- Conserving and Sharing Taro Genetic Resources for the Benefit of Global Taro Cultivation: A Core Contribution of the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees. The first line of defence against Taro Leaf Blight, among other things.
- Female access to fertile land and other inputs in Zambia: why women get lower yields. Because they’re stuck with the poorer soils. I’m assuming there was some control for maize variety, but the damn thing is behind a paywall. LATER: Yeah, they controlled for hybrid vs open pollinated variety.
- Towards a dialogue of sustainable agriculture and end-times theology in the United States: insights from the historical ecology of nineteenth century millennial communes. In other news, it has become necessary to reconcile the apocalypse with sustainability.
- Population genomic analyses of the chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao L., provide insights into its domestication process. Domestication was both good and bad.
- The use and domestication of Theobroma cacao during the mid-Holocene in the upper Amazon. Archaeology says domestication in western Amazon in line with above (somewhere in Ecuador?), but earlier than thought.
- DNA methylation footprints during soybean domestication and improvement. Differentially methylated regions are particularly genetically diverse.
- Major domestication-related phenotypes in indica rice are due to loss of miRNA-mediated laccase silencing. Not so much the genes, as their regulation.
- Phylogenetic patterns and phenotypic profiles of the species of plants and mammals farmed for food. Plants and animals are different.
- Botanic Gardens Complement Agricultural Gene Bank in Collecting and Conserving Plant Genetic Diversity. 6000 taxa in 68 crop genera are in botanic gardens. Check out the rest of the special edition of Biopreservation and Biobanking on agricultural genebanks.
- Plants: Crop diversity pre‐breeding technologies as agrarian care co‐opted? Pre-breeding ignores farmers’ knowledge.
- The Open Source Seed Licence: A novel approach to safeguarding access to plant germplasm. Seeds will find a way.
- When too much isn’t enough: Does current food production meet global nutritional needs? No: grow more food and vegetables.
- Breeding and genomics status in faba bean (Vicia faba). Plenty of diversity to be still used. Pass the chianti.
- QTL Mapping of Resistance to Bean Weevil in Common Bean. Based on a cross between the susceptible Zambian landrace Solwezi and the resistant breeding line AO-1012-29-3-3A. But which Solwezi? I hope there’s a DOI in the actual paper for those who get through the paywall.
- Spatial Multivariate Cluster Analysis for Defining Target Population of Environments in West Africa for Yam Breeding. 7 mega-environments identified, but what I want to know is if any are under-represented in terms of material in the genebank.
- Economic shifts in agricultural production and trade due to climate change. Under mitigation scenarios trade networks for agricultural commodities get more distributed, and possibly therefore more stable. So that’s another reason to mitigate C emissions, you know, apart from saving the planet.
Brainfood: Makapuno, Middle Eastern dogs, Date palm origins, Speedy NUS, Red apples, Apple characterization, Phenotyping double, Assisted migration & pathology, Soya diversity, Sustainable intensification, Seed research, Cucurbita history, Potato value chains, Livestock ES
- Towards the Understanding of Important Coconut Endosperm Phenotypes: Is there an Epigenetic Control? Maybe.
- Dogs accompanied humans during the Neolithic expansion into Europe. All part of the Fertile Crescent package.
- Genomic Insights into Date Palm Origins. Domesticated in the Gulf region, but in a more complicated way than used to be thought.
- Speed breeding orphan crops. Worth the extra cost.
- Malus sieversii: the origin, flavonoid synthesis mechanism, and breeding of red-skinned and red-fleshed apples. Not just good for pest and disease resistance.
- Can you make morphometrics work when you know the right answer? Pick and mix approaches for apple identification. Good job they differ in colour too.
- Systematic establishment of colour descriptor states through image-based phenotyping. Doesn’t work for brown, though.
- High-throughput method for ear phenotyping and kernel weight estimation in maize using ear digital imaging. And the colour doesn’t matter.
- Amplifying plant disease risk through assisted migration. Making AM great.
- Characterization of a diverse USDA collection of wild soybean (Glycine soja Siebold & Zucc.) accessions and subsequent mapping for seed composition and agronomic traits in a RIL population. One of the parents of the RIL population was a wild accession.
- Plant Responses to an Integrated Cropping System Designed to Maintain Yield Whilst Enhancing Soil Properties and Biodiversity. So far, so good.
- Seed longevity phenotyping: recommendations on research methodology. Ok, now there’s no excuse.
Oh, well, except for the paywall. - Evolutionary and domestication history of Cucurbita (pumpkin and squash) species inferred from 44 nuclear loci. All 6 crop taxa in one clade, and some novel relationships with wild species.
- Value Chain Development and the Agrarian Question: Actor Perspectives on Native Potato Production in the Highlands of Peru. Difficult to penetrate the socio-economic jargon, especially without access to the full text, but I think it’s saying that to understand why some value chains for native potatoes work and others don’t, you have to understand that different players want different things. Which seems kinda obvious so I probably don’t have that right.
- Perception of livestock ecosystem services in grazing areas. Not all bad.
Nibbles: Australian wheat, Heirloom apple, Olive trouble, The Queen’s Mulberries, Watermelon breeding, Phancy phenotyping, Chefs & NUS, Cacao origins
- An encomium for CIMMYT Down Under.
- A paean for the Albemarle pippin. That’s an apple.
- A threnody for the Italian olive.
- An honour for British mulberries.
- A tribute to USDA watermelon genomics.
- An auto-panegyric from BASF. Yeah, I know auto is Latin, sue me.
- A celebration of millet-loving chefs.
- A reflection on the origin of that cacao origin paper, by the author.
Duty Calls: Forgotten Root Vegetables Edition
It’s a sickness, I know, but when I read the Grauniad article Luigi just nibbled — Salsify: Waitrose brings back ‘forgotten’ Victorian vegetable — I knew I couldn’t rest or, indeed, eat lunch, until I’d set matters straight.
The article says:
The vegetable will be available at Waitrose in the black variety, grown in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, as well as a small amount of white salsify, which is grown in the sandy soils of Ayrshire in Scotland.
A reasonable person might imagine that there are indeed two varieties of a single crop. An unreasonable one, me, would take to his keyboard in a huff, explaining that the vegetable occasionally known as black salsify, is also known as scorzonera, and is botanically Scorzonera hispanica, while salsify is Tragopogon porrifolius. Admittedly both are in the same family (Asteraceae) but they are not varieties of a single crop, unless that crop is forgotten Victorian root vegetables.
Adding insult to injury, the Guardian’s photograph of Tragopogon porrifolius is captioned “Scorzonera hispanica (salsify) roots with tendrils. Photograph: Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images/Dorling Kindersley”. Right common name, wrong Latin name.
I traced it back to the original. The page itself has vanished, but thanks to the Internet Archive a version has been captured, and though it lacks the image, it does state clearly that it is Tragopogon porrifolius.
Somewhere along the line, probably when Getty Images acquired it from Dorling Kindersley, things got messed up. Certainly Getty’s gallery of salsify images is a jumble of the two species, with Scorzonera predominant.
I’ll go and get my lunch now.
Dutch go wild
Nice little video from CGN on collecting the wild relatives of asparagus and other vegetables.