- Culturally valuable minority crops provide a succession of floral resources for flower visitors in traditional orchard gardens. Proper gardens better for pollinators than unmanaged plots.
- Trends in access of plant biodiversity data revealed by Google Analytics. No impact of social media on the use of plant data, and the future is mobiles.
- Worldwide Genetic Diversity for Mineral Element Concentrations in Rice Grain. Most, though not all, elements showed high heritability, which is good news for breeders.
- Agriculture facilitated permanent human occupation of the Tibetan Plateau after 3600 BP. No barley, no Tibetans.
- Seed fates in crop-wild hybrid sunflowers: crop allele and maternal effects. Having wild mothers helps wild-crop hybrids survive in the wild.
- Coconut (Cocos nucifera l.) pollen cryopreservation. Eureka!
- The evolution of seed dormancy: environmental cues, evolutionary hubs, and diversification of the seed plants. More dormancy, more speciation.
- The evolutionary ecology of C4 plants. C4 opens new niches, but it’s all a matter of contingency and you have to follow the whole evolutionary history of a group to understand its current ecological strategy.
- A Minor Role for Environmental Adaptation in Local–Scale Maize Landrace Distribution: Results from a Common Garden Experiment in Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s the social factors, stupid.
- Crop immunity against viruses: outcomes and future challenges. PAMP (pathogen-associated molecular patterns)-triggered immunity (PTI) may be the future.
Super bananas in the dock
The Gates Foundation has sunk $15 million into developing GMO ‘super bananas’ with high levels of pre-Vitamin A, writes Adam Breasley. But the project is using ‘stolen’ genes from a Micronesian banana cultivar. And what exactly is the point, when delicious, popular, nutritious ‘red bananas’ rich in caroteinoids are already grown around the tropics?
That provocative lede to an article in The Ecologist provoked a number of responses when I posted it on Facebook 1. As not everyone can post comments there, and nobody at all can post comments at The Ecologist, I’ve decided to move the whole thing here.
A couple of comments were actually questions. Anastasia Bodnar asked: Are the existing red banana cultivars suitable for growing where this new variety is intended to be grown? And Sarah Hearne added: And do the red bananas have the same farmer/consumer acceptance in East African and beyond as existing varieties? Good questions all. And Alexandra Zum Felde addressed them, and more, in her comment:
Red bananas — at least ones like those in the photo, not Fe’i bananas — can and are grown where Cavendish are grown (so basically all over the tropics), though they — like many traditional cultivars — are not as productive as Cavendish bananas. But Cavendish are not the issues here — in Uganda the staple banana is Matooke (East African Highland Banana), of which over 180 cultivars exists … and all of which are pretty beta-carotene poor … but local leafy vegetables are full of (pro)vitamins! It would be easier and more cost-effective to re-vamp the image and attractiveness of traditional foods, than to introduce one single GMO variety.
So, are red bananas, whether traditional cultivars or the ones genetically engineered in an Australian lab, the wrong answer to the right question? Discuss.
Nibbles: Hunger Games, Nutritious markets, Plant secrets, Nutrition soundbites, Buckwheat panic, Olive oil panic, Cannabis breeding, Wild turkey genetics, Quinoa wars, Domestication infographics, Howard-Yana Shapiro
- Do they know it’s Christmas? Stocking-filling books for do-gooders.
- Wonder if any of them talk about using markets to deliver nutritious food.
- The surprising secrets of baobabs, among other plants. I thought we knew all there was to know about baobabs, what with all those factsheets.
- The Global Nutrition Report in 12 sound-bites. No sign of baobabs.
- Russians in a tizzy about their buckwheat. If only they’d had a factsheet.
- Everybody in a tizzy about European olive oil. Maybe they should try the American stuff?
- “When skunk was created the people doing it had no idea they were altering the ratios of CBD and THC — they just kept breeding the plants that gave the strongest high and threw the rest away.” Ouch. But fear not, help is at hand.
- Restoring wild turkey populations is screwing up its subspecific structure, pissing off taxonomists no end.
- Bolivians do not appreciate cheap Peruvian quinoa. Hipsters unavailable for comment.
- No, LA’s wild quinoa is not going to put too much of a dent in global food shortages, nor interest many hipsters, but it’s a fun story. Too bad wasn’t mashed up with the US crop wild relatives prize-winning paper.
- Cool crop domestication infographics.
- Plant geneticists are from Mars.
Nibbles: Farmers’ markets, Pacific news, Solanaceae news, Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, Tibetan barley, Rice roundup, David Lobell interview, Native American crops, Mesopotamian recipe, Insectophagy, Cities, Land purchases, Dormancy in evolution, Bad news from some crops, Good news from others, Creative Commons at Gates
- Hell of a week in the office again, so catching up on accumulated Nibbles on a Sunday. Because we’re here to serve.
- Cynical, funny take on farmers’ markets: “No, I don’t save seeds. That’s time-consuming nonsense for backyard gardeners. Yes, I’ve heard of Monsanto. I’m a farmer. I know about goddamn Monsanto.”
- Uncynical double from the Pacific: Samoa’s agricultural show and more detail on the aroid breeding work.
- High tech breeding of solanaceous crops. Nothing like this for aroids yet, alas. Yeah, but first you have to collect the little blighters.
- On the other hand, you also need an awareness of the past. Ask the Tibetans.
- And here’s kind of an example of that involving rice in India. Compare with that first Nibble: seed saving not just for backyard gardeners after all? Convinced? Go do it, no, really. Or read Bob Zeigler; you can listen to him too. We could go back and forward on this forever. I know: let’s get some data.
- And another example involving wild not-rice in the US and Canada. Though there are some things that haven’t survived quite as well among Native Americans as those wild rice recipes.
- And speaking of ancient recipes, here’s one from another wetland, far far away from the above.
- Yeah but not all ancient recipes are so resilient, take beetles for example.
- Urban farming is big, needs to be bigger.
- Meanwhile, agricultural land is being bought up all over the place, for what it’s worth, so maybe cities will be all we have to grow stuff.
- International Cocoa Organization calls bullshit on all those chocolate-is-running-out stories.
- Maybe we should chill about wine too? I dunno, I think I’d prefer to play it safe with both. Or get help from above. Or from the Fascists.
- The banana was going extinct too, wasn’t it?
- British apples (and other trees, to be sure) are of course perennially in trouble, but help is on the way, courtesy of Kew. And not just British or apples that get help from that quarter.
- “The potato will not only survive climate change, it will help us to survive it as well.” Good news at last.
- Mapping cassava, all of a sudden an exciting new crop, if you can believe it. No stopping it now that Bill Gates has called it the world’s most interesting vegetable.
- Incidentally, he’s also decided to go totally CC-BY.
- And that’s all she wrote. For now.
Action for Nutrition at last, maybe
The Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) drew to a close yesterday, having promulgated the Rome Declaration on Nutrition and endorsed a Framework for Action. From the latter, let us all applaud Recommendation 10 (of sixty):
Promote the diversification of crops including underutilized traditional crops, more production of fruits and vegetables, and appropriate production of animal-source products as needed, applying sustainable food production and natural resource management practices.
FAO is putting its (donors’) money where its mouth is by establishing an Action for Nutrition Trust Fund.
Twice per year the PCU will make a Call for Proposals based on the size of the Fund at the time. The SC will decide which proposals will be funded based on the recommendations from the PCU.
With sixty recommendations to choose from the Programme Coordinating Unit (PCU) will have its work cut out for it.