Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
An article in National Geographic looks at possible changes in the climate of the Andes, how they will affect potatoes, and what breeders are doing about it. The wild relatives are very much to the fore:
“The crosses we are developing between wild, drought-tolerant varieties and modern potatoes now are for the future,” said Meredith Bonierbale, senior potato breeder at the International Potato Center in Lima.
The article also quotes our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis, ((Andy works for CIAT and Bioversity in Cali, Colombia.)) who recently collaborated with others on a paper which concluded that some of those very same wild relatives are themselves threatened:
“Even if we halt habitat loss, in the next 50 years, climate change could undo all of the conservation that we already have,” said Jarvis.
From a very tired and emotional Robert Hijmans. Previously….
No domestication without relaxation. Today was excursion day at the Harlan II symposium. All to the Napa wineries you’d think, but no, there were not enough registrants for that. ((Editor’s note: Excuse me?)) But there was a tour of the Charles Rick Tomato Genebank and a “Native Biodiversity and Plant/Pollinator Interactions” tour, visiting field sites used by Claire Kremen’s group. But I had my own program. Before I get to that, which I will do in a separate post, allow me to make to parting comment on the Harlan II symposium.
On day 1, I mentioned that molecular biology rules. The increased understanding of the relatedness of populations of different crop taxa and their wild relatives is having a tremendous effect on our understanding of domestication and dispersal of agrobiodiversity. The flurry of recent papers on this subject has probably not escaped the attention of readers of this blog.
Be that as may, I should also have mentioned the explosion of archaeological data and analysis. Compared to 10 years ago, there are now many more late Pleistocene to early Holocene settlements that have been analyzed. This is providing a much more refined insight into early agriculture and domestication than was previously possible.
I do not know why there has been such an increase, all of a sudden. More people and money thrown at it, no doubt, but why now? At the same time, and perhaps not unrelated, there appears to have been an important increase in the sophistication of the methods used to study agricultural origins. Extracting charred starch particles from pot fragments or mortars. Determining minor differences in grain sizes to classify them as one type or the other. Tallies of bone sizes to determine whether the animals were hunted or farmed. And then there is the analysis of ancient DNA. And so forth. Not much Indiana Jones in it, but it is quite safe and more intellectually rewarding.
Most insights about agricultural origins still come from the Levant. While other areas are much less explored, they are also moving along. For many places and periods, we now have a good idea about what plants and animals were eaten. That is why we now know that there was a long transition from cultivation to domestication. This is why Dorian Fuller was able to show us graphs with changes in crop characteristics over time for multiple crops (wheat, barley, rice).
The origins of agriculture and the domestication process that took place about 10,000 yrs ago are fascinating and fundamental to the understanding of the history of humans. But domestication has never stopped, and will not stop, despite EU regulations. There are many other stories, from other regions, from other (not cereal) crops that have been much less explored.
Jared Diamond is convinced that no more crops or animals of major importance will be domesticated. He says that crop and animal domestication happened where there were species predisposed to be domesticated. We found them millennia ago. That is why agriculture originated where it did, and this is one of the reasons why some places are richer than others.
I wonder whether we can be more imaginative about what domestication could do to some wild plant or animal. We now know what it takes and can engage it what Melinda Zeder calls “directed domestication”. Perhaps something for an X-Prize. A hundred million dollars for anyone who can develop a crop that is now insignificant (say less than 10,000 ha) to an area of at least 10 million ha. I agree that it is hard to image that this will happen with staple food crops, but it is bound to happen with an energy crop.
Robert Hijmans’ third dispatch from Davis. Previous one here. Keep ’em coming, Robert!
Day 3 of the Harlan II symposium had another cornucopia of fine presentations. Farmed fish, genetic chips, fruits for the poor, improving desert crops, ecosystems services research, transgenic goats, selling diversity to the rich to name a few topics. One subject shared by several talks was on-going and future domestication. ((Domestication in the not very strict sense of using more of relatively little exploited biological resources.)) From conservation to innovation.
Dennis Hedgecock described the big wave of domestication in our time: aquaculture. Within a decade or so, there will be more fish produced on farms than caught in the oceans. The ocean catch won’t increase much any more (or worse); we have reached the limits. And how wild is caught fish anyway? Fish stocks in the ocean are increasingly being replenished with small fish from hatcheries. The majority of Japanese fish descends from hatchery fish. Whether this is good or bad for the genetic diversity of the fish depends how it is done. Guess how it is done.
Overfishing of oceans and the subsequent shift to farming is strikingly similar to the domestication pathways of some land animals that were also hunted before they were domesticated (discussed yesterday by Melinda Zeder). So what is all this fish farming about? Shrimp, salmon, tilapia? No. Number 1 is the Pacific Oyster and 60% of fish farming is carp production in China.
The breeders are at it too. They have developed a tetraploid Pacific Oyster. Crossing it with the normal diploids creates infertile, but larger, triploid offspring. They are not being commercially produced yet, but here aquaculture mimicks plant domestication.
Roger Leakey described a project of further or re-domestication of tree crops. Going into villages in West Africa, Leakey and colleagues asked farmers what trees they valued and would like to have more of. They then looked at the variation in the species, selected some with good fruits, and helped find a place for them in the farming system, e.g. as shade crop in cacao. Seems like fairly simple work, if labour intensive.
In some places the result was stunning, with very poor farmers earning an extra US$700 per year from a few trees in their field. Diversity can improve livelihoods of poor farmers. We will need to revise the agronomy curricula to make it happen on a large scale.
Meanwhile, in India, good old pigeonpea is being renewed. Landraces are perennial bushy plants. But Laxmipathi Gowda and collaborators at ICRISAT have produced many other types: short duration; determinate; daylength insensitive; and even hybrids. And in California there might be renewed attempts to use jojoba, now for bio-energy. Stephen Kaffka talked about some of the difficulties of domesticating a highly heterozygous, variable, and slow growing shrub. So far there is no evidence that we can use our new molecular biology prowess to reduce the domestication process from 1000(0) years to 10.
Food trends start in California, said Karen Caplan. Perhaps she is right. Perhaps most societies will go through an agrobiodiversity bottleneck when they urbanize; but then bounce back when they get rich enough. In a respectable farmers’ market here in Northern California there will — in the right season — always be a stand with only tomatoes, and a least twenty varieties of them. The weirder the shape the better, as long as they taste good. Guess what I had for dinner in my Best Western hotel. T-bone steak? No, a heirloom tomato salad.
Caplan discussed some of the inner workings of getting more agricultural biodiversity through the modern food-chain. Flavor is king. Ignore obstacles. Use influencers such as TV cooks and movie stars to rave about your new potato or brassica. Get it mentioned on a blog.
