- 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.
How do you do biofortification?
Well…
First, plant breeders screen thousands of different types of crop seed stored in global seed banks to discover varieties with naturally higher amounts of micronutrients.
Nicely, and all too rarely, said.
Nibbles: Nutrition successes, Fruit grafting, Bee hero, VERY early ag, Humans bad shock, Biodiversity video
- Do you have a nutrition success story? Asking for IFPRI.
- What, another “Tree of 40 Fruit”?
- Bee expert Prof. Dave Goulson is a BBC conservation hero.
- Pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers did some sort of semi-cultivation of some plants, in one place, at one time, maybe.
- Anthropogenic environmental change affecting pollinators and crop zinc levels shock.
- Video on biodiversity loss mentions crop diversity shock.