- Changes in rocket salad phytochemicals within the commercial supply chain: Glucosinolates, isothiocyanates, amino acids and bacterial load increase significantly after processing. Sitting around is good for rucola’s nutritional value.
- From “Genetic Resources” to “Ecosystems Services”: A Century of Science and Global Policies for Crop Diversity Conservation. Not just stuff to mine.
- Camels and Climate Resilience: Adaptation in Northern Kenya. Increasing focus on camel herding a reasonable climate resilience strategy, but only under some scenarios, for some communities. And what is it doing to diversity?
- A review of factors that influence the production of quality seed for long-term conservation in genebanks. What’s best for commercial seed production is not necessarily best for long-term conservation. Though it won’t hurt.
- The eco-evolutionary impacts of domestication and agricultural practices on wild species. Agriculture (plant breeding, agricultural practices and gene flow with crops) can have evolutionary consequences for wild species that undermine the success of agriculture.
- Multiple alleles at a single locus control seed dormancy in Swedish Arabidopsis. Careful with that GWAS!
Brainfood: African sorghum, Dying living collections, Safe oats, Faba relative, Monitoring erosion, Driving livestock diversity, Sweet cryo, Wild rice genomes, Indian foxtails, Bonsai cassava, Sahelian food trees
- Assessment of genetic diversity of sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (l.) Moench] germplasm in East and Central Africa. Each country is different.
- A Review of Living Collections with Special Emphasis on Sustainability and Its Impact on Research Across Multiple Disciplines. Crop genebanks are just the tip of the iceberg, but they all have the same problems.
- Why Oats Are Safe and Healthy for Celiac Disease Patients. Because of the avenins.
- 14,000-year-old seeds indicate the Levantine origin of the lost progenitor of faba bean. Eureka!
- Monitoring Changes in Genetic Diversity. Needs genetic data.
- An exploratory analysis on how geographic, socioeconomic, and environmental drivers affect the diversity of livestock breeds worldwide. More animals = more breeds.
- Cryopreservation and evaluations of vegetative growth, microtuber production and genetic stability in regenerants of purple-fleshed potato. Apparently the first time it was done for this colour of sweet potatoes.
- Sequencing of Australian wild rice genomes reveals ancestral relationships with domesticated rice. N. Australia is the centre of diversity of genome A.
- Genetic diversity and variability in Foxtail millet [Setaria italica (L.)] germplasm based on morphological traits. 51 Indian elites form non-geographic groups.
- The Bonsai as an alternative safety duplication system of the world cassava collection preserved at CIAT. So cool.
- Conservation of food tree species in Niger: towards a participatory approach in rural communities. Adansonia, Boscia and Maerua need watching.
Nibbles: Royal Soc discussion, Meyer Medal, Adopt-a-seed, Organic coffee, Seed book, CGIAR genebanks, Open source seeds, EUCARPIA conference, Vegetables, Geographic indications
- 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.