- Lawrence Haddad on how to start transforming the food system.
- Here’s an idea: CIMMYT genebank recognized for restoring agricultural diversity in Guatemala.
- And another. Cash transfers are better than more conventional interventions for malnutrition, but they have to be real money.
- But, of course, they don’t always work. That’s one of many development myths listed in this fun Twitter thread.
- We also need metrics, sure, but the right ones, and we may already have them.
- The first ecologist remembered. That would be Humboldt.
- Terrible visualizations of the changing geography of American agriculture.
- But where are heirloom grown? Rice, say?
- And where are all the pomegranate farmers?
- I’m sure there are plenty of grape maps of France somewhere. But what’s with all these varieties? And are there more than in pomegranate?
- IUCN launches a new Red List website.
- Laos launches a sort of Red List website on traditional foods. Here it is. No word on linkages with Ark of Taste.
- Belgian lambic beer threatened by climate change. Now it’s personal.
- In Italy, the landscape needs people to keep it safe.
- Even olive landscapes, which maybe need to be more promiscuous.
- Early agricultural migrations fuelled by cheese.
- Early eggplant migrations fuelled by elephants.
- Microbes to the rescue.
Brainfood: Quinoa boom, Diet affordability, Insect boom and bust, Organic & pests, Maize agroforestry, Landraces, Wheat roots, Conservation costs, Sustainable intensification, Defences & domestication, Polyploid niches, Mexican CWR, Danish apples, Diversity proxies, Grassland nutrient hotspots
- Foods and fads: The welfare impacts of rising quinoa prices in Peru. Modest.
- Measuring the Affordability of Nutritious Diets in Africa: Price Indexes for Diet Diversity and the Cost of Nutrient Adequacy. Maybe they could try quinoa.
- Impacts of climate warming on terrestrial ectotherms across latitude. Insects are in trouble in the tropics, but will make up for it at higher latitudes, which will be really bad for crops there, 10-25% more bad.
- Evidence that organic farming promotes pest control. Something for farmers in those higher latitudes to think about.
- The global distribution of Bacillus anthracis and associated anthrax risk to humans, livestock, and wildlife. 63.8 million rural poor livestock keepers are at risk. No word on effect of climate change.
- Do open-pollinated maize varieties perform better than hybrids in agroforestry systems? Maybe in Rwanda, but in Ethiopia not so much.
- More than Yield: Ecosystem Services of Traditional versus Modern Crop Varieties Revisited. Landraces are liked for yield stability in marginal environments, and for cultural reasons.
- Root and shoot traits in parental, early and late generation Green Revolution wheats (Triticum spp.) under glasshouse conditions. Modern wheat have smaller roots.
- Standardized reporting of the costs of management interventions for biodiversity conservation. Behind a paywall, so can’t tell whether includes genebanks. But I bet it doesn’t. Tell me I’m wrong.
- Global assessment of agricultural system redesign for sustainable intensification. Apparently 30% of farms and 10% of agricultural land worldwide, which is both more and less than I would have guessed.
- Genetic homogeneity of North-African goats. The Berber breeds are different, everything else is a big mixed up mess.
- Plant domestication decreases both constitutive and induced chemical defences by direct selection against defensive traits. In cabbage, even the tissues that are not eaten are more edible than in the wild relative.
- Polyploid plants have faster rates of multivariate climatic niche evolution than their diploid relatives. Relevant for domestication?
- An Initiative for the Study and Use of Genetic Diversity of Domesticated Plants and Their Wild Relatives. In Mexico.
- Population structure, relatedness and ploidy levels in an apple gene bank revealed through genotyping-by-sequencing. There’s a lot of inter-relatedness in the Danish collection.
- Biases induced by using geography and environment to guide ex situ conservation. “Although geographic and environmental diversity have proven to be reliable predictors of allele frequency differences and ecotypic differentiation across species ranges, they appear to be poor predictors of allelic diversity per se.” At least for 3 species.
- Examining the spectra of herbarium uses and users. Herbaria mostly used by taxonomists shock.
- Ancient herders enriched and restructured African grasslands. Shit. You heard me.
Brainfood: Phenotyping, Genotyping, Perennial Hordeum, Communicating PGRFA, Participatory breeding, Sri Lankan homegardens, Traditional Slovak landscapes, Ecosystem services, LWR double, African cassava, Labelling fish
- Translating High-Throughput Phenotyping into Genetic Gain. More to it than cool drones. Although those are not to be sneezed at.
- A guide to sequence your favorite plant genomes. Someone may already have what you need.
- Towards the Development of Perennial Barley for Cold Temperate Climates—Evaluation of Wild Barley Relatives as Genetic Resources. H. bulbosum is the best bet. So far.
