- In praise of common names. Meh. You won’t see a Latin name in this whole Nibbles. See how you like it.
- Building a tomato. In Spanish.
- Tracking a tomato.
- The dark side of tomatoes.
- Amaranth to rescue Mexicans from obesity.
- Seeds of contention.
- Finding the lost Least Lettuce.
- Indigo goes back to the future.
- What if the monsoon fails? MS Swaminathan has some answers.
- Nice chocolate infographic from FAO.
- A diverse microbial community in and around roots helps plants thrive. The Science article is behind a paywall, but there’s a helpful infographic on Twitter.
- The US has a National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration. Vision? The right seed in the right place at the right time. Wish I’d thought of that.
- When otherwise useful trees attack. Ah, the irony of this coming right after the previous one.
- UK’s Global Food Security programme says extreme weather events are increasing and we must adapt agriculture. Good to know.
- And today’s Five Plants That Will Save the World are…
- Maybe add pawpaw to that?
- Japanese rice farmers: change gonna come.
- Nice coffee museum in Brazil.
- Early agriculture in the Caribbean: Cuba and Trinidad.
- The babaçu breakers of Maranhão are under threat. What’s babaçu? Yeah, well, look it up.
- “Seed banking began about 30 years ago as an improvement to individual farmers storing and using their own seeds.” Riiiiight.
- That Vilsak is a card.
Brainfood: Brassica rethink, Camel colours, Parsing the ITPGRFA, Static buffalo, Traits not taxa, Expert tyranny, Chinese pollinators, Heritage landscapes, Mining text, Diversity & nutrition
- Domestication of Brassica oleracea L. It happened in the balmy Mediterranean, not along those blustery Atlantic cliffs.
- Validating local knowledge on camels: Colour phenotypes and genetic variation of dromedaries in the Nigeria-Niger corridor. The locally recognized colour-based breeds are not supported by the genetics.
- The Battle over Plant Genetic Resources: Interpreting the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources. The Treaty phrase “genetic parts and components, in the form received” can be interpreted in ways that do not clash with TRIPS. The author also suggests that the Benefit Sharing Fund should be used to pay lawyers, but I’m not sure if that’s tongue-in-cheek.
- The response of the distributions of Asian buffalo breeds in China to climate change over the past 50 years. Fancy maths says it’s minimal.
- Functional traits in agriculture: agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services. It’s not the taxa. Or it shouldn’t be.
- Expert opinion on extinction risk and climate change adaptation for biodiversity. In situ most preferable, ex situ most feasible.
- Conserving pollinator diversity and improving pollination services in agricultural landscapes.The view from China is much like the view from everywhere else.
- Heritage Values and Agricultural Landscapes: Towards a New Synthesis. Back to the future: heritage can mean resilience.
- Using legacy botanical literature as a source of phytogeographical data. Text parsed to yield maps. Brave new world.
- Production diversity and dietary diversity in smallholder farm households. Want better nutrition? Access to markets better than promoting production diversity.
Nibbles: CIAT job, Rice revolution, Pomegranate genebank, Spiderplant, Floating heritage, Lager origin, Amaro history, Golden Rice et al.
- CIAT genebank looking for a leader.
- IRRI soon-to-be-former (Thanks, Mike) DG looking for a new Green Revolution.
- Looking for pomegranates? Look no further.
- Cleome looking for markets. With genomics.
- Looking to the floating gardens of Bangladesh for answers.
- Looking for the origin of lager yeasts. And finding two of them.
- Looking to understand amaro.
- A good look at biofortification.
Nibbles: Kinky crops, Hot pepper, Cary Fowler, Gin history, Open data, Quaker food, QPM in Ethiopia, Botany app, Old seeds, New tomato
- Why aren’t there more crops among the orchids?
- This pepper is not so much a crop as a weapon of mass destruction.
- Now here’s a crop. New tomato has taste, storability, looks. But I think it’s dating.
- Maize with cool amino acids reaches Ethiopia. Must have walked there.
- Really old squash seeds.
- Cary Fowler on the Weather Channel. You heard me.
- Quakers have an opinion on the right to food and climate change. Well, why shouldn’t they? They also have a UN office, but that’s another story. No word on whether they made the Weather Channel.
- Ok, so apparently the answer is data. Says a data company. And open data at that. Quakers nonplussed.
- Botanizing in N or S America? There’s an app for that.
- The rise and rise of gin. And I certainly need one.
Organic space lettuce
Fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space officially is on the menu for the first time for NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. Expedition 44 crew members, including NASA’s one-year astronaut Scott Kelly, are ready to sample the fruits of their labor after harvesting a crop of “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce Monday, Aug. 10, from the Veggie plant growth system on the nation’s orbiting laboratory.
And I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to watch them do it.
As for Outredgeous, you can buy it online. It was bred by Frank Morton, as Matthew Dillon of the Organic Seed Alliance told me on Facebook:
The varieties that University of Wisconsin researchers recommended they grow were bred by Frank Morton, an organic farmer with no formal training in genetics, but one of the more successful vegetable breeders of our time. Farmers as seed innovators, even in space.
You can find his story online in various places.
His varieties are grown in many countries and even in space: Outredgeous, one of his most popular lettuces—so named for leaves so red that the botany students who first saw it didn’t recognize it as lettuce—is being grown on the International Space Station. (It grows quickly, has a high concentration of antioxidants, and is highly bacteria-resistant—a concern for astronauts eating raw food.)
But why not let him tell it?
My education as a plant breeder has been through several stages. The first one, just described, was based primarily on direct experience with the repeated life cycles of plants and their insect cohorts. I also read the twenty volumes of Luther Burbank’s life and work, which does not really qualify as an education in breeding these days (“Can you learn anything reading those?” one well known breeder asked). But Burbank was inspiring beyond belief, and made me believe anything was possible, given enough tries. Persistence pays.