Category: Livestock

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Crowdsourcing money for Dutch heirloom pigs

Among the 2012 Arca-Deli® Awards for Prestige and Marketing Value (announced in October but only coming across my radar screen now, via Facebook), this one particularly caught my eye:

Extraordinary Pigs! 100’000 Euro raised through crowdfunding for rearing rare breed pigs in the Netherlands, producing good tasting pork and for increasing animal welfare. An innovative project which combines conservation of the old with modern methods. “Like” their Facebook page to keep up with their news or visit their website.

Alas, both seem to be exclusively in Dutch, which is a pity as I’d really like to know more about how they managed to raise all that cash.

LATER: And thanks to Twitter, here’s the secret revealed:

Thanks, @dsmnutrition!

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Nibbles: Manioc gastronomy, Wilting revolution, Turrialba cheese, Conservation and poverty, Beans breeding, Dye plants, Plant Cuttings, Amazon fires, Balm, African silver bullets, Heritage food, Potato politics, Native seed meet

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Brainfood: Core collections, Romanian pigs, Commons, Valuation, Biofortification, Yam characterization, Pompeii diet, Rice grain genetics

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Conserving wild animals the hard way

With regard to … sperm collection from wild animals, FAO does not have guidelines on this, given our emphasis on domestic livestock. However, if the animal can be sacrificed, epididymal sperm collection may be an option. This procedure is briefly discussed in the FAO Guidelines for Cryoconservation of Animal (domestic) Genetic Resources (pages 99-100) (http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/i3017e/i3017e00.pdf) but some experimentation would likely be needed to adapt it to your species of choice. If the animal must remain alive, options may be to remove sperm from the testes by using a syringe (PESA — Percutaneous Epididymal Sperm Extraction), to surgically implant a catheter or by removal of only a single testicle for sperm collection, leaving the other intact. Two scientific documents on epididymal semen collection in livestock by Dr. Flavia Pizzi (one of the authors of the FAO Cryoconservation Guidelines) and her colleagues are available at:

ftp://DADnet:Mobile45@ext-ftp.fao.org/ag/reserved/dad-net/ReprDomAnim_epididimi2012.pdf (278 kb)

ftp://DADnet:Mobile45@ext-ftp.fao.org/ag/reserved/dad-net/PosterSLTB.pdf (870 kb)

For “conventional” sperm collection from living wild animals, an electro-ejaculator is often used, although this approach will not be successful for all species (e.g. it’s generally not used for pigs and horses among livestock species). In case your target species is wild cats, the following may be of use to you:

http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/31238/InTech-Wildlife_cats_reproductive_biotechnology.pdf

That’s from the always interesting DAD-Net. Makes me ever so very grateful the wild relatives I deal with are plants.

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Nibbles: Old rice, New quinoa, Fishy stuff, Cropland landscapes, Forest landscapes, Old seed, Superdomestication, Intensification

  • Youth compiles list of rare and extinct rice varieties of Assam. Maybe he should look at weedy rice too?
  • Meanwhile, American farmers are learning to grow quinoa, probably including some rare varieties.
  • The smelliest fish in the world. No traceability needed for that one, I guess.
  • Cropland getting mapped. Presumably including the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). Help needed by both, by the way.
  • Follow the forest discussions at COP18. High on the agenda: what is a landscape? It’s what you study when you’re being holistic, no? Anyway, there’s got to be a connection to the previous links.
  • Boffins find a genetic marker for old seed. Will need to Brainfood this one.
  • Pat Heslop-Harrison breaks down superdomestication for you.
  • SRI gets a scaling up. What could possibly go wrong?