Category: Livestock

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Livestock landraces and marginality in Europe

goats

Visually, by comparing the map of INDEX2 (Fig. 6) [right] with the one of the distribution of breeds (Fig. 2) [left], it can be seen that the studied breeds seem to be consistently located in regions defined as marginal by the indices.

Well, maybe. Click on the image to see better. But it seems a stretch to me, and the more rigorous logit analysis that the authors subject the data to isn’t exactly overwhelming. If I understand it correctly, the best that a combination of various proxies for marginality can do in predicting the presence of local sheep and goat breeds is 19%. And that’s with breed distribution data which seems to be biased towards marginal areas anyway.

Local sheep and goat breeds are generally argued to be remarkably well adapted to marginal rural areas.

That’s certainly a dominant meta-narrative, and not just for livestock, for agrobiodiversity as a whole. I may even believe it. But not a huge amount of evidence for it here.

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Nibbles: Agroforestry, Forecasts, Coffee, Pigs, GIS, Potatoes

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Linking up livestock databases

The object of most biodiversity web sites in animal agriculture is the ‘breed’ or population, and not the individual animal within (an exception are some breed societies which present individual animal data on some of their most important breeding animals). With the linkage of CryoWEB and FABISnet, for the first time, production type databases with individual animal records are directly linked to the global breeds database network, thereby creating breeds statistics in FABISnet which are directly derived from production data. Perhaps the procedure can also be a model for other data in the biodiversity databases.

That’s from a piece on animal genetic resources databases by Elldert Groeneveld of the Institute of Farm Animal Genetic in Germany, published as article of the month in the Globaldiv Newsletter. It’s entitled Databases and Biodiversity: From Single Databases to a Global Network and you can find it on page 8. I suppose there is a similar problem in crops, where you might have evaluation data for various different lines selected from a single population. But somehow you don’t hear so much about it. Is it that the links between conservationists and users (that is, those doing the evaluation) are better developed in the livestock field?

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Nibbles: Vegetable seeds, Colorado potato beetle, Castanea, Pigs, Condiments, Porpoise, Biofuels, Mouflon, Blackwood

  • European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
  • Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
  • Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
  • The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
  • The diversity of sauces.
  • Cooking Flipper.
  • Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
  • Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
  • “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”