- 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 1 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.
Nibbles: High science, Methane-friendly rice, Gender, Indian priestesses, Banana extinction, Inka legacy, Diversity in ag, Yerba genome, Cucumber chains, Tomato relative, Agrobiodiversity in art
- High-level agricultural scientists thinks high agricultural science will feed the world. Oh, and smart policies.
- This new rice would qualify, I suspect.
- Participatory varietal selection manual revised to take women into account. Someone mention high science?
- No such manual needed in India, it seems.
- The banana-is-doomed story sure has legs. Or hands.
- What did the Inkas ever do for us?
- Is agriculture diverse enough? That is the question.
- Yerba mate gets sequenced. Because it can be.
- Following an Indian cucumber down the value chain.
- Thank your lucky stars for this weedy-looking tomato wild relative.
- “We’re interested in the color, shape and sizes of the vegetables from 400 years ago, compared to modern cultivars of the same vegetables: the deep sutures on cantaloupe in Italian art of the Renaissance or the lack of pigmentation in pictures of watermelon compared to today.”
- Quite a bit of agrobiodiversity featured in Day of Archaeology. Nice idea.