- Modelling chestnut biogeography for American chestnut restoration. As all 7 species have very similar climatic niches, if you could get a blight-resistant hybrid, it would probably be adapted to North American conditions.
- Ex situ conservation programmes in European zoological gardens: Can we afford to lose them? No, and therefore the EU needs to step in. Whoa, talk about a non sequitur.
- The Fine Scale Ethnotaxa Classification of Millets in Southern India. Malayali farmers can consistently recognize more phenotypes than DNA analysis, and some of the cryptic landraces might be really useful.
- Diversity of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) cultivars and its management in the department of Bouenza in the Republic of Congo. High, but decreasing, at least in some villages. But overall? Any collections made?
- Indigenous agroforestry in a changing context: The case of the Erumanen ne Menuvu in Southern Philippines. Despite being divinely-sanctioned, the pengegnewiran swidden system is changing, in response to socio-economic changes. It needs to, and blaming the people because you don’t like the result is not very helpful.
- Variation in biochemical composition of baobab (Adansonia digitata) pulp, leaves and seeds in relation to soil types and tree provenances. Soil has a big effect. At least in Benin.
- Comparing silvopastoral systems and prospects in eight regions of the world. They’re all going to need more active management.
Nibbles: ICT, New institute, Brit apples, Coconut embryos, Farm cinema, Seeds, Southern obesity, Biofortification, Prize, Kew
- World Bank runs competition to develop climate change app. CCAFS surrenders.
- ICRISAT launches Center of Excellence on Climate Change Research for Plant Protection. CCAFS surrenders.
- Britain’s National Fruit Collection gets grafted.
- COGENT looks for validation.
- Everybody loves timelapse.
- A seed catalogue round-up.
- “True grits“. Worthy, of course, but basically I love the title.
- Not sure why news of a website for the Biofortification Conference held in November 2010 just popped up, but it did.
- Know any good, young, committed, practical, gung-ho, field-tempered, agricultural Norman Borlaug clones? The World Food Prize wants to hear from you.
- The Millennium Seed Bank has a blog. Welcome, seed-dudes!
Brainfood: Chicken domestication, Financial crisis and conservation, Cucurbit domestication, Tamarind future, Biofortification via bacteria, Cowpea nutritional composition, Roman bottlegourd, Noug, Rice blast diversity, Pearl millet domestication, Cacao genotyping, Organic ag, Marcela, In situ vs ex situ, Artocarpus roots
- Heritable genome-wide variation of gene expression and promoter methylation between wild and domesticated chickens. Domestication was Lamarckian.
- Global economy interacts with climate change to jeopardize species conservation: the case of the greater flamingo in the Mediterranean and West Africa. Financial crisis leads to closing down of Mediterranean saltpans, which is not good news for flamingo. Climate change doesn’t help. Must be similar examples for plants, Shirley.
- Parallel Evolution Under Domestication and Phenotypic Differentiation of the Cultivated Subspecies of Cucurbita pepo (Cucurbitaceae). C. pepo subsp. pepo and subsp. texana underwent similar genotypic and phenotypic changes during domestication.
- Ecological and human impacts on stand density and distribution of tamarind (Tamarindus indica L.) in Senegal. Climate change will lead to an area of currently low density in the NW being a refugium. Connectivity problems will ensue.
- Biofortification of wheat through inoculation of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria and cyanobacteria. Breeders give up.
- Nutritional ranking of 30 Brazilian genotypes of cowpeas including determination of antioxidant capacity and vitamins. Breeders take heart.
- A short history of Lagenaria siceraria (bottle gourd) in the Roman provinces: morphotypes and archaeogenetics. Out of Asia. And more.
- Functional Properties, Nutritional Value, and Industrial Applications of Niger Oilseeds (Guizotia abyssinica Cass.). It has them, in spades, as this paper summarises.
- Sex at the origin: an Asian population of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae reproduces sexually. The Himalayan foothills would seem to be the place where to look for resistance.
- Evolutionary History of Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum [L.] R. Br.) and Selection on Flowering Genes since Its Domestication. Bayesian modelling of 20 random genes supports domestication about 4,800 years ago, with protracted introgression from the wild relative, and selection sweeps suggest flowering related genes unsurprisingly underwent strong selection as the crop spread southward. But a single domestication scenario? Anyway, sounds familiar, doesn’it.
