- Texas A&M builds better
mousetrapcowpea. - Huge survey of the distribution of crop pests.
- Spanish tree breeders assisting in the despoliation of the Ethiopian plateau. Totally unfair, I know, there’s plenty of reasons why improving eucalyptus production in Ethiopia is a good idea. But I just wish similar effort had gone into local trees.
- They increased the biodiversity of city gardens and nobody noticed. Wonder if it would have been the same in allotments. Meanwhile, however…
- It takes 4-5 million years for allopolyploids to become different enough for their hybrids to be sterile.
- Save the Espinal!
- More water wouldn’t help sorghum in the Sahel. Yes, you guessed it, the World Congress on Agroforestry is still going on.
Let there always be Pane Nero di Castelvetrano
It all started with a photo of “tumminia bread” on Instagram. It looked yummie, but I’d never heard of tumminia. A picturesque hamlet? A time-honoured though back-breaking mode of preparation? Some ancient grain hanging on precariously on the outskirts of encroaching modernity? A treasured local variety of wheat nurtured by gnarled rustics? I had to know. A little googling revealed that the name refers to an ingredient in the Pane Nero di Castelvetrano, a dark bread made in a small town in the Sicilian province of Trapani.
The bread is made using a leaven system. The flour mix is 80% local and refined semolina durum, described as “blonde grain”. I believe this will be the equivalent grind to “rimacinata”, if I’m not wrong. The other 20% of the flour is from the tumminia durum wheat grain, which is milled quite coarsely, and is a wholegrain flour.
So the next job was to hunt down in genebanks that treasured local variety of durum. Because how long will it continue to be nurtured by gnarled Sicilian rustics in the picturesque hamlet of Castelvetrano, out there on the outskirts of modernity? Thankfully, Genesys says that there are two accessions of tumminia at ICARDA and another two at IPK. They’re not duplicates, I don’t think, the former having been collected in 1973 and the latter in 1985. They all come from Sicily, but the ICARDA accessions from near Aragona, some 100 km southeast of Castelvetrano along the coast, and the IPK accessions from Bisacquino, which is a bit closer, about 60 km east, in the mountains. So several picturesque hamlets are involved, or at least that was the case 30-40 years ago.
Anyway, if you go to the European Wheat Database you get a little bit of additional information, but unfortunately I can’t link to it, so I’ll have to hand-hold you through it. See that thing that says “single search” down the left-hand side? Click on it, and where is says accession name, type tumminia to get to the IPK accessions; now click on either accession number. You’ll get to the passport information on our Sicilian durum accession. Scroll down and on the right-hand side you’ll see a button marked “Link to pedigree catalogue.” If you click on that you’ll land on the entry for tumminia in Zeven’s Genealogies of 14000 wheat varieties, published in 1976. Which says that it is a Spanish landrace. 1 Awkward. Maybe the gnarled rustics that originally nurtured tumminia are in altogether a different picturesque hamlet, in a different country? Or maybe Zeven was wrong.
Be that as it may, I think we can rest assured that, genetically speaking at least, the key ingredient of Pane Nero di Castelvetrano is probably pretty safe. Even if fewer picturesque hamlets grow tumminia nowadays than formerly, and for all I know the opposite is true, there are those 4 accessions to fall back on, in two separate genebanks, plus safety duplications, and probably even Svalbard. Now to make sure that back-breaking mode of preparation is likewise safe from encroaching modernity.
French grape genebank on the move?
After Pavlovsk and Brogdale, it is now the turn of a French fruit genebank to feel the heat. According to Declan Butler’s somewhat breathless piece in Nature:
Uncertainty hangs over one of the world’s largest and most important grapevine collections. The Domaine de Vassal vineyard, on France’s Mediterranean coast, houses a vast sweep of grape biodiversity that is essential to research and winegrowers in France and around the world.
That would be the Station de Recherches Viticoles of the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA). For those that know genebank-speak, that is institute FRA139. Plug that into the “institute code” slot on ECPGR’s Vitis database page to get the details of its holdings. Or you can get summary data from WIEWS. It’s actually not the only grape genebank in France, but there’s no word on overlap with other French collections, or indeed with collections in other parts of the world. Numbers vary among the sources, but this collection represents maybe half of France’s holdings of cultivated grape accessions, and a tenth of the world’s. 2
So it’s an important collection, large and well documented, both phenotypically and genotypically. What’s the problem? Well, the lease is running out on the land it’s been on for the past 138 years, and it needs to shift. The move will cost €4 million, and the money isn’t in the budget. INRA says it’s committed to maintaining the collection, and will find the cash. The boffins fret and worry about the disruption to research and possible losses in the process. I asked our friends at the Myles Lab in Canada for their opinion and they do see an upside:
@AgroBioDiverse @BrianFLloyd @plantbiology 1/2 The move is a good idea – offers chance to plant collection in specific experimental design
— Foodimprover (@foodimprover) February 7, 2014
But it is worrying. We’ll keep an eye on it for you.
Nibbles: Decolonization edition
- Decolonize your diet.
- Decolonize your grazing regime.
- Decolonize your plant threat status assessment.
Nibbles: Water buffalo, Beans, Rhizowen, Fisheries, Frankincence, Gender and gender, US CWR, Cropland, Forests and food security
- Today’s genome of passing interest, the water buffalo, less than two years after it was promised.
- Saluting the true amateurs, on bean and tuberous diversity.
- Unconsidered benefits of capture fisheries — except for the captured fish, I suppose.
- Eleven months early, AoBblog links to a new paper on how to best to tap frankincense.
- Not to be outdone, Modern Farmer relates how maple syrup could be industrialised as a row crop. H/t Metafilter.
- An e-learning course on Gender in Agriculture.
- Which is unlikely to please Ed Carr, author of Gender and adaptation: Time to do it differently.
- US inventories its crop wild relatives.
- Demand for cropland will increase.
- Which is bad for forests, which are good for food security, but not as much as they could be.