- When Cotton was King.
- America’s longest-operating outdoor market.
- Australia builds a genebank for native plants. Some crop wild relatives may be involved, I guess.
- Undergraduate review of colony collapse disorder. Resist the temptation to mark. Or don’t.
Ancient wheats brought up to date in Hungary
Quite by coincidence, while Luigi was digesting cereal diversity and nutrition, I was reading about an effort to bring ancient wheats up to date, also centred in Hungary. Geza Kovács of the Agricultural Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has overseen a project that looked at 250 einkorn (Triticum monococcum) and 130 emmer (T. dicoccum) samples from various genebanks and screened them to see how well they performed and what kind of grain they produced. The best 20 were selected for further breeding, with a particular eye on their performance in organic systems and how well they met the needs of end users such as bakers and consumers. ((I found a brief report in the Bulletin of the Organic Research Centre, and I am trying to source a published paper.))
Two particularly promising new einkorn varieties emerged, with “acceptable” yield compared to a bread wheat and significantly higher protein content. Other varieties have undetectable levels of gluten, which might make them suitable for people with gluten allergies. Some are also high in fat-soluble anti-oxidants. Some of the new emmers also show great promise, with protein levels higher than standard bread wheat and a high level of carotenoids.
Kovács also speculates that some of the new varieties may be a good source to resurrect the production of ancient foods such as frikeh. This is made from wheat, harvested at a critical point when the seeds are plump but still green and not yet mature. The seeds are dried and then burned. Frikeh is delicious — I tried some in Aleppo once — and could be an excellent snack for health-conscious consumers, and those who just want to eat something good that preserves diversity.
Neocolonial land grab?
Sue Branford writes in The Guardian that:
China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other nations have been buying and leasing huge quantities of foreign land for the production of food or biofuels.
A couple of days ago, Luigi mentioned in a footnote of a post on Malagasy coffee, that Daewoo is to lease 1.3 million ha in Madagascar. Apparently to produce maize. The Financial Times reported:
“It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched. And we will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar,” said Mr Hong [of Dawoo]. The 1.3m hectares of leased land is almost half the African country’s current arable land of 2.5m hectares.
There might be some scope for agricultural expansion on the Malagasy high plateau, but 1.3 million ha of good arable land that is untouched? Except by the local population, of course.
Not quite, and not so fast, responded the government:
The contract (…) concerns only the facilitation of a land search. We are talking about a search for 100,000 hectares … It is only after this stage that the rest of the process will continue.
Grain has a report, and a Google notebook with clippings.
FAO’s Jacques Diouf talks about neo-colonialism. There is also this Guardian article on resentment in Laos. Expect more of that to come.
A big picture
If everyone shifts trophic status to roughly herbivore level, and we educate all the world’s women to secondary level, we have a chance.
The difference between 12 billion and 9 billion people in 2050 is one child per woman. If all the world’s women were educated to secondary level, fertility would drop by about 1.7 children per woman. And we can probably feed 9 billion herbivorous people, if we can maintain the crop diversity of the major grain crops high enough to avoid catastrophic disease outbreaks.
Read more from Steve Carpenter at Resilience Science.
Fishy facts
Myself, I’d rather eat wild cod once a month and sardines once a week than farm-raised salmon, ever.
Me too.
Well, not too often.
Warm blooded, acrobatic, long-lived, and wily, it’s a miracle of evolution.
But that shouldn’t stop us doing what we like to it, right?