- Genome-Wide Analysis of the World’s Sheep Breeds Reveals High Levels of Historic Mixture and Strong Recent Selection. Much like, ahem, pearl millet. For flowering genes, read horniness genes. The bit about an initially broad sampling of diversity sounds a bit like the horse. Who out there is going to synthesize all this domestication stuff? Not that I’m looking for a meta-narrative, mind.
- Ultra-barcoding in cacao (Theobroma spp.; Malvaceae) using whole chloroplast genomes and nuclear ribosomal DNA. Well, sequence the whole thing and be done with it is what I say, why flaff around with ultra-this and super-that?
- The crop yield gap between organic and conventional agriculture. 20%.
- Marcela, a promising medicinal and aromatic plant from Latin America: A review. Achyrocline satureioides, in the Asteraceae. Yeah, I never heard of it either. But these guys say it’ll make you rich and beautiful.
- Comparative genetic structure within single-origin pairs of rice (Oryza sativa L.) landraces from in situ and ex situ conservation programs in Yunnan of China using microsatellite markers. 2-5 times more unique alleles in the in situ version of various landraces compared to the ex situ version, collected in 1980. But same number of common alleles.
- Mutualism breakdown in breadfruit domestication. More recent cultivars have less abundant and less species-rich arbuscular mycorrhizas.
Nibbles: Cover crops, Barley tempeh, Irish biodiversity, Veg research, Landwirtschaft in einer anderen Dimension, Farmers Markets
- Higher maize yields? Plant cover crops between the rows.
- Barley tempeh! My kind of food exploration.
- Danny Hunter impresses Irish Times with need to conserve biodiversity.
- UK devotes millions to research for “bigger yields of better quality fruits and vegetables”.
- Germans embrace high-tech urban agriculture — cautiously.
- Put farmers’ markets near medical centres for added benefits. What happens when everyone’s so healthy they don’t need the doctor?
How to solve global hunger and malnutrition
There’s been a whole lot of noise lately about how to feed 9 billion people well, much of it adopting ammunition of silver. Organics can do it. GMOs are essential. Women farmers. Microdoses of fertiliser. Sequence everything. Drip irrigation. Et cetera, et cetera. Mostly special interest groups looking after their special interests. And like Dr Johnson’s apocryphal epigram, they’ll never agree because they are arguing from different premises. In the meantime, though, is it any wonder that some people take umbrage at pronouncements like these:
The United States of America is the world leader in agriculture. We have invested in domestic agricultural education, infrastructure and distribution, and reaped the rewards. Other countries look to us for new technologies and new systems. It is time to teach them more efficient farming methods.
That, from one Christopher Barden, is the prelude to a call to increase the number of agricultural exchanges, which “allow young or mid-career agriculturalists to come to the U.S. and live and work alongside American farmers and learn the work ethics, technologies, organization and honesty practiced in that community. Participants can earn money to invest in their agri-businesses at home while taking back a bank of knowledge and respect.” Mr Barden, as it happens, “is the vice president of Worldwide Farmers Exchange, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit independent of government funding”.
I wonder whether any of the young or mid-career agriculturalists have any solutions to, say, the problems of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, or the externalities imposed by concentrated pig operations?
Dan Glickman, former US Secretary of Agriculture, tells a very familiar story in an article for Diplomatic Courier magazine. Feeding a Growing World Sustainably and Nutritiously goes through the usual reasons and rounds up the usual suspects, to whit: invest in “basic and adaptive agricultural research,” in “the production of fruits and vegetables and other nutrient-dense specialty crops,” and especially in women.
Investing in women has positive repercussions not just for productivity, but also for nutritional improvement. Women make the majority of household nutritional decisions, and giving women nutrition information is proven to improve maternal and children’s health.
But here’s a thing: Despite Rhetoric, Women Still Sidelined in Development Funding.
Of course, one can’t blame ex-Secretary Glickman for that. Personally, however, if the problems are as pressing as everyone seems to think they are, wouldn’t it be better to try lots of different approaches, and see which ones work best where, and in what combinations. But no, lets just slag off everyone who doesn’t agree with us. ((As I did to Mr Barden.)) One rather wishes a well-meaning psychologist type would come along and figure out why no one group can even begin to appreciate another’s point of view. The world is diverse, and so are the ways in which people secure their food and nutrition. A first step might be to recognise that.