Organic agriculture

November 9, 2012November 20, 2017

UK Chancellor backs plant breeding

#OsborneSci Uses the @royalsociety's 'sustainable intensification' line. Nods to JIC and Rothamsted. I can feel @bbsrc beaming from here.

— Jack Stilgoe (@Jackstilgoe) November 9, 2012

Does that mean the UK’s genebanks are safe? More here. And here.

I wonder if he might be interested in what’s going on in Brussels at the same time. No, probably not.

November 6, 2012November 6, 2012

Nibbles: Value chains, CAP, Intercropping, Tree trouble, Phenotyping

Sustainable value chains made easy. Perhaps too easy.
An end to crazy EU agricultural subsidies? Don’t hold your breath. What would it mean for agricultural biodiversity?
Yesterday it was rotation, today it is intercropping, and more. Is there something in the air?
Ten new things we learned about trees this year. The one I would add is that eucalypts are rain forest species.
Way more about high-throughput phenotyping than I need to know. But somehow still less than I’d like to know. Thanks, Tom.

November 2, 2012January 10, 2013

Nibbles: Audacity of hops, Potato catalogues, Heirloom apples, Heirloom wheat, UK systematics, Millennial olives, CIAT celebrates, IITA in the news, Agrobiodiversity marketing awards, Insects in orchards, Quinoa

U. of Minnesota has a poster of the pedigree of hop varieties which I covet.
Cool catalogue of the native potatoes of a bit of Ecuador. Via Red Electronica de la Papa.
Stark photos of a few heirloom apples, with descriptions.
Meanwhile, Brockwell Bake sows some heritage wheats. With stark photo
Report on the state of UK capacity in taxonomy. How many countries have reports on the state of their taxonomy? Anyway, here’s some of that capacity at work.
Farrago on some old olives in Jerusalem.
CIAT celebrates 45 years of existence.
Meanwhile, IITA pushes soil fertility management and cassava.
Arca-Deli Awards awarded.
Defra’s latest Biodiversity News has stuff on the importance of insect biodiversity to pest control and pollination in orchards.
The International Year of Quinoa, which is next year, has a website, and all sorts of associated social networking goodness. And here’s a nice little student video on the crop, for a somewhat different perspective.

October 29, 2012November 29, 2017

Brainfood: Pedodiversity, Rice and CC, Bean domestication, Cassava mealybug, Grape relationships, Habitat conservation, Extinction and CC, Local provenance, Speciation, Breeding for climate change, Melon diversity, Eucalypt mating, Diverse croppping systems

Archive and refugia of soil organisms: applying a pedodiversity framework for the conservation of biological and non-biological heritages. They want to set up a network of soil reserves. To conserve the likes of dung beetles, among other things (see last week’s Brainfood). Someone will no doubt mash this up with nature reserves and other protected areas in due course.
Climate warming over the past three decades has shortened rice growth duration in China and cultivar shifts have further accelerated the process for late rice. One degree increase in temperature translates to about a 4 day shortening of growth period. But the problem would not be so bad if short-duration cultivars were not being increasingly used. No, I don’t fully get it either, but it seems interesting.
Multiple origins of the determinate growth habit in domesticated common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). The gene in question, part of the domestication syndrome, has been messed about in a variety of distinct and independent ways.
The Cassava Mealybug (Phenacoccus manihoti) in Asia: First Records, Potential Distribution, and an Identification Key. Bad news for “the southern end of Karnataka in India, the eastern end of the Ninh Thuan province in Vietnam, and in most of West Timor in Indonesia.” No resistance. Yet.
Genetic relationship between Chinese wild Vitis species and American and European Cultivars based on ISSR markers. It is limited. That goes for the wilds too.
Synergies and trade-offs between ecosystem service supply, biodiversity, and habitat conservation status in Europe. What’s good for the environment is good for the environment. Or if you prefer the non-smartass version, get it from the horse’s mouth…
Development of best practices for ex situ conservation of radish germplasm in the context of the crop genebank knowledge base. See the results for yourself.
How does climate change cause extinction? Not so much because of intolerance to high temperatures as due to disruption of relationships with other species, as it turns out. But it’s a small sample.
Testing the “Local Provenance” Paradigm: A Common Garden Experiment in Cumberland Plain Woodland, Sydney, Australia. No difference between locally sourced and more “exotic” provenances. Bang goes that paradigm.
Mapping the genomic architecture of ecological speciation in the wild: does linkage disequilibrium hold the key? Clever shortcut allows identification of key genes separating phenotypically distinct but admixing species. I think. It’s complicated.
Breeding Strategies for Adaptation of Pearl Millet and Sorghum to Climate Variability and Change in West Africa. Anything that keeps diversity in the system, basically.
Estimation of phenotypic divergence in a collection of Cucumis melo, including shelf-life of fruit. Old-fashioned morphological characterization of small Indian collection confirms distinction between botanical varieties. Not many people hurt.
Pollen diversity matters: revealing the neglected effect of pollen diversity on fitness in fragmented landscapes. Fragmentation means lower pollen diversity in Eucalyptus sp., means lower progeny fitness, and not just because of inbreeding.
Increasing Cropping System Diversity Balances Productivity, Profitability and Environmental Health. So let me get this straight. You mean to tell me that a little bit of industrial agriculture (synthetic inputs) can combine with a little bit of ecoagriculture (cropping diversity) to give you something that’s kinda better than both?

