- The history of the potato at Shimla.
- Lots of Mediterranean mammals in trouble, including wild relatives of domesticated species.
- SciDev rounds up the science on climate change and diseases. Human diseases, that is, but much also applies to those of crops and livestock.
Nibbles: Chile breeding, Sugarcane in India, Seed Vault, Cuban breeding, Cattle in Argentina, Flax fibres, Fisheries, Urban mushrooms, Ferula, African leafy green
- “All green chile derives its genetic base from the work of Fabian Garcia. We are at the center of the universe when it comes to chile because of Dr. Garcia.”
- Indian farmers move out of sugarcane, live to regret it.
- Freakonomists get Svalbard governance slightly wrong, but what the heck. Get it from the horse’s mouth.
- Adapting to climate change in Cuba through crop improvement.
- The Argentinian gauchos are running scared. And not just because of their pathetic football team.
- Microscopic remains of 30,000 year old flax cords found in Georgian cave. 30,000?
- Gotta fish less, boffins say.
- Growing shittake in a disused Mittagong railway tunnel.
- You remember our recent Dung of the Devil post? You remember how you thought it was a plant you didn’t need to know much about? Think again.
- BBC’s The Food Programme tackles African indigenous veggies.
Nibbles: Goat, Wine, Heirlooms, Soil microbes, Climate change, Sorghum
- “Is goat the most popular meat you’ve never eaten?” No. We both love it.
- Winery recycles water. We recycle wine.
- “I have tomatoes in my blood.” See a doctor, Amy.
- Rice’s little friends the microbes, under intense scrutiny. Should IRRI be too? Or GRAIN?
- “Even small-scale management of farm lands can immensely benefit from recent advances in climate prediction.” FAO is ready.
- “We know that improved sorghum has better quality and high production value. But, given our reality of water scarcity, we prefer to plant traditional sorghum because it needs less water.”
Goats gnaw on geographic given
We’re used to thinking — or at least assuming — in agrobiodiversity conservation that genetic distance is a monotonically increasing function of geographic distance. It is, after all, a reflection of the great Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography: “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” And yet. Why should that necessarily be so for crops and livestock, so willfully and incessantly moved to and fro by people in all kinds of unpredictable ways?
A paper just out in Molecular Ecology in effect tests the First Law of Geography with goat genetic diversity data, microsatellites in fact. ((BERTHOULY, C., DO NGOC, D., THÉVENON, S., BOUCHEL, D., NHU VAN, T., DANES, C., GROSBOIS, V., HOANG THANH, H., VU CHI, C., & MAILLARD, J. (2009). How does farmer connectivity influence livestock genetic structure? A case-study in a Vietnamese goat population Molecular Ecology DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04342.x)). Goat populations were sampled in 3-8 villages in each of 2-5 communes in each of 10 districts in the remote, mountainous, ethnically mixed Vietnamese province of Hang Giang, for a total of 492 animals. The genetic relationships among the animals were then analyzed.
To the surprise of the authors, the spatial structure of the overall population was poorly explained by simple geographic distance. The ethnicity of their keepers and the husbandry practices to which they were subjected did a much better job of predicting the genetic distance between goats. The most dissimilar goats were not necessarily the ones which lived furthest apart, but rather the ones which were kept in different ways by people of different ethnic groups.
So, if you wanted to maximise the diversity in a Vietnamese goat conservation programme, or your chances of hybrid vigour, you’d pick animals from different ethnic groups or production systems, and not necessarily from different ends of the country. Which is something that I remember sort of almost subconsciously doing when I was collecting crops, but it is nice to see it validated like this. I can’t remember offhand similar work on crops, but no doubt Jacob will set me straight soon enough. In the meantime, I revel in a rule proven.
Nibbles: Banana disease, Prickly pears, Pea breeding, Aquaculture, Bees, Soil microbes
- A letter makes some very important points about bananas in Africa. There’s a huge back-story to this, but we’re not going to go there.
- Prickly pear fruit chips. An opportunity beckons, for someone.
- Building the perfect pea.
- Half of fish farmed. But which half?
- Scientific American bee podcast.
- “…there is a whole world of microbes underground, associated with the roots of plants, that has yet to be analyzed.”