The latest Plant Breeding News is out, though only if you’re registered for email alerts. However, in a couple of days you should be able to get October’s digest on the archive page, where you can also subscribe. Lots of stuff about breeding for climate change in this issue. It’s a great resource, brought to you by the Global Partnership Initiative for Plant Breeding Capacity Building (GIPB). And I’m not just saying that because they gave us a namecheck this month.
Assyrian food culture in the Old and New Worlds
The BBC has an interesting photo essay on wine-making’s struggle for survival in Turkey among Assyrian Christians. Interestingly, a scion of the Assyrian community is something of a food guru in the Bay Area. Expatriates again…
Yemen may need taller wheat
Back when I made my living applying an outmoded and discredited paradigm by going around collecting germplasm, I had the great good fortune of visiting the Hardamawt province of what at the time was the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The region, and in particular the beautiful and historic city of Shibam has recently been hit by devastating floods. I could link to news accounts, but I think the series of photographs Jeremy just sent me does a better job of summing up the situation than any number of newspaper articles.
Agriculture in the Hadramawt relies on spate irrigation:
Flood water from mountain catchments is diverted from river beds (wadi’s) and spread over large areas. Spate systems are very risk-prone. The uncertainty comes both from the unpredictable nature of the floods and the frequent changes to the river beds from which the water is diverted.
So flood damage is to be expected every once in a while, and people by and large know how to cope, though on this occasion the flooding seems to have been particularly bad. One of the ways people cope is by building strong houses. Some houses in Shibam are hundreds of years old, despite being made of mud brick. I remember that while collecting (this was 20 years ago) I asked people why they were still growing their local wheats rather than the new Green Revolution varieties. They said that the new varieties, though giving a higher grain yield, were too short, 1 and they needed a lot of straw to make the mud bricks they used to build their homes.
Now, I haven’t been back to Shibam since then, and I don’t know whether the use of shorter wheats has spread. And I don’t know whether even if they have this has affected the quality or quantity of the local bricks. But I wonder.
Microbe man
Gary at Muck and Mystery waxes lyrical:
When I walk my fields I entertain fantasy visions of walking on a spongy mass of wriggling, ravenous microbes. It helps that my fields – or at least those I’ve had the management of for a couple of years – are in fact soft and yielding since they are rich in organic matter and living material so that even when bone dry they remind some of walking on a firm mattress.
He sees microbes and moo-cows as co-workers, a view we need to promote to those who see simplification as the only response to challenge. Complexity is almost always best.
Chocolate industry meets all over the place
The cacao community is meeting in Ghana under the sponsorship of Mars to draft a plan for sustainable cacao farming in Africa:
Topics on the table range from multifunctional agriculture, genetics and germplasm, to pest and disease, and science and leadership.
I hope they will also consider the kind of value-adding that is being discussed at the just-opened annual Paris chocolate show.