- Prof. Brian Cox presents “Feeding the Future,” and it’s not entirely about GMOs. Worth sitting through the whole thing.
- Did we say that Cary Fowler recently received the Frank N. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources? This is what he had to say on a different recent occasion.
- Want to adopt a coffee seed? Kew will let you give a really cool Christmas gift.
- Or you could buy some Ethiopian coffee.
- Speaking of Christmas gifts…
- CIAT’s bean diversity collection gets its 15 minutes of fame. And ICARDA’s chickpea collection is not far behind.
- More on “open source seeds.”
- Mobilizing the green gold of plant genetic resources: maybe if they were open source…
- Not just green, though, right? Veggies come in all sorts of colours.
- Brexit may do for Wensleydale. I knew there must be a silver lining.
Nibbles: Dog evolution, Horse evolution, African cassava, Jackfruit, Fairtrade quinoa, Editing tomatoes
- Tibetan mastiff precursor got busy with wolves.
- Very few stallions are responsible for domestic horses.
- Workshop on getting the most out of cassava in central Africa. But are they talking about collections?
- Jackfruit is allright.
- Fairtrade keeps youngsters on the (quinoa) farm. But for how long?
- Tweaking tomatoes through gene editing.
Choosing the right things to measure in agriculture
How do you “shift the focus from feeding people to nourishing them”? According to a recent short article in Nature, there are ten things to do, and one of the, fixing metrics,
Take, for example, maize (corn). The trend is to convert much of what is (over-)produced into starch and sugar. In conventional agricultural analysis, the improvements in yield per hectare per year in intensive maize-production systems are usually presented as the main indicator of success. More maize for fewer dollars up-front is also considered an important contribution to food security.
The shortcomings of such a narrow focus is something we’ve talked about here before.
Calories are, of course, part of nutrition, but by no means the most important part over the long run. We have tables of recommended daily allowances for macronutrients like Calories (or their proxies) and for micronutrients. We could calculate nutrients per Calorie for different kinds of produce. We could even try to express productivity as the percentage of the RDA for all nutrients that would be provided by some area of land. We could do lots of things more sensible — and more difficult — than Calories per hectare.
Indeed we could.
Nibbles: Diversification, Street food, Forest genetic units, Citrus greening, COP22 roundup, Australian breeding, Temperate Orchard Society, Quinoa conference
- Diversifying crop production for the SDGs: the view from AVRDC.
- Local bread, in India and Istanbul.
- Foresters get all genetic.
- Winning the battle against citrus greening in Florida.
- Yeah, so what happened in Marrakech?
- Do chickpeas really have the nutritional value of cardboard?
- An apple genebank a day…
- Drawing the International Year of Quinoa to a decorous close.
Nibbles: Cryoconservation, Barley history, Beer in UNESCO, Future crops, Pacific crops, Ag & biodiversity, Sequencing NUS, Market education, Mauritanian camels
- Cryo congress coming.
- Ancient farmers enjoyed a beer…
- …and now we all can.
- Yeah but what’s next in the improvement pipeline?
- CePaCT: The Video.
- Why can’t we all just get along?
- Genetic maps are from Mars, nutrition is from Venus…
- Using markets to teach biodiversity.
- The end of camel herding?