- Jess dissects nutrition mystification. So hey, Jess, what field do you work in?
- Can agricultural research help eradicate famine? CGIAR boss asks the tough ones.
- Giant FAO document on Payments for Ecosystem Services and Food Security.
- Crop diversity and disease pressure, The case of maize in China.
- Wanna job? Crops for the Future Research Centre is hiring.
- Our chums at the Global Crop Diversity Trust get a Dutch treat.
- Nagoya Protocol threatens to conserve Mexican biodiversity.
- The Scientist Gardener distinguishes hay from straw.
- Ford Denison scrutinizes nitrogen-fixing cereals paper.
Imminent extinction of bananas … again
Science Friday, a series on the US National Public Radio, last week interviewed Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. Koeppel recently fanned the embers of bananas-are-going-extinct back into a roaring blaze. That particular take on the new races of diseases that threaten the world’s favourite fruit started in a January 2003 article in New Scientist magazine (helpfully summarized by The Guardian) and of course one should always take the sub-editor’s art with a pinch of salt. FAO, not one to miss an opportunity, jumped on the extinction story too, which New Scientist duly covered.
So, extinct, probably not. But if it gets you to care about agricultural biodiversity, I’m all in favour of it.
You can listen to the story from NPR’s site (and read a transcript for good measure). I liked the interview, not because bananas in general are or are not going extinct, but because Koeppel explained so clearly the super-efficient business model that puts bananas on the supermarket shelves at scarily low prices. It is a business model that none of the incumbents is willing to abandon until absolutely necessary, and that makes the cost of entry for a new player, or a new variety, impossibly high.
I also liked Koeppel’s confidence in fingering just one variety — ibota ibota — as his absolute favourite. A quick search session revealed that ibota ibota is quite probably a synonym of Yangambi km5, a banana variety whose name is whispered reverently wherever banana enthusiasts gather. Or maybe it is more complicated than that. Banana stories usually are.
Brainfood: Genetic isolation and climate change, Not a Sicilian grape variety, Sicilian oregano, Good wine and climate, Italian landraces, Amazonian isolation, Judging livestock, Endosymbionts and CCD, Herbal barcodes, Finnish barley, Wild pigeonpea, Protected areas, Tree hybrids
- The impact of distance and a shifting temperature gradient on genetic connectivity across a heterogeneous landscape. Climate change bringing formerly genetically isolated populations together, possibly increasing adaptive potential.
- Intra-varietal genetic diversity of the grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) cultivar ‘Nero d’Avola’ as revealed by microsatellite markers. 15 distinct genetic group among 118 plants from 30 Sicilian vineyards seems quite a lot.
- Emerging cultivation of oregano in Sicily: Sensory evaluation of plants and chemical composition of essential oils. More from Sicily. Wild is best.
- Effect of vineyard-scale climate variability on Pinot noir phenolic composition. Its complicated. But at least Pinot noir is not like Nero d’Avola. Or is it? Oh, crap.
- Landraces in Inland areas of the Basilicata region, Italy: monitoring and perspectives for on farm conservation. “Farmer-maintainers” of landraces tend to be old and isolated. Interesting stratified sampling strategy. Basilicata? They grow horseradish there, don’t they? They do indeed.
- Critical distances: Comparing measures of spatial accessibility in the riverine landscapes of Peruvian Amazonia. GIS-calculated time-based accessibility influences rural livelihoods and land use pressure. And agrobiodiversity? Apply to Basilicata next?
- A morphological assessment system for ‘show quality’ bovine livestock based on image analysis. Image of side of animal fed through neural network almost as good as experts in determining how beautiful the animal is. well there’s a triumph for science.
- Endosymbionts and honey bee colony losses? Something else to add to the list of possible causes of colony collapse disorder.
- Commercial teas highlight plant DNA barcode identification successes and obstacles. About a third of products revealed signatures of stuff that was not listed in the ingredients, but that could be due to a number of reasons.
- What would happen to barley production in Finland if global warming exceeded 4°C? A model-based assessment. Nothing good, surprisingly. Better get some new varieties, I guess.
- Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen as the donor of new pigeonpea cytoplasmic male sterile (CMS) system. Gotta love those CWRs.
- Australia’s Stock Route Network: 1. A review of its values and implications for future management. Established for movement of livestock before trucks and trains, but has lots of endangered species and communities. Great value on many fronts, in fact. Needs proper governance though.
- Should forest restoration with natural hybrids be allowed? Yep.
Ecological intensification at IBC18
Doyle McKey‘s presentation at IBC18 sounds like a doozy. I was alerted to it by Eve Emshwiller on Twitter, who said, among other things:
McKey: ecological intensification, not just green revolution model “intensification” of ag needed. #ibc18
Music to our ears, of course. Here’s a summary from the (very large) Abstract Book of the congress.
The evolutionary ecology of plant chemical defenses in agroecosystems: past, present and future.
McKey, Gleadow, Cavagnaro
Plant chemical defenses mediate interactions between plants, their herbivores and pathogens, and the naturalenemies of these plant parasites. In domesticated plants, farmers are added to this web of interactions. Plant defenses have been subjected to complex selection pressures under domestication, leading both to decreases and to increases in their concentration, and to shifts in their intra-plant distribution. This complexity is explained partly by variation in the kinds of plants farmers chose to domesticate, and partly by the kinds of environments that nature and farmers combined to create in agroecosystems. Today, the interactions mediated by plant defenses are affected by changing climate, rising temperature and increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. These changes can threaten food security by lowering not only the production of food but also its nutritional quality. The strategies proposed to counter these threats envisage a wide range of ways, not mutually exclusive, to manage biotic interactions in agroecosystems. These include modifying crop plants’ natural constitutive and induced defenses and other sources of resistance; engineering crop plants to express novel defenses; and increasing the effectiveness of ‘integrated pest management’ (through natural enemies, other components of agrobiodiversity and pesticides) by modifying the structure and functioning of agroecosystems. In this presentation, we examine these proposed solutions through the evolutionary ecologist’s lens: What are their respective costs and benefits, and how do these affect the ecological situations in which each could help farmers produce sufficient amounts of high-quality food? How can the coevolutionary dynamics of interactions between crop plants and their biotic environment be managed to avert catastrophic fluctuation of yield?
Nibbles: Heat, Watermelons, Rye, Apples, Solanum melongena, Pinus edulis, Food systems, Indian rice, Glycene
- Heat takes growing toll on Kansas farm crops. Heat, not drought. Just sayin’.
- Amateur Hour I: watermelons.
- Amateur Hour II: perennial rye.
- Amateur Hour III: red-fleshed apples.
- Bronjenas. An eggplant by any other name is still an aubergine (Solanum melongena).
- Not your average pinoli.
- We need to fix the food system. But how? Answers on a postcard, please.
- Saving traditional rice landraces in India. Of which there are maybe 3,000 in the NE alone. No mention of genebanks.
- Superstar Swedish soybeans