- Mr Chetri’s genebank.
- Ruby chocolate. You heard me.
- The next Green Revolution won’t be like the first one. Phew.
- Ideas that will change the world include “super plants” like enset. Right.
- But not, surprisingly, quinoa.
- Or bush tucker.
Nibbles: Weird genebank, Wheat history, NJ blueberries, Xoloitzcuintle, Cemetery prairie, Tenure, Sunflower at USDA, Potato breeding book, Cullinary diversity, Genomics & breeding, Migration report
- There’s a genebank for algae and protozoans.
- How Turkey Red Wheat from Ukraine built Kansas.
- Taming the wild blueberry.
- History of the ugliest dog breed in the world.
- The prairie lives on among the dead.
- Speaking of which: land tenure and conservation.
- Conserving and breeding sunflowers in the US.
- Making potato breeding great again.
- M.S. Swaminathan recommends millets.
- Computing our way to food security.
- Food insecurity and migration.
Wheat is somewhat ignored, in some places
That’s according to Bill Gates, on his visit to The Bread Lab. May come as a surprise to CIMMYT and ICARDA, and to their partners at TraitGenetics. Or to the bunch of Italian farmers Jeremy interviewed for the latest Eat This Podcast. Or to everyone at the Land Institute and elsewhere working on perennial wheat. Maybe Mr Gates meant at his Foundation.
Brainfood: Kolli Hills diversity, Fergana diversity, Chinese rice terraces, ICRISAT prebreeding, Spanish CWR collecting, Edible flowers, Diversification, Prices vs volatility
- An ethnographic exploration of perceptions of changes in dietary variety in the Kolli Hills, India. Cassava cash cropping has had unforeseen effects on dietary diversity.
- Mapping and assessing crop diversity in the irrigated Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan. More crops on the edges.
- An Analysis on Crops Choice and Its Driving Factors in Agricultural Heritage Systems—A Case of Honghe Hani Rice Terraces System. Established for “red rice”, but that’s not enough.
- Prebreeding Using Wild Species for Genetic Enhancement of Grain Legumes at ICRISAT. It’s not easy, but it’s been worth it.
- A Multispecies Collecting Strategy for Crop Wild Relatives Based on Complementary Areas with a High Density of Ecogeographical Gaps. Collecting in Spain in “…top 10 selected complementary areas would allow the capture of 59 of the 88 targeted taxa and 31% of the 683 different taxa-ELC category combinations identified in the ecogeographical gaps.”
- Antioxidant power, anthocyanin content and organoleptic performance of edible flowers. Tycoon Blue will be quite the marketing challenge.
- Diversifying Food Systems in the Pursuit of Sustainable Food Production and Healthy Diets. And nary an edible flower mentioned.
- Cereal price shocks and volatility in sub-Saharan Africa: what really matters for farmers’ welfare? Prices.
Domesticating horsegram
The indefatigable Dorian Fuller has been even less fatigable than usual lately, with a couple of papers in the past few weeks on the history of the horsegram, Macrotyloma uniflorum. The first is a general review of the geographical, linguistic and archaeological evidence for the origins of the crop. They point to a long history in India and at least two separate domestications there.
The second is a much deeper dive into the history of domestication, using high resolution x-ray computed tomography with a synchrotron to measure non-destructively the decrease in seed coat thickness with time in archaeological remains of domesticated material. A thin seed coat is thought to be related to loss of dormancy, and hence part of the domestication syndrome. It had been suggested that rare non-dormant variants might have been selected during domestication, but the evidence from horsegram is that even the thick-coated, and therefore presumably still dormant, material was domesticated.
Which is all very interesting, but what I want to leave you with is a little quiz. Given that Kersting’s groundnut is now also in Macrotyloma, as M. geocarpum (Harms) Maréchal & Baudet, how many other con-generic species can you think of that were domesticated on separate continents? Apart from the two Oryza species, of course.