Sometimes a crop just doesn’t have the genes for it, as a good friend of mine who dabbled in taro breeding used to say. So then you have to try something else. “Zerihun Tadele is using the latest biotechnological methods to produce dwarf tef lines in order to prevent lodging, which causes significant yield losses.” The technique involved is TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes), an automated methods for inducing, and then detecting, potentially useful point mutations. But is there really no short(ish) teff variety among the 4743 accessions in the genebank of Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation? By the way, IBC has just won the Sultan Qaboos Environmental Preservation Prize. Congratulations!
Surf’s up in Solomons
My friend Tony Jansen and his friend Jon put together this fun video on the Solomon Islands. It’s ostensibly about surfing, but there’s stuff in there about agricultural biodiversity too. I met Tony when he was working at Kastom Gaden Association, a great local NGO working on sustainable agriculture and nutrition issues. We worked together on the livelihoods assessment of the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal.
You spoke, we listened
Back to complete entries on the home page. That’s what you wanted — by a whopping six votes to one (with one indifferent person) — and so that’s what you’ve got. I added a large date on a light gray background to separate one day’s posting from the next. I hope that helps. And I’ve also moved the list of latest posts up high on the left, so they should be easier to scan. Remember; we live to serve, but if you don’t ask, you won’t get.
Aquaculture big in Egypt
I stumbled on a fairly recent (2006) summary of aquaculture in Africa which at first sight suggests an incredibly impressive expansion in the use of aquatic agrobiodiversity — something like a five-fold increase in tonnage in the past ten years or so. ((via Timbuktu Chronicles.)) A closer look, however, shows that most of that increase has occurred in a single country: Egypt accounted for 83% of African aquaculture production in 2004, and 42% of that was Nile tilapia. The industry does seem to be diversifying a bit in terms of species, but not much, judging by the graphs. I hope there isn’t a bust coming after this boom…
Farmers save seeds shock
A farm in Massachusetts, US, has launched its own seed bank. Red Gate Farm Seed Bank aims to:
- provide community access to quality, local seeds.
- preserve local, heritage and heirloom seed varieties.
- promote seed saving.
- develop and distribute seeds that are optimum for our unique New England soils and climate.
- collect the social histories of our local seeds.
And very worthy that is too. You can do that sort of thing in nasty quasi-dictatorial America. In freedom-loving, liberal ol’ Yurp it would be illegal.
via Grist, which adds that “with a climate on the fritz, indigenous seeds will likely play an increasingly important role in sustaining local agricultureâ€. Except, of course, that it won’t be indigenous seeds that will support local agriculture. It’ll be agricultural biodiversity from far away, adapted to a different climate.