghana. Let the breeding begin.
- Similar estimates of temperature impacts on global wheat yield by three independent methods. Down by about 5% for a 1°C global temperature increase, no matter how you slice it.
- Genome-wide association mapping of provitamin A carotenoid content in cassava. SNPs associated with carotenoid content in cassava roots found in vicinity of known gene responsible for increase in accumulation of provitamin A carotenoids in cassava roots.
A warty problem
By now, of course, you know the difference between a true zucchini and a cocozelle. In the course of researching that little gem, I came across one of the stranger byways in the annals of pumpkin science.
In December 2007, Siegers Seed Co., of Holland Michigan, applied for a US patent for “warted pumpkin”. The patent helpfully tells us that such a pumpkin has an “at least one wart associated with the outer shell of the body”. And, while IANAPL, it seem to me that the patent attempts to cover any warted pumpkin whatsoever, no matter how large, prominent or numerous said warts may be.
Which is very odd because warted pumpkins are nothing new. And again, IANAPL, but I thought that a patent had to include some sort of novelty.
As Hank Will, then as now Editor in Chief at Grit magazine wrote:
My ancestors grew warted gourds, pumpkins and squashes long before Siegers was even in business, and they received the seed from Native American gardeners who had warted cucurbits in their patches for who knows how long.
Will listed five examples of “prior art,” including a description from the granddaddy of cucurbit taxonomy, Antoine Nicholas Duchesne. The lack of novelty was one of the factors that led the US Patent & Trademark Office to reject the application in quick time. The rejection even cited images from our friends at Seed Savers Exchange to show that warty pumpkins had long been in existence. The patent rejection, however, was “non-final” and I have not been able to find out what happened after that. ((If you know, let me know.))
How did Siegers come to invent the warty pumpkin that everyone else seems to have known about forever? The “inventor” (who was a director of marketing at Siegers) was both very observant and very inexperienced.
In a large commercial field of multiple unknown pumpkin varieties, a single fruit was discovered displaying a greater degree of warting than has ever been observed in prior experience by the inventor.
The brilliant marketing idea was that these warty pumpkins would make extra ghoulish Jack-o-lanterns, and Siegers even went so far as to register the trade name Super Freak, with varieties called Knucklehead and Goose Bumps, and one called Gremlins that I swear is a repackaged version of the “ornamental gourds” that were all the rage dried, varnished and gathering dust a while back.
One independent trial concluded:
We had both of these in our trials and thought they were sort of ugly, but nonetheless, they appeared to be a hot item at a garden center where we test-marketed them. These varieties will not be easy to use as carving pumpkins because of the hard shell associated with the warty character.
So maybe it was a good marketing idea, even if it was a terrible idea to claim novelty and a patent.
Thanks Lori Holder-Webb for making your picture of warty pumpkins available.
P.S. A website the company apparently created, “dedicated to the Superfreak™ Series,” and designed to give “growers and consumers alike … valuable information about all of Siegers Seed Company’s unique pumpkins, gourds and fall specialty items” ((From here.)) has been overrun by spam. That seems kinda fitting.
Brainfood: Med diet, Rice relatives, Local breeds, NGS, Extremophiles, Farmers’ rights, Wild foods
- Prototypical versus contemporary Mediterranean Diet. They’re basically the same.
- Development of Oryza sativa L. by Oryza punctata Kotschy ex Steud. monosomic addition lines with high value traits by interspecific hybridization. A very distant relative finally succumbs.
- Local breeds – rural heritage or new market opportunities? Colliding views on the conservation and sustainable use of landraces. Apparently, both is not an answer. At least in Finland.
- Exploring Genetic Diversity in Plants Using High-Throughput Sequencing Techniques. No excuse now.
- Extremophyte adaptations to salt and water deficit stress. Any crop wild relatives, though?
- Seed wars and farmers’ rights: comparative perspectives from Brazil and India. Stewardship vs ownership.
- Quantifying the economic contribution of wild food harvests to rural livelihoods: A global-comparative analysis. Three quarters of rural families use wild foods, but their contribution to income averages only 4%. Must be the nutrition, I guess.
Nibbles: GRIN-Global, Old gardens, Grain buildings, Roman eating, Armenian wine, Coffee GI, PAPGREN, Tamar Haspel double
- How to look for stuff in Chile’s genebank.
- How colonial Americans gardened. And later built stuff out of produce.
- How Romans ate.
- How Armenians are (still) making wine.
- How to figure out where your coffee comes from.
- How the Pacific is saving its crop diversity.
- How organic agriculture delivers benefits, and how it does not.
- How GMOs deliver benefits, and how they do not. By the same person as the above.