- Communicating plant genetic resources for food and agriculture to the public — A study of grant-receivers with demonstration-projects in the Danish Rural Development Programme. It can be done.
- Farmers’ participatory selection of new rice varieties to boost production under temperate agro-ecosystems. It can be done.
- Assessing the Impacts of Agrobiodiversity Maintenance on Food Security Among Farming Households in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone. Help the poor.
- Contribution of Traditional Farming to Ecosystem Services Provision: Case Studies from Slovakia. Traditional systems more diverse and balanced in provision of ecosystem services than intensive modern systems. The problem is that pesky production service. Yeah, but about that…
- Bright spots in agricultural landscapes: Identifying areas exceeding expectations for multifunctionality and biodiversity. Small is beautiful.
- Why should we save the wild relatives of domesticated animals? Because we can.
- Tracking trends in the extinction risk of wild relatives of domesticated species to assess progress against global biodiversity targets. And because we should.
- Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) diversity of cassava genotypes in relation to cassava brown streak disease in Mozambique. Some Mozambican landraces are very similar to resistant Tanzanian landraces.
- Generic names and mislabeling conceal high species diversity in global fisheries markets. DNA barcoding reveals that 300 “snapper” samples are in fact 67 species from disparate fisheries. Use Latin names, folks!
Brainfood: Rationalizing acquisition, Empowering women, Breadfruit domestication, Rice hybrid sterility, Long-distance crop dispersal, Diversification, African leafy greens, GIAH, Silkworm cryo, Bean in situ
- Molecular markers as a tool for germplasm acquisition to enhance the genetic diversity of a Napier grass (Cenchrus purpureus syn. Pennisetum purpureum) collection. Win-win for the ILRI and Embrapa genebanks.
- Women’s empowerment in agriculture and agricultural productivity: Evidence from rural maize farmer households in western Kenya. 1% increase in women’s empowerment led to a 6-16% increase in maize yields, depending on fanciness of math.
- A transcriptome screen for positive selection in domesticated breadfruit and its wild relatives (Artocarpus spp.). Evidence of selection in 1000 genes.
- A selfish genetic element confers non-Mendelian inheritance in rice. Pollen toxin-antidote genetic system controls hybrid sterility in wild-cultivated crosses.
- Between China and South Asia: A Middle Asian corridor of crop dispersal and agricultural innovation in the Bronze Age. It’s not all demic diffusion.
- Determinants of crop diversification in rice-dominated Sri Lankan agricultural systems. Not everyone can diversify.
- Improving food-system efficiency and environmental conservation using agricultural biodiversity in Busia County: a pilot study. Giving farmers nutritional data increased their cultivation of traditional vegetables, and their income.
- The impacts of farmers’ livelihood endowments on their participation in eco-compensation policies: Globally important agricultural heritage systems case studies from China. Giving farmers money increased their income.
- Conservation of wild silkworm genetic resources through cryopreservation: Standardization of sperm processing. It’s best to recover sperm from the bursa copulatrix and spermatheca of the female moth after mating.
- Short-Term Local Adaptation of Historical Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Varieties and Implications for In Situ Management of Bean Diversity. 3 years of multiplication of heritage varieties in contrasting organic farms leads to genetic changes: it takes a network to truly conserve.
Brainfood: Potato errors, Cryo maize, Fish ABS, Salamander poaching, Better niches, Diverse urban farms, Old growth, Space seeds, Breeding networks, Mating systems
- Genetic Identity in Genebanks: Application of the SolCAP 12K SNP Array in Fingerprinting and Diversity Analysis in the Global In Trust Potato Collection. 11 mismatches between 250 original samples and their putative in vitro counterparts.
- Maize seed cryo-storage modifies chlorophyll, carotenoid, protein, aldehyde and phenolics levels during early stages of germination. But do the effects last?
- Sharing aquatic genetic resources across jurisdictions: playing ‘chicken’ in the sea. Fish resources need cooperative governance too.
- Imminent extinction in the wild of the world’s largest amphibian. Because it’s a luxury food, believe it or not.
- Community structure informs species geographic distributions. Include coexisting species in niche models for better results.
- Increasing plant diversity with border crops reduces insecticide use and increases crop yield in urban agriculture. Planting soybeans, maize and vegetables around rice was bad for pests and good for profits in Shanghai.
- Where are Europe’s last primary forests? Mountains, mainly.
- Seeds in space. Orbiting Svalbard, anyone?
- Resistance Genes in Global Crop Breeding Networks. Networks for cassava, potato, rice, and wheat “are clustered due to phytosanitary and intellectual property regulations, and linked through CGIAR hubs.”
- Plant Mating Systems Often Vary Widely Among Populations. One estimate is never enough.