Neglected species

April 18, 2014April 18, 2014

Quinoa in Washington State

Kevin Murphy wants to steal their livelihoods from under the noses of poor Bolivian farmers.

No, wait …

Kevin Murphy wants to allow Bolivian farmers to improve their nutrition by enabling them to eat the quinoa they grow instead of selling it.

No, wait …

I give up. Go along to his talk and make your own mind up. Then come back here and tell us about it.

April 18, 2014April 18, 2014

Nibbles: Veggies, Livestock, Micronutrients, Scurvy, Hemp

Grow what the market wants, African veggie growers told.
Develop the markets for what you grow, Vietnamese farmers told.
You need diverse animal breeds to graze on diverse landscapes shock.
Why, then, are pastoralists abandoning pastoralism?
The Micronutrient Forum is being revived with a gabfest in Addis, 2-6 June. Be still my beating heart.
They’re obviously not going to be too worried about scurvy.
It’s cannabis, Jim, but not as we know it. Hemp Is Coming Back As A Farm Crop. Oh yeah it is.
Whatever, I just hope the seed goes to Svalbard.

April 14, 2014April 14, 2014

Brainfood: Wheat resistance, Wild barley regeneration, Barley improvement, Maize regeneration, Seed pathogens, Colombian rice management, Malawi diversity & nutrition, Modelling pollinators, Women & seeds, Vietnam development, European agrobiodiversity, CIP sweet potato goes to China, American NUS

Gene bank of sources of spring wheat resistance to leaf-stem diseases. Crop wild relatives to the rescue.
Evolutionary History of Wild Barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum) Analyzed Using Multilocus Sequence Data and Paleodistribution Modeling. Recently collected material gives different results to genebank accessions, suggesting geneflow during ex situ maintenance?
Barley genetic variation: implications for crop improvement. “Contemporary plant breeders now benefit from publicly available user-friendly databases providing genotypic and phenotypic information on large numbers of barley accessions.” Barley Genebank Database Heaven? Should talk to the guys above?
Detection of genetic integrity of conserved maize (Zea mays L.) germplasm in genebanks using SNP markers. Oh crap, that problem with ex situ barley maintenance is an issue with maize as well.
Incidence of Seed-Borne Mycoflora in Wheat and Rice Germplasm. Oh, I give up, genebanks are doomed.
Ethnophytopathology: Rice Fields Free of Diseases, from the Culture of Producers in a Nuquí, Chocó-Colombia´s Community. Careful placement of fields in the landscape ensures they don’t get diseases. Who needs genebanks and breeders?
Farm production diversity is associated with greater household dietary diversity in Malawi: Findings from nationally representative data. Yeah, but settle down, it’s kinda complicated.
Landscape fragmentation and pollinator movement within agricultural environments: a modelling framework for exploring foraging and movement ecology. Don’t know how your set-asides and whatnots are going to affect pollinators? Well, now there’s a spatially explicit model for that. Which could perhaps be applied to…
Complex effects of fragmentation on remnant woodland plant communities of a rapidly urbanizing biodiversity hotspot. Would be so interesting to know if there were any socioconomically useful plants (including crop wild relatives) among these remnants.
Gender, Seeds and Biodiversity. Whether in Pennsylvania or Peru, it’s women that save seeds. (This is from an old book, which has presumably just been digitized, hence its appearance in my RSS feed.)
Land Use Dynamics, Climate Change, and Food Security in Vietnam: A Global-to-local Modeling Approach. Agriculture is at risk. Better collect all that germplasm. Right? Right?
Responses of plants, earthworms, spiders and bees to geographic location, agricultural management and surrounding landscape in European arable fields. Mineral N and pesticides not good for agricultural biodiversity. Too bad you can’t really conserve earthworms ex situ.
Identification and evaluation of major quality characters of introduced sweet potato germplasm resources. 4 accessions out of 32 from CIP were likely to prove very useful, for different reasons. I’d say that was pretty good.
Conservation and use of genetic resources of underutilized crops in the Americas – A continental analysis. Some underused crops are more underused than others, but policies don’t help any of them much.
And this week’s theme, I’ve just realized, somewhat belatedly, is the complementarity of ex situ and in situ conservation. No, really, go back and check. And it was purely by chance too.

April 13, 2014April 13, 2014

Nibbles: Diverse diets, Ancient diets, Urban veggies, Medicinal phylogenetics, Double blind cowpeas, Adaptation hope, Livestock emissions, Climate change data, Afghani poppies, Aussie ag & breeders, Chinese agrobiodiversity, Weird cherry

Meaty presentation on how biodiversity in the food system delivers a diverse diet. Could hardly fail to, really, could it.
What’s a diverse diet ever done for me, asks ancient farmer.
Vegetables an important part of diverse diets, of course. Especially in urban areas.
Interesting EU project on the phylogenetics of medicinal plants. Any vegetables in there?
Improved cowpeas only improved when farmers know they are improved. Wow.
Some glimmers of hope on adaptation? Maybe.
Not all livestock bad for climate change. And room for improvement on those that are.
Yeah, but who cares, global warming is just a giant natural fluctuation, no? No.
Legalize it, already! Poppy cultivation as a climate change adaptation measure?
Australian agriculture unprepared for climate change? With all these fancy breeders and access to the world’s genebanks?
Meanwhile, in China, the focus is on food sovereignty.
And in Japan on its spaced out cherry tree.

April 10, 2014

Nibbles: Forests and food, Baobabs

“Will Increased Food Production Devour Tropical Forest Lands?” A long condensed version of an even longer answer.
Baobabs hybridise rather freely. Time to edit all those factsheets?