- CIAT genebank looking for a leader.
- IRRI soon-to-be-former (Thanks, Mike) DG looking for a new Green Revolution.
- Looking for pomegranates? Look no further.
- Cleome looking for markets. With genomics.
- Looking to the floating gardens of Bangladesh for answers.
- Looking for the origin of lager yeasts. And finding two of them.
- Looking to understand amaro.
- A good look at biofortification.
Nibbles: Kinky crops, Hot pepper, Cary Fowler, Gin history, Open data, Quaker food, QPM in Ethiopia, Botany app, Old seeds, New tomato
- Why aren’t there more crops among the orchids?
- This pepper is not so much a crop as a weapon of mass destruction.
- Now here’s a crop. New tomato has taste, storability, looks. But I think it’s dating.
- Maize with cool amino acids reaches Ethiopia. Must have walked there.
- Really old squash seeds.
- Cary Fowler on the Weather Channel. You heard me.
- Quakers have an opinion on the right to food and climate change. Well, why shouldn’t they? They also have a UN office, but that’s another story. No word on whether they made the Weather Channel.
- Ok, so apparently the answer is data. Says a data company. And open data at that. Quakers nonplussed.
- Botanizing in N or S America? There’s an app for that.
- The rise and rise of gin. And I certainly need one.
Nibbles: Summer holidays, Tajik bread, Farm to pizza, Västerbottensost, Diverse bananas, Banana wine, Chinese agroforestry, Peak coffee, Responsible oil palm, Model chickens, Damn you NS
- Ah, summer and its funny medieval holidays.
- Making bread in Tajikistan.
- Making pizza in Sussex.
- Making cheese in (one village in) Sweden.
- Diversifying bananas in Queensland.
- Diversifying banana products in Kenya.
- Diversifying with trees in China.
- Better diversify coffee.
- I see your responsible soy and raise you responsible oil palm.
- Cocks of the walk.
- I’m so annoyed the New Scientist article on breeding less bitter veggies is behind a paywall that I won’t even link to it. Google it, if you must.
Nibbles: Sustainable database, Strawberry breeding, Breeding rice, Nutrition champion, Camel milk, Mike Jackson, Feed the Future, Quinoa prices, Small is beautiful
- A database of how you do sustainable intensification.
- Building a better strawberry.
- New lab helps Bangladesh with high-zinc rice.
- Maybe those guys are you nutrition champions.
- They’re right, camel milk is good, and good for you.
- Useful list of Mike Jackson’s publications.
- Pres. Obama learns about maize in Ethiopia.
- Increased quinoa supply leads to lower prices shock.
- Silly season roundup: tiny watermelons (no, not really), tiny pineapples.
Nutritional yield in the spotlight
Dr Jess Fanzo had a paper in the works on the topic when he asked a few days ago “How would you measure agricultural production?” But his pleas for measuring nutrition per hectare, rather than just calories or yield, certainly gets a boost from the article, and in Science, no less.
Here is what Prof. Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, who is the lead author, and others ((DeFries R, Fanzo J, Remans R, Palm C, Wood S, & Anderman TL (2015). Global nutrition. Metrics for land-scarce agriculture. Science (New York, N.Y.), 349 (6245), 238-40 PMID: 26185232)) think:
We propose a metric of “nutritional yield,” the number of adults who would be able to obtain 100% of their recommended DRI [daily dietary reference intake] of different nutrients for 1 year from a food item produced annually on one hectare.
Why? Because…
…nutritional needs for a wide range of essential nutrients in the human diet have generally not been included in considerations of sustainable intensification. Access to food with high nutritional quality is a primary concern, particularly for 2 to 3 billion people who are undernourished, overweight, or obese or deficient in micronutrients.
They even provide a worked example, highlighting the fact that many neglected staples are more nutrient-dense than boring old rice, wheat and maize.
In 2013, for example, on average one hectare of rice produced 4.5 metric tons/year, which is the equivalent of providing the annual energy requirement for 19.9 adults. Millet produced only 0.9 metric tons/ha per year, the annual energy requirement for 4.0 adults. However, a hectare of rice fulfills the annual iron requirement for only 7.6 adults, compared with 15.3 for millet.
Leave aside for a minute that, depending on what particular millet is meant, rice vs millet is an unusual comparison to be making. This does sound like a promising idea; but here’s the problem I see. You have to do the calculation for each damn nutritional factor: protein, iron, zinc, whatever. How do you know which to pick for any given comparison you want to make? Is there no way to come up with a more synoptic nutritional yield score? One that takes into account multiple nutrients at once, rather than one at the time. How about this, for example:
the number of adults who would be able to obtain at least 50% of their recommended DRI of all of X nutrients for 1 year from a food item produced annually on one hectare
Where X is whatever nutritionists think is a sensible basket of nutrients. After all, people rarely need just iron.