- A look inside the big USDA genebank at Fort Collins. Whatever next?
- Sweet wheat. Whatever next?
- Farmers must participate in agricultural research in Europe. Whatever next?
- “Come and farm our virgin lands, Ethiopia tells India.” Whatever.
- “You may already know that yampah (Perideridia gairdneri) is a North American umbellifer.” Er, no. Tell me more.
- After cloves, vegetables? Zanzibar’s farmers increase productivity.
- More news for Luigi’s MIL: Future Climate Scenarios for Kenya’s Tea Growing Areas.
- Is this the end of trail mix?
- Body Shop uses wins award for using Cameroonian rainforest honey and wax from CIFOR-supported beekeeping project.
- Fancy a glass of ass’s milk? Totally SFW.
- Everybody is climate-proofing crops.
- The BBC looks at medicinal plants.
Safeguarding tangible agricultural heritage
There’s a great set of pictures of Kenyan traditional crops and food preparation on UNESCO’s Facebook page, in their Documenting Living Heritage series. This is part of an exhibition currently on at UNESCO’s HQ in Paris to raise awareness of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. I doubt there’s a photograph of the Gene Bank of Kenya, but that surely contributes to that goal too.
German lentils go back home
Before the introduction of the potato, Irish people included grain as a dietary mainstay, particularly oats. Oats were used in breads, desserts, drinks, medicines and cosmetics! Other grains that were grown included barley, flax, rye and some wheats. Unfortunately, many of these grain varieties were lost and we had to turn, primarily to the Vavilov Institute in Russia, the first genebank in the world, to repatriate our native grains. Michael Miklis in Piltown, Kilkenny, working with very small quantities of grain, over many years trialed them and bulked them up so that they could be resown on field scale again.
That reference to the Vavilov Institute on the Irish Seed Savers website reminded me of something similar they told me about the last time I was there.
Dr Margarita Vishnyaova, the head of the legume department, told me that they had recently “repatriated” some “German” lentils to a farmer cooperative in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The varieties in question are labelled “Späts Alpenlinse” (K2106, collected Hungary in 1965) and “Späths Albinse” (K2076, collected Czechoslovakia in 1963) in VIR’s records. Woldemar Mammel, a farmer from near Stuttgart had apparently been looking for these varieties in databases all over the place and eventually happened on them in the VIR online catalogue. They are old traditional varieties from the Swabian Alps which are no longer grown in Germany, or at least his part of them. The handover of the seed to Herr Mammel and a group of 15 other German organic farmers took place in Nov. 2007 at VIR, and was filmed by Slow Food Deutschland (Prof. Dr Roman Lenz, Dinah Epperlein). There are some photographs of the event on the Slow Food website. Sometimes genebank databases are good for something after all.
Nibbles: CWR, ICRISAT, Fruits, Maize, Symbionts, Tissue culture, Vegetables, Med diet
- ICARDA saves the world.
- No, ICRISAT saves the world.
- You’re both wrong, it’s CIAT.
- No, wait, maybe it’s CIMMYT. Oh I give up.
- Actually it’s fungi.
- Or maybe tissue culture?
- Surely it can’t be five unknown vegetables?
- Could it be that it’s the Mediterranean diet? And that UNESCO will screw it up for all of us?
Brainfood: Introgression, Sorghum and drought, Rice and drought, Carrot evaluation, Wheat breeding, Legume conservation, Wild Tibet soybean, Gezira, Biochar, CA, Grass ecotypes and climate, Organic ag and nutrients
- Alien introgressions represent a rich source of genes for crop improvement. Polyploids such as wheat do it best.
- Characterization of sorghum genotypes for traits related to drought tolerance. There is diversity within the “association panel” of diverse germplasm used. What I want to know is how that is different from a core or mini-core collection.
- Rice near-isogenic-lines (NILs) contrasting for grain yield under lowland drought stress. Small genetic differences can lead to big differences in yield under drought stress. What I want to know is whether doing this on NILs is better value for money than doing it on association panels of germplasm (see above), whatever they may be.
- Towards better tasting and more nutritious carrots: Carotenoid and sugar content variation in carrot genetic resources. European accessions sweeter and more orange than Asian.
- Changes in duration of developmental phases of durum wheat caused by breeding in Spain and Italy during the 20th century and its impact on yield. Fascinating unpicking of just where the genetic changes have their impact.
- Legume genetic resources: management, diversity assessment, and utilization in crop improvement. A lot of characterization, not enough evaluation. Core collections useful, but not useful enough. Crop wild relatives being used, but not enough. Good plug for the importance of geo-referencing.
- Genetic diversity and geographical peculiarity of Tibetan wild soybean (Glycine soja). Low and high, respectively.
- Analysis of agricultural production instability in the Gezira Scheme. Went up for wheat, cotton and sorghum, down for groundnuts, on liberalization.
- Biochar effects on soil biota – A review. It’s complicated but, on the whole, not unpositive.
- A research agenda to explore the role of conservation agriculture in African smallholder farming systems. Basically, it is likely to work least well in marginal conditions. Which is kinda surprising, and not, at the same time.
- Ecotypes of European grass species respond differently to warming and extreme drought. Yeah, but, alas, not in the way one might have wished.
- Comparison of nutritional quality of the crops grown in an organic and conventional fertilized soil. Maybe lower nitrate and N, higher P in organic crops. But really too much variation to be sure.