President Bust Bush apparently ordered a review and audit of Federally held scientific collections back in 2005. The report is just out. The article in the Washington Post about this dismisses genebanks in a few words (“rare seeds stockpiled by the Agriculture Department”), but the actual report has a bit more, including a box highlighting the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation at Ft Collins and making a reference to Svalbard (p 23), and a paragraph on GRIN (p 31). I think that’s pretty good going. The recommendations (starting on p 29) are a fun read. They’re directed at scientific collections of all types in the US — of seeds, herbarium specimens, stuffed animals, rock samples etc. But basically, if you applied them to genebanks globally, you wouldn’t go far wrong.
Nibbles: India, City chicks, Rooftop gardens, Black cherry, Prairie grasses, Oryza SNP
- ICRISAT recommends diversity to cope with climate change in India.
- US urban farmers “mad as wet hens“. City chicks?
- US urban farmers with a view to die for.
- CWR becomes nuisance when free of soil pathogen.
- Convicts help with germplasm regeneration and multiplication.
- The “gold-standard set of curated polymorphisms” for rice.
Senate discusses wild rice
Good news for wild rice breeders, from Washington, DC of all places.
Funding for wild rice and forestry research cleared a Senate committee hurdle last week, said U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minn.
The Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved $5.5 million in agriculture and economic development initiations that include new product research for wood and wild rice research.
A $300,000 appropriation would develop new and hardier strains of wild rice, Klobuchar said. It would fund research to tackle some of the most critical problems for wild rice producers, including shattering resistance, disease resistance, germplasm retention and seed storage.
Wild rice is the only cereal grain native to North America. Minnesota is the nation’s second-largest producer of wild rice, with production concentration near the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, the Democratic senator said.
I’d really like to have heard the august US Senators debate the ins and outs of that 300 large. Maybe one of them explained what “germplasm retention” is.
Nibbles: Chilli, Extension, Africa, Genebank, Potatoes, War, Angora
- Cool new use for hot peppers: fungicides, for agriculture and human health.
- Community Knowledge Workers transformed into “Mobile Banana Disease Monitors”.
- Grain “call[s] on African peasants to resist and protect their agriculture, as they have always done”.
- Near Corvallis, Ore, USA? Wanna tour the genebank? Wanna write it up for us?
- New World Catalogue of Potato Varieties. A pedant asks: “Any Old World varieties in there?”
- Germany is said to be demanding entire Rumanian wheat crop, also part of what is left over from 1938 crop. Orwell’s approaching war.
- Saving the Angora goat in the US.
Nibbles: New genebank
- How do you say “I know! Let’s build our own national genebank” in Nepalese?