- Indoor farms in Tokyo, growing a diversity of non-pot crops, to train yoof. Via.
- BBC News web site picks up on BBC World TV documentary on neglected species.
- The geography of sauce in South Carolina.
- India and Pakistan find something to agree on: basmati rice.
- Have we already mentioned this new book on bananas?
Feral rape: seedbank to blame
People do worry about the “escape” of agricultural plants into the pristine wilderness that surrounds farmers fields. In England, smears of bright yellow follow the roads that harvesters and trucks have taken with their loads of mustard and rape seeds. The big question seems to be whether such escapees can persist in the wild. Now, in Ecological Modelling, an “exhaustive 4-year survey” in France looked at the origin of feral crops. Seed immigration from fields and from transport are important, but the single most important factor was found to be the seedbank; the number of seeds in the soil at any given time. ((PIVARD, S. (2008). Characterizing the presence of oilseed rape feral populations on field margins using machine learning. Ecological Modelling, 212;(1-2), 147-154. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2007.10.012))
Many cultivated species, such as oilseed rape, sunflower, wheat or sorghum can escape from crops, and colonize field margins as feral populations. The general processes leading to the escape and persistence of cultivated species on field margins are still poorly investigated. An exhaustive 4-year survey was conducted in the centre of France at a landscape level to study the origin of feral oilseed rape populations. We present here results obtained with machine learning methods, which are increasingly popular techniques for analysing large ecological datasets. As expected, the dynamics of feral populations relies on large seed immigration from fields and transport. However, the seed bank was shown to be the keystone of their persistence rather than local recruitment.
Which is good to know. But of course the real reason to blog this post is to note the unfortunate paper title, involving as it does “feral rape,” and to include a link to one of my favourite non-agrobiodiversity sources, Language Log, which just happens to be dealing with some of the Brassicaceae and which has this to say:
[Further side note: rape [rep] as the name for these greens in English has an understandably unhappy history. Even rapeseed oil, for the cooking oil made from the seeds of the rape plant, is edgy — which is why we now have canola oil, made from a variety of rapeseed originally developed in Canada.]
Of course, feral canola carries no google-juice whatsoever.
Reflections on dog breeding
Nice pictures of livestock guardian dog breeds. And a plea for lumping.
Roman agrobiodiversity on show
So I was at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme to catch the Rosso Pompeiano exhibition, which was fine, and which I may blog about later, but details of two statues caught my eye among the permanent stuff on show — representing agrobiodiversity, of course. The statues are meant to symbolize different provinces of the empire. This one is supposed to be Thrace:
I guess the cereal is barley, but why the poppy seed capsule? And this one is supposed to be Egypt:
Now, the caption said this is a pomegranate, and I can see why that should be, but isn’t there something wrong with the top of the fruit? Shouldn’t the remains of the sepals be sort of more upright? Check out various other representations of the fruit to see what I mean. Anyway, I can’t imagine what else it might be. Except perhaps an opium poppy, especially when you compare it with the obviously more weedy poppy in the other statue. But both capsule and seed are too big. Of course, the “poppy” held by the representation of Thrace could in fact be a small pomegranate. In any case, I don’t understand why barley should somehow represent Thrace and pomegranates Egypt. I’ll look into it. Someone somewhere is bound to have written a thesis on botanical symbolism in Roman art.
Saving local breeds, then eating them
Matthew Fort, who writes on food and drink for the Guardian newspaper in the UK, waxes lyrical about the Rare Breeds Survival Trust and its mission:
Speaking personally, on the whole I worry rather more about the survival of Boreray sheep and Marsh Daisy poultry than I do about the snow leopard or the hairy-nosed wombat, if only on the grounds that I would like the chance to eat them.