Threats

May 2, 2012May 2, 2012

Going, going, not gone?

My circles on GooglePlus alerted me to a report from NPR in the US, that the country’s oldest extant seed company is facing bankruptcy. The D. Landreth Seed Company has been going since 1784, and is credited with introducing the zinnia to the US and with popularising the tomato when it offered seed for the first time in 1820. Now the company is in trouble with its creditors.

That’s a great shame, the more so because it is happening in a country that, unlike some, ¹ does not enjoy legislation preventing the sale of specific varieties. So what about market demand? Don’t people want the seeds that D. Landreth has to offer? Could it be that the company’s website is, as one commenter suggests, not entirely up to date?

At G+ Anastasia Bodnar said “it’d be sort of sad if the company went under, but as it says in the article, it’s not like the germplasm would disappear, it’d be auctioned off”.

Well, maybe, but what guarantee is there that whoever buys it would maintain it? And if Landreth can’t make a living selling that germplasm, maybe the reason is that lots of other people have the self-same varieties and are selling them successfully.

My question is this: “how many varieties offered by Landreth are not offered by another seed company in the US or elsewhere?”

In the old days, I might have checked by looking in Seed Savers Exchange’s wonderful publication the Fruit, Nut & Berry Inventory, but I see there hasn’t been a new edition since 2001, and I can’t see the database on which it was based anywhere. Having produced a UK version myself, I know how hard it is to do this kind of information wrangling, but it is really worthwhile.

<dream>Maybe I should attempt to Kickstart that effort again. </dream>

May 2, 2012May 2, 2012

Nibbles: Environmental health index, Data visualization, Hungry World, Vegetables meeting, FFS, ICTs in ag, ILRI review, Devil’s claw, Cassava pests, Greek seed meet, Dolphins

“…the world’s first environmental health index to be based on long term historical data” not actually as interesting as it sounds.
Data porn. Aggregated. There oughta be a law… Speaking of infoporn, though, check out the third one here.
AlertNet site on Solutions for a Hungry World pretty but broken. Media alerted, so by the time you read this they may have fixed it and you won’t get Haiti no matter what you click.
Warwick meeting to look at vegetables and food security. You going? Will you tell us about it?
Farmer field schools in El Salvador. Diversification seems to be on the curriculum. But diversity?
And are they using — or being taught — ICTs?
ILRI reprises a high-impact article. And why not. Nice idea, actually. I may steal it.
Devil’s claw: weed or NUS? Both!
Cassava not such a Rambo after all? Heading for a quagmire in SE Asia.
Greek seed savers met a couple of weeks back. Where you there? Would you like to tell us about it?
Speaking of seeds, would you like to help save the D. Landreth Seed Company?
More social dolphins more likely to help humans fish. I wonder if the same for, say, ancient wolves.

April 27, 2012April 27, 2012

Nibbles: Fungi, Pastoralism, Climate hoofprints, Ancient farmers, Pineberry, Yellow Rust, Rio+20

Mushrooms in Art: why, and what good has it been.
Keep moving that livestock; it’s more profitable.
And … noted promiscuous communication expert confuses cow and elephant in search of livestock’s climate hoofprint.
Best blog account of those Swedish farmers from Cyprus.
Back to the strawberry’s future: meet the pineberry.
Too late for Robigalia, yellow rust threatens triticale.
Lecture of Dr Maurits van den Berg – “The future of land”. You’ll get nothing from the link, but the presentation made me wish I’d been there.

April 25, 2012April 25, 2012

Nibbles: Data visualization, Soil, Heirlooms, Organic, Bugs, Veggies, Rome, AnGR, Meat, Mexico, Date palm pollination

Cool infographics on food, trade and, well, a particular sort of trade. And how to make your own.
Soil would be a cool place to start.
The bananas of your grandchildren and the carrots of your grandparents. Plus a funny peculiar idea about how to keep seed of such stuff for 50 years.
Which you don’t need to do anyway because “[r]eplacing traditional seeds with commercial varieties is not an official government policy,” at least in South Africa. Unlike in the EU, I guess. Oooooh, did I just say that? Such a naughty muppet.
Ok, let me make up for that with some thoughts on breeding for the sorts of places where those traditional seeds might be found, in Africa and in Europe.
Of course, in such places, you have to know your aphids. Before they go and eat a bacteria and change their DNA. Tricky to breed for resistance to that, I would guess.
Oh, but here are also the views of someone in Europe who would rather not have anything to do with traditional seeds and their accompanying aphids at all. Why can’t we just get along?
Why, for example, can we all not get to love mboga za watu wa Pwani. You heard me. And no, residing far from the Swahili Coast is no excuse. Jeremy unavailable for comment.
He did, however, point out that “[t]he value of male prostitutes exceeds that of farmlands.” Yep, Robigalia time again.
Meanwhile, not far from the Swahili Coast, some people are thinking that man does not live by mboga alone… No, he must have nyama too.
And speaking of which: giving sausages a name. On this, I am with Bismarck. No such porky nonsense from the French.
“Nine thousand years of Mexican agriculture” online. And five hundred on the stove.
Pollinating date palms just got a whole lot easier. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with any of the other nibbles, but I thought it was cool.

April 23, 2012April 16, 2012

Brainfood: Lupin restoration, Balkan wheat drought tolerance, Metabarcoding, Wild sheep genetics, Organic vegetables, Diversity protects, Sorghum geneflow, Wild sunflower genetics

A Molecular and Fitness Evaluation of Commercially Available versus Locally Collected Blue Lupine Lupinus perennis L. Seeds for Use in Ecosystem Restoration Efforts. Commercial seed sources can be dodgy, and that’s a problem.
Comparison of responses to drought stress of 100 wheat accessions and landraces to identify opportunities for improving wheat drought resistance. 20 Balkan landraces seemed to be more drought tolerant than 80 accessions sourced globally.
Towards next-generation biodiversity assessment using DNA metabarcoding. You gotta be kidding me, metabarcoding? Will they be applying it to soils? Yep.
Selection and microevolution of coat pattern are cryptic in a wild population of sheep. You need to look at the genes.
Will they buy it? The potential for marketing organic vegetables in the food vending sector to strengthen vegetable safety: A choice experiment study in three West African cities. Not enough.
Plant diversity improves protection against soil-borne pathogens by fostering antagonistic bacterial communities. Chalk another one up to diversity. Did they say soil?
Local scale patterns of gene flow and genetic diversity in a crop–wild–weedy complex of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) under traditional agricultural field conditions in Kenya. Mostly crop-to-wild, which could be a problem if transgenics are ever grown. If.
Adaptation with gene flow across the landscape in a dune sunflower… is leading to “ecological” speciation.