- Michael Halewood in Genebank Policy Hell.
- Vavilov in Genebank Database Hell.
- A guide through Clonal Crops Conservation Hell.
- Pakistan contemplates genebank for carp “pure line and improved stairs for SAARC countries.” Bicycles next, I suppose. But will Ghana follow suit?
- Meanwhile across the border, India is putting resources into livestock conservation at both national and state level.
- Italian broccoli variety moves to Florida and makes the big time.
- And ancient Egyptian gardens make the big time in Amsterdam. Too bad it wont be possible to exchange seeds.
- I bet those ancient Egyptians had taro. They certainly had wheat and barley.
- But not quinoa, alas, despite what Thor Heyerdahl might have thought.
A diversity of nibbles
Got held up with sickness and overwork, so rather than nibbling, which takes work, 1 how about a kinda narrative thang?
Starting off with a piece from Agriculture for Impact asking does planting trees compete with planting food?. “It depends,” natch. Richer farmers tend to do well in the particular scheme, which was based on payments for carbon sequestration. The one comment on the post – Planting trees is more profitable than planting food crops – puts in a nutshell the difficulties of improving local food security. Can you buy as much nutrition as you could grow on the same land? Is sequestering carbon considered in the USDA’s new Economic Research Report Rural Wealth Creation: Concepts, Strategies, and Measures? I’ve no idea. Also, on prices and wealth, Marcelino Fuentes calls the do-gooders for their volte-face on high food prices. Surely they’re good for poor farmers? Not any more. and how I remember the squirming when this very topic came up at the FAO in 2008.
In the wake of The Economist’s encomium to Svalbard, the Western Farm Press links that fine safety backup seed bank to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, calling it “the oldest global seed bank”. Pavlovsk is still under threat, which Svalbard presumably is not, so point taken. But c’mon, people, it is not a seed bank.
And speaking of seeds, Garden Organic in the UK has a new guide to exotica, serving the needs of communities new to the English Midlands who want to grow the stuff they’ve always eaten. I’d have thought they already knew how, but maybe the real point is to harvest that knowledge.
All those communities moving around the place have been known to muddy the linguistic waters around the things they eat; your rocket is my arugula, and neither of us knows what rughetta might be. There’s long been an on-again off-again project at Melbourne University, to compile a multilingual, multi script plant name database, which is useful if you have specific questions. Now comes something that might be altogether more provocative of interesting work: on open data standard for food. I’m not geeky enough to know exactly how it will be useful – for example in citizen science, or global surveys – but I am geeky enough to believe that it will indeed be useful.
Brainfood: Beans, Potatoes, Lettuce, Agave, Gaming, Mangroves, Ancient millets, Ancient missions
- Mesoamerican origin of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is revealed by sequence data. Revealed is kinda strong isn’t it? This from a bean expert of my acquaintance: “Yes, we knew that, as it seems to be the case of all species of the Phaseoli section. They could have done a bit better in including the 2 populations of Cordoba mountain, in order to see whether these belong to the first migration to the Andes, or the second one. Wild vulgaris from western Panama, or Venezuela, could have helped in this regard too. We have shown years ago that the complex genetic structure in Mexico and in Colombia is the result of these floristic migrations combined with gene flow events because beans cross among themselves.”
- The Enigma of Solanum maglia in the Origin of the Chilean Cultivated Potato, Solanum tuberosum Chilotanum Group. These are long-day adapted and therefore crucial to the history of the potato in Europe. But the various sorts of evidence looked at to investigate their relationship to the rare Chilean wild relative S. maglia just do not agree. Bummer.
- Wild and weedy Lactuca species, their distribution, ecogeography and ecobiology in USA and Canada. So Iowa is a wild lettuce hotspot. If you’re interested in the germplasm, it’ll be in the genebank of Palacký University in the Czech Republic.
- Sustainability of the traditional management of Agave genetic resources in the elaboration of mezcal and tequila spirits in western Mexico. Tequila industrial agriculture should learn from the traditional kind.
- Fate of the World: computer gaming for conservation. Worth a try. No, really.
- The Economic Value of Mangroves: A Meta-Analysis. You might think there would be a value in the abstract; you would be wrong.
- Early millet use in northern China. That would be Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum, and new evidence from ancient starch grain on pottery and grinding stones found in archaeological sites has pushed back their cultivation in N China by 1000 and 2000 years respectively, to about 9500-7500 BC. The Archaeobotanist has more, as ever.
- Digitization and online availability of original collecting mission data to improve data quality and enhance the conservation and use of plant genetic resources. They’re there (and here; what’s up with that?) to consult and make use of if you want.
And don’t forget, you can join our group on Mendeley, subscribe to the feed, and have all this filtered goodness delivered to the RSS reader of your choice.
Nibbles: Gene, Database, Climate Change, Nutrition, Archaeology, Website, Prices, Svalbard
- Today’s maybe we’ll get some coverage if we link it to hunger and famine press release. Petunia gene.
- Today’s there’s a database for that announcement. FAO’s Horticulture Cultivars Performance Database.
- Today’s impact of climate change on X report. Forest resources in the Caribbean.
- Today’s debunking a crappy piece of nutrition research killjoys. Experts respond to nutrition claims.
- The Archaeobotanist has been going great guns; new book on domestication and millet domestication. We’ll pass on the museum post till we can firm it up.
- IFPRI says let two flowers bloom. Here’s the super-groovy new policy kid on the block for non-policy wonks.
- I’ll see your evil speculators and raise you a rising secular trend in food prices. (See what I did there?)
- With a heavy clunk, The Economist gave Svalbard’s Doomsday Seed Vault a fine 4th birthday present.
Nibbles: Forests and agriculture, Seed collecting, Banana book, Fermentation, Cucumber history, Myrrh, Farm systems, Dog genetics, Chocolate wars
- Seven forest myths exposed. And more on the work debunking one of them. Yeah I know we already Nibbled it, get over it.
- And you know what, here’s another one we already Nibbled, on collecting seeds in Central Asia. But I just read it again in the hardcopy version and it’s really cool and I like seeing people I know in funny shorts. Incidentally, the dead tree version has a link to Vaviblog that is unaccountably missing online.
- Will no one buy me this fabulous banana book? (Not if you keep being rude to your reader. Ed.)
- Second installment of that we-farm-because-we-like-beer thing. I’m not sure about the theory, but I like the way this guy writes. Yes, it’s a little look at me, look at me. But sometimes you need that.
- Tales of the cucumber. Does anyone remember if we blogged about this paper?
- More to myrrh than meets the eye. And more than most folk need to know.
- Oxford boffins say a pox on both your houses: “environmentally friendly” farms better than conventional and organic.
- National Geographic tackles the dog. Amazingly, all the photos are of, ahem, dogs.
- What’s with all this stuff about cacao lately? Has someone sequenced another variety or something?