Category: Neglected species

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Senate discusses wild rice

Good news for wild rice breeders, from Washington, DC of all places.

Funding for wild rice and forestry research cleared a Senate committee hurdle last week, said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minn.

The Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved $5.5 million in agriculture and economic development initiations that include new product research for wood and wild rice research.

A $300,000 appropriation would develop new and hardier strains of wild rice, Klobuchar said. It would fund research to tackle some of the most critical problems for wild rice producers, including shattering resistance, disease resistance, germplasm retention and seed storage.

Wild rice is the only cereal grain native to North America. Minnesota is the nation’s second-largest producer of wild rice, with production concentration near the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, the Democratic senator said.

I’d really like to have heard the august US Senators debate the ins and outs of that 300 large. Maybe one of them explained what “germplasm retention” is.

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Millet news from the front

I could spend all day reading the blogs of volunteers in different countries. One I keep coming back to is Jessica’s Letter from Niger. It’s an exciting time:

There is a rush to do as much planting as possible before the soil dries out, so families spend all day every day out in the fields, working hard to get all of their millet, sorghum, beans, sesame, and peanuts in the ground. Millet is the priority; once an entire field is planted in millet, people will go back and plant the other crops in the spaces between.

I hope their crops survive and do well.

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Nibbles: Traditional knowledge, Opium poppy, Fish, Bees, Earthworms, Wild horses, Camel, Fearl rabbits, Guinea savannah, Kava

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Attack of the Giant Parsley

David Brenner, a curator at the USDA genebank at Ames, Iowa, has just grown what may be the world’s tallest parsley plant.

Brenner says the seeds for the record-breaking parsley plant were first collected from Hungary in 1983. Even though it resembles a large bushy weed, he says it’s a perfect example of parsley. “It also had big tubers,” Brenner says. “The roots are almost four inches across and in Europe, the roots of parsley are another food crop, almost like a potato, so it has a double-barreled purpose.”

The Guinness people have been summoned. The existing record is six feet and this plant is almost eight.

GRIN knows about six Petroselinum accessions collected in Hungary in 1983, from five different villages, and donated in 1987. However, they’re listed as “inactive.” Not for long, I guess. But with the news making it to the media and Guinness on the way, I hope Dr Brenner manages to regenerate a lot of seed. To find out which one of the six the giant is, we’ll have to wait for the characterization data to go online. Look for that “plant height” descriptor…

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In the soup

It seems only fair to point out that last week’s Economist column poking fun at certain menu items aroused the ire of certain readers. Do we care if they can’t take a joke? Of course not. But in trying to rub healing balm on aggrieved hearts, the writer accidentally, I am sure, touched a fire in ours. He loved sea buckthorn!

Even more striking was the dessert, concocted out of the lurid and astringent juice of the sea-buckthorn berry. This costly and vitamin-packed elixir was mixed before our eyes with liquid nitrogen, creating an instant sorbet with explosive effects on the tongue. Did someone say that east European food was boring?

Not boring, and not merely striking either, but good for you, as we’ve said more than once.