An interesting post on the Denver Botanic Garden’s blog led me to the Center for Plant Conservation‘s ((Hosted by the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri.)) database of the National Collection of Endangered Plants of the US, which I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about. It is interesting to us here because it includes crop wild relatives like Helianthus species. There’s also lots of information on how to fight invasives, which has been the subject of some discussion here in the past few days.
Carlos Ochoa
Carlos Ochoa — legendary potato breeder, explorer and scholar — has passed away at an age of 79 in Lima, Peru.
Born in Cusco, Peru, Ochoa received degrees from the Universidad San Simon, Cochabamba, Bolivia and from the University of Minnesota, USA. For a long time Ochoa worked as a potato breeder. He combined Peruvian with European and American potatoes to produce new cultivars that are grown throughout Peru.
Ochoa was professor emeritus of the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, Peru. In 1971, he joined the International Potato Center, where he worked on the systematics of Andean cultivated and wild potatoes. His long list of publications on this topic include hefty monographs on the potatoes of Bolivia and on the wild potatoes of Peru.
His last major published work (2006) is a book on the ethnobotany of Peru, co-authored with Donald Ugent.
Ochoa was a wild potato explorer par excellence. One third of the nearly 200 wild potato species were first described by him.
Carlos Ochoa received many international accolades, including Distinguished Economic Botanist, the William Brown award for Plant Genetic Resources, and, together with long time collaborator Alberto Salas, the Order of Merit of the Diplomatic Service of Peru.
Here is Ochoa’s own story about some of his early work, including his search for Chilean potatoes described by Darwin and his thoughts on potato varieties: “[they] are like children: you name them, and in turn, they give you a great deal of satisfaction”.
¡Muchas gracias, professor!
Nibbles: Early diet, Rice, Veggies, Barley, Research, Taiwan, Coffee trade
- Early Peruvians didn’t brush their teeth. On the plus side, they had a tasty, varied diet.
- Mangrove rice farming in West Africa: The Book.
- “Could it be that vegetables are the new meat?“
- Wild relative rescues barleys threatened by Russian pests.
- Gates supports McKnight supports poor farmers.
- Vavilov does Formosa.
- Ethiopian Commodity Exchange gets to grips with coffee. Starbucks unavailable for comment.
Nibbles: Wikiforéts, Super-rape, Gut microbiome, Soybeans, Golf courses, Chestnuts, Rice, Yeast
- Wiki for African forest information. Go, make it multilingual, fill in the gaps, use it.
- Canola (rape) desalinates, gives fuel and enriched fodder. Jeremy comments: “I’m a tad skeptical.”
- Diversity of intestinal flora good for your figure. Or the other way around.
- Edamame bean comes to Britain. Why, one wonders.
- Golf courses good for salamanders. I wonder if anyone’s looked at how many CWRs they support.
- Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
- Rice domestication unpacked.
- More extreme beer. Oh, and the phylogeny of yeast.
Cocoa from tree to cup
News from both ends of the cacao value chain today. At the upstream end, new molecular marker work on over a thousand genebank accessions reveals that the species is divided into no less than 10 genetic clusters, rather than the conventionally recognized two. These show a clear geographic pattern: they are strung out along an east-west axis in the Amazon, probably reflecting, according to the authors, the location of ancient ridges (“palaeoarches”), which were barriers to dispersal not only for Theobroma but also for various fish groups. Meanwhile, at the downstream end, there’s an account of a visit to a “chocoholic mecca” in Santa Fe.
LATER. And, for the trifecta, news from somewhere around the middle of the value chain.
LATER STILL. What comes after trifecta?