- Frank Rijsberman aims to build a “strong Consortium.”
- Teaching tools aim to improve capacity in plant breeding. And no, I didn’t mean anything by the juxtaposition, settle down.
- Kenyan reality show aims to enhance rural livelihoods. What, are you trying to be funny? No, I tell you, it’s all a massive coincidence.
- You know what, why don’t we just all go to the beach and relax? Nothing like combining work with pleasure…
- You could read the new Plant Cuttings there.
- Or look at 3D photos of cabbages.
- Or fiddle with the latest geeky plant gadget.
- PDF of the European dictionary of domesticated and utilised animals. From the folks at the European Regional Focal Point for Animal Genetic Resources (ERFP). Which is news to me. Relationship to the equivalent on the crops side unclear.
- Speaking of Europe, someone at the Dutch genebank studying gaps in the conservation of crop wild relatives. Welcome to the club.
- Well this sort of thing is not going to help with any gap analysis, is it? Qualifies as assisted migration though, perhaps, which is kinda cool. And may well be needed.
- I wonder what the Brazilian forest code means for crop wild relatives.
- Traditional Japanese rice variety grown in Queensland to help Fukishima victims. Well, yes, but it’s not exactly charity we’re talking about here. And what’s it going to do to all the wild rice there? Which I’m willing to bet is a gap of some kind.
- Speaking of altruistic gestures, the idea to, er, sell the Indian genebank encounters some, er, opposition.
- No plans to sell anything from this new Jersey apple genebank. Except maybe the cider? I wonder, any hazlenut genebanks out there? No, don’t write in and tell me.
- The genebank of the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre given a bit of a face-lift on VoA. At least in the trailer, starting at 0:45. Not sure how to get the full thing, but working on it…
- Latvian government plants small veggie patch in meaningless gesture. Paparazzi promptly tread all over it. Not that such things can’t be nice, and indeed useful. Oh, and here comes the history. But maybe they should have taken a slightly different tack.
- “Orange is the colour of curry.” Why spice is nice. And here comes the science on that.
- And speaking of heat, FAO very keen to tell you what zone you’re in. Oh, hell, there go another couple hours down the drain as I try to navigate the thing.
Brothers in farms
Jeremy’s recent piece of detective work with the current edition of the Garden Seed Inventory, coming hot on the heels of my own piece on how diversity in French wheat has changed during the past hundred years, reminded me of a post of ours a couple of years back that could now bear revisiting. It was about a paper that had re-analyzed historical data from vegetable seed catalogues old and new to suggest that maybe the metanarrative of genetic erosion had been overdone:
If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties, then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the multiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful. Perhaps the most accurate measure of diversity would be found in a comparative DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties, work that remains to be done.
The alleged grounds for hopefulness are that Drs Heald and Chapman, the authors, found 7100 varieties in 2004 catalogues, “only 2 percent fewer than one hundred years earlier. By this measure, consumers of seeds have seen almost no loss of overall varietal diversity”. Well of course that French wheat work is indeed as close as we’re likely to get to the “DNA analysis of equal random samples of old and new varieties.” And, alas, it shows what Jeremy said at the time was all too possible, and that is that genetic diversity can go down even when varietal diversity, meaning the number of cultivars of a crop, goes up. Grim after all.
Trawling seed catalogues is good fun, and can give you some clues as to what genetic erosion may be happening, but in the end it is diversity at the genetic level that really counts, let’s remember that. The geneticist JBS Haldane famously said that he would lay down his life for two of his brothers or eight of his cousins. That’s just a striking way of saying that you’re more closely related to your brother than to your cousin. The corollary of that is that there’s more genetic diversity in a group of cousins than in a group featuring the same, or indeed even a greater, number of brothers.
We still don’t know if those 7100 varieties in the 2004 catalogues are more brothers or cousins, but, if French wheat is anything to go by, the former is more likely. ((Though it need not be so.)) You may think you have a “multiplicity of present choices”, but if in fact you only have brothers to choose from, you could be forgiven for the temptation to trade a whole bunch of them for a cousin or two.
Assuming you can get hold of them, that is.
Tomato expert’s field notes go online
We have blogged before about the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center at UC Davis and their tomato germplasm database. Now, via Dr Roger Chetelat, the director, we hear of a major addition to the data they make available.
The collecting notes of Dr Charles Rick, the world’s foremost authority on tomato genetics, who passed away in 2002 and after whom the center is named, are now online. You can see an example here, for LA1253, a Lycopersicon hirsutum f. glabratum (or Solanum habrochaites if you prefer) collected in Ecuador in 1970. The notes have been painstakingly transcribed from Dr Rick’s handwritten field notebooks, an example of which you can see below. Cannot have been easy work. And I mean both chasing after all those tomato wild relatives in the first place, and transcribing Dr Rick’s notes after so many years and with him gone.
There are plans to eventually also “scan the pages that contain drawings of fruit shape, maps of collection sites, or other tidbits that can’t readily translated into text.” As an old collector, I find this stuff fascinating. Although I’m really not sure I’d like my own field observations so mercilessly exposed to the world.
Nibbles: Welsh sheep, Indian cows, International centres, NUS in Asia, Purdue workshop, Onions, New Alliance, Community seedbanks, Seed Savers Exchange, Restoration, Shakespeare
- “I think you’re going to need different sheep.” In Wales, that is. (And different grasslands?)
- And new cattle in India, apparently.
- Another bunch of international agricultural research centres get together. Yeah, because the other lot are doing so well.
- I wonder if any of either lot will be going to this FAO symposium on NUS in Asia in a couple of weeks’ time. And no, I don’t know why we didn’t know about this earlier.
- On the whole, though, I think I’d rather be at the Purdue llama workshop.
- Or, at a pinch, this thing on the edible Alliaceae.
- Wait, there’s also a New Alliance to Increase Food Security and Nutrition. Not sure who’s invited to this party, but the “Rome-based agencies” seem to be the ones throwing it. (I guess this comes on the heels of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ annual symposium? Where’s a good summary of what happened there? Anyone? Ah, yes, Ian Scoones explains all.)
- One of those agencies wants to hear from you if you have experience of community “gene/seed banks.”
- Unclear if Seed Savers Exchange would qualify, but they have a bunch of peas out for the “community” to have a look at.
- These Indian award-winners would definitely qualify. Which is just as well as it seems the national genebank is up for sale.
- Meanwhile, botanic gardens get together to restore degraded ecosystems.
- The Bard’s plants. Well, some of them.
Nibbles: Olives, Sweet potatoes, Kew’s kitchens, Markets, Easy-SMTA
- Ancient olives not that old after all. But still attractive.
- Giving up tobacco – in favor of purple sweet potatoes?
- Kew is now as much about cooking as growing. Visit the 18th century kitchens.
- Linking small farmers to markets, video from a conference.
- The International Treaty’s SMTA made easy. Well, kinda. It would have been even easier if they had linked to the site. Good thing there’s us, eh?