Mainstream

July 4, 2019July 3, 2019

Go North, rice!

You might think that Queen’s Line off Drake Road, Chatham, ON N7M 5T1, Canada is the furthest north that rice grows in the world. That’s near Lake Erie, after all.

But you’d be wrong, and so was I. The latitude is 42°19’59.7″N. And there’s rice cultivation in China and central Asia, maybe even Italy’s Po valley, north of the 45th parallel, according to this map. ¹

We know the furthest south that rice is grown.

July 3, 2019July 3, 2019

Fact-checking extreme seed-saving

The story of the 800-year old squash seeds has surfaced again. We blogged about it way back, pointing out that it was, in fact, fake. But Archaeology Review does a great job of debunking it yet again. Be careful out there, people.

July 2, 2019July 1, 2019

Nibbles: Bean and chili diversity, European Neolithic, Microbiota Vault, Paški sir, Freeze dried potatoes, Rice art, ABS

Collecting beans in the American SW.
Chilis too.
Updated map of Neolithic expansion in Europe.
The Microbiota Vault is a thing.
Wind-flavoured cheese.
But is chuño worth saving, really?
The art of rice diversity.
Using Jerry Maguire to explain the Plant Treaty. It is not well done. But one is surprised to see it done at all.

June 25, 2019June 25, 2019

Nibbles: Organic Greek, Mexican maize heirloom, Community seedbank, Arizona chilli, African maize, Chinese trifecta, Sex-changing solanum, Breeding oddities, Breeding costing tool, Chicken project, WFP, Cattle book, Agroforestry database, Minor cereals, Reviewing genebanks, Wheat breeding, Rice seeds

Greek organic farm resists.
Communities getting into seed banking all over.
Saving zapalote chico.
Would you like chiltepines with that?
No zapalote chico in South Africa, but lots of other maize.
Conserving agricultural biodiversity in China.
Including in Hainan.
At the same time, China restricts foreign access to human genome data.
Sexually plastic Australian wild tomato named at long last.
Breeding flavour crops.
And figuring out how much it will cost.
Interesting project on human-chicken interactions.
Veggie breeder wins World Food Prize.
New coffee table book on cattle in Africa.
Flagship agroforestry database gets new version. Anyone wanna test it for us?
Minor cereals in Europe are anything but minor.
And lots are conserved in Europe’s increasingly scrutinized genebanks.
Meanwhile, a major cereals keeps getting the attention it also needs.
“The candidate markers could be used by any rice genebank to potentially identify varieties with seeds that are particularly short- or long-lived in storage. Viability monitoring intervals could then be customized by variety.” And wheat?

June 17, 2019June 25, 2019

Brainfood: Seed viability double, Forest reserves, Biodiversity value, Hunter-gatherers, Seed concentration, Past CC, Hot lablab, Mungbean adoption, Climate smart impacts, Tree threats, Chicken domestication, Top sorghum, Ancient wines, Plant extinctions

Variation in seed longevity among diverse Indica rice varieties. 8 major loci associated with seed longevity.
Seeds and the Art of Genome Maintenance. Viability is about the DNA repair response. Snap.
Are Mayan community forest reserves effective in fulfilling people’s needs and preserving tree species? Sure they are.
The power of argument. People don’t respond to utilitarian arguments when it comes to biodiversity. In the Netherlands.
Do modern hunter-gatherers live in marginal habitats? Nope. What can I tell ya?
New evidence on concentration in seed markets. Not as bad as some people think.
Climate change has likely already affected global food production. From 2003 to 2008, there’s been a ~1% average reduction in consumable food calories in barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat.
Selection of Heat Tolerant Lablab. 6 out of 44 accessions from the WorldVeg genebank are heat tolerant. Seems a lot.
Counting the beans: quantifying the adoption of improved mungbean varieties in South Asia and Myanmar. 1.2 million farmers reached by WorldVeg varieties. Lablab next?
Climate smart agricultural practices and gender differentiated nutrition outcome: An empirical evidence from Ethiopia. They work, but they’re better in combination.
Pests and diseases of trees in Africa: A growing continental emergency. Into Africa…
Genetics of adaptation in modern chicken. Not much of a domestication bottleneck; that came later.
Multi-Trait Diverse Germplasm Sources from Mini Core Collection for Sorghum Improvement. From 40,000 in the genebank, to 242 in the mini-core, to 6 really cool ones (from Yemen, USA, China, Mozambique, and India x2 if you must know).
Palaeogenomic insights into the origins of French grapevine diversity. Ancient DNA from 28 pips dating back to the Iron Age provides pretty good matches to grapes grown today.
Global dataset shows geography and life form predict modern plant extinction and rediscovery. Almost 600 plants went extinct in modern times, at least, and I count about 20 crop wild relatives among them.