Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
I’m not sure if we’ve already noted that there is an international symposium on “Underutilized plants for food, nutrition, income and sustainable development” in the offing. Anyway, it is scheduled for 3-7 March 2008 in Arusha, Tanzania, and the deadline for submission of abstracts has just been extended to 31 August.
LATER: Here’s more.
That it has absolutely nothing to do with agriculture! That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from a report on the CABI blog about a study in the journal Biological Conservation. It reports a survey of “the general public” in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, which tried to discover what they knew about biodiversity. (I’ve pinched my headline direct from them.) You might think the Cairngorms are not a very agricultural place, but you would be wrong. There’s a great deal of farming up there, to say nothing of timber industries. And some of the conservation efforts seek to duplicate farming practices that have fallen by the wayside. But to hear CABI tell it, even though the survey included foresters and “farmer students” there seemed to be almost no understanding of how agricultural practices are part and parcel of landscapes and their ecology. Bah!
Just updated WordPress, the software behind the site. I’ve checked everything I can think of, and it all seems to work. If something’s not as you expected, just holler.
Cows produce milk, right? Its qualities vary among breeds, with creamy Jersey milk at one end and that skimmed milk cow at the other. And the quantity varies within a breed, which is how we got to the monster lactation machines that are the modern Friesian. But until this morning I had no idea that there was a distinct difference in the type of milk produced by cows within a breed.
Apparently, the major protein in milk, beta-casein, comes in two different forms, called A1 and A2 (original, huh). Some cows have both forms of casein in their milk, some only A1 and some only A2. (Students of genetics will want to know the ratios. I can’t seem to find them.) The A2 corporation, which has registered and trademarked A2 milkâ„¢, says that the A2 form is the original, and that at some point in the past a mutation produced A1. It also hints strongly that as a result, pure A2 milk is better for you. There seems to be some evidence floating around out there, but none of it is overwhelmingly positive.
Anyway, one can determine which cows produce what milk with a simple DNA test, and this morning’s awakening came from a report about the first dairy farm in the US to separate the milk from its A2 cows. A dairy company in Lincoln, Nebraska has started to market A2 milk in the US. To say they are cagey about the exact health claims they are making for this premium priced product would be the understatement of the week.
“To say there is no controversy over this would not be correct,” said Timothy Thietje, CEO of The Original Foods Company, a Nebraska-based marketer of A2 Milk.
“But to say there’s a substantial body of evidence both in terms of science and the response from people who use the product is correct.”
Right.
All this started in New Zealand and Australia, where the milk is marketed without the approval of the milk boards; what would all those other farmers do? But could this, just possibly, be a case in which reducing diversity might be good for you?
More today to satisfy your hunger for rice information, hot on the heels of the recent paper trying to explain the pattern of genetic variation across and within two subspecies of cultivated rice, discussed by Jeremy a couple of days ago.
First there’s a paper ((Global Dissemination of a Single Mutation Conferring White Pericarp in Rice. Sweeney MT, Thomson MJ, Cho YG, Park YJ, Williamson SH, et al. PLoS Genetics Vol. 3, No. 8.)) looking at how