October 8, 2012October 18, 2012

Brainfood: Host-pathogen genomics, Maize-teosinte system, Organic Europe meta-analysis, Food perceptions, Guanaco, Earthworms, Pea & powdery mildew, Pea drought tolerance, Butternut regeneration, Wild tomato salt tolerance, Germination & climate change, Medieval melons, Barley domestication, Rice origin, Livestock & wildlife, Niche modelling, Insects

A Population Genomics Perspective on the Emergence and Adaptation of New Plant Pathogens in Agro-Ecosystems. Crop diversity affects fungal diversity as much as the other way around. Actually more so, as fungal genomes are incredibly plastic.
Teosinte as a model system for population and ecological genomics. Genetics of speciation, hybridization, various evolutionary questions: all can usefully be looked at in the maize-teosinte system with cheap next-generation sequencing. Oh, and that can help us with crop improvement.
Does organic farming reduce environmental impacts? –- A meta-analysis of European research. Per unit area, yes. Per unit product, not always. Need to mix and match. Good luck with that.
“Healthy,” “diet,” or “hedonic”. How nutrition claims affect food-related perceptions and intake? If you tell people something is healthier, they believe it is, in fact, well, healthier.
Guanaco management by pastoralists in the Southern Andes. They can coexist with cattle.
Earthworms promote the reduction of Fusarium biomass and deoxynivalenol content in wheat straw under field conditions. Earthworms protect crops from pathogens.
Screening of pea germplasm for resistance to powdery mildew. 14 accessions from 10 countries are promising. That’s out of 700. Hard row to hoe.
Sources of high tolerance to salinity in pea (Pisum sativum L.). Out of some 780 accessions, China seems to be a hotspot, but the most tolerant accession was from Greece. Any overlap with the previous results?
A rare case of natural regeneration in butternut, a threatened forest tree, is parent and space limited. In situ is not enough. Not if you don’t help it along, anyway.
Relationship between survival and yield related traits in Solanum pimpinellifolium under salt stress. 2 accessions among a subset of over 90 from over 300 in the AVRDC collection show high survival and yield under stress. Would be interesting to know if the 90 were indeed well-chosen in the first place.
Climate warming could shift the timing of seed germination in alpine plants. Spring emergence will shift to autumn, but the bad effect will be on the seedlings.
Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae). Lexicography suggests that there were sweet melons in Central Asia early on, but they didn’t get to Iberia until the late 11th Century, and to the rest of Europe until the 15th. Climate and the clash of civilizations to blame, as ever.
Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley. The other being the Fertile Crescent. Some Chinese hulless and six-rowed barleys in particular are similar to Tibetan wild material. But are the authors stretching the data?
A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice. Or origins. Japonica first domesticated from O. rufipogon in the middle Pearl River in Southern China, and indica is a hybrid of the first cultivars with local wild rice in South East and South Asia. But have we not heard this before? Ah, but this paper has more, better markers, no doubt. Anyway, compare and contrast with maize and barley above.
Lessons on the relationship between livestock husbandry and biodiversity from the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE). Livestock and wildlife can coexist, but you have to work at it. Bit like the guanaco thing, then?
Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine-scale do climate projections need to be? Doesn’t matter for total extent, but actual locations of stable climates vary with scale. On average, “270 m is fine enough,” but it really depends on the species. Probably safest answer is “as fine as possible.”
Fertilisers and insect herbivores: a meta-analysis. Fertilizers good for insect numbers. Which means bad for plants? But insect diversity? Wonder what they do to those earthworms and fungi above…