While browsing the iafrica.com website after reading its features on the potato, I ran across an article about tea-tasting at the Mont Rochelle Hotel in Franschhoek, not far from Cape Town. Which sounds wonderful. But a poignant complement to it was provided by a post I found a little bit later on a blog from the Botswanan village of Nata, which has a line about how tea and bread are served at funerals there. Anyway, Nata Village Blog seems like it’s definitely worth following. Franschhoek and Nata are about 1,600 km apart, as the crow flies.
Crop books reviewed
More about food and farming from bookforum.com, including links to reviews of books on the history of citrus and of beans. Meanwhile, iafrica.com has features on the potato in history and the potato and politics to remind us that 2008 will be the International Year of the Potato.
Kill and cure
There’s a great article at Common-Place about the Great American Ham. No, not Kevin Bacon. We’re talking how to cure “the thigh of a back leg of a hog, [with its] three large cross braided muscles, now designated the inside round, outside round, and sirloin tip.” It’s down to the “three s method: salt, saltpeter and smoke.” Sugar sometimes features as a fourth s. Fascinating historical stuff, and something of a (welcome)Â antidote to our incredibly popular mini-pig nibble.
Perennial wheat a little bit closer
Almost a year ago I blogged about a trial of perennial wheat being planted at Texas A&M University by Dr Charlie Rush. Well, the results are in now, and they’re encouraging. According to a press release, the grazing (they do that with wheat in Texas) was as good as annual wheat, and the seed yield about half. Another part of the study is getting under way, crossing the perennial wheats with regionally adapted varieties to try and produce perennial wheats that are better suited to specific conditions. And more detailed investigation of the perennial wheats will continue.
The really good news, as far as I am concerned, is that Dr Rush is now collaborating with Dr Stan Cox at The Land Institute. The scientists there have been such pioneers in perennial polyculture, I was kind of peeved that the first news from Texas A&M ignored them. It is very heartening to see mainstream scientists recognizing The Land Institute’s contributions and expertise. There’s also apparently been interest in the perennial wheats from what Texas A&M calls the Jon Innes Centre in Norwich, England. 1 It is hard to tell what the JIC wants with perennial wheats; the release says something about habitat for wild birds. No doubt all part of the UK’s marvellous biodiversity conservation plan.
And in other wheat news, two rather heavy-duty papers about molecular biology. The first is a review of molecular markers in wheat breeding. 2 If you’re into this sort of stuff, you don’t need this review. If you aren’t, it gives a reasonable history and summary and might help you to scythe your way through the thickets of jargon, acronyms and abbreviations. My main objection is the claim that “large-scale genome characterization by DNA-fingerprinting has revealed no declining trends in the molecular genetic diversity in wheat as a consequence of modern intensive breeding thus opposing the genetic ‘erosion’ hypothesis”, which takes a very narrow view of the genetic erosion hypothesis indeed.
And coming right along to bolster my belief, a paper showing that synthetic wheats are a valuable source of traits to improve varieties for baking and milling. 3 It is much easier to cross modern wheats with synthetic wheats (because they contain the same number of chromosome sets, six) than it is to cross modern wheats with either wild relatives or ancient wheats (which contain four or two sets). Kunert and colleagues crossed two wild species, revealing interesting genetic traits to improve qualities such as the amount of protein and the resistance to sprouting in storage, which can now be bred into modern wheats.
My feeling is that if all the genetic diversity breeders need were present in modern wheats, as Landjeva seems to think, then other scientists would not be spending considerable time and effort to create synthetic wheats from wild relatives in order to use them in breeding programmes.
Cassava breeders unite
A press release from AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, gives details of cassava brown streak disease and a recent confab of breeders to tackle it. Cassava is the second most important source of calories for people in Africa, and the spread of the disease has been very worrying. The breeders say that they have resistant varieties, with more in the pipeline, but that stringent rules on the release of new varieties are hampering their efforts to get these to farmers. This sounds like an unintended consequence of rules designed to ensure high quality seed is available to those who can afford it; isn’t there some sort of mechanism for bypassing the rules in an emergency?
The breeders also say they are going to use a “new” idea called farmer participatory selection: give farmers the resistant material and let them choose the ones that best suffice all their needs.
“This farmer-participatory approach to plant breeding is a genuine and fairly recent breakthrough in crop breeding,” said George Bigirwa of AGRA. “Only a decade ago, such methods were considered by many to be ‘less scientific’ than selecting for maximum yields in trials grown on isolated research stations using high applications of fertilizers and chemical pesticides.”
At the meeting, cassava breeders from eight countries reported on the farmer participatory breeding work of their national research institutions. In many cases, the reports represented the first time that the breeders were testing their own locally-bred varieties, rather than varieties developed by others at distant research stations.
Now that does sound like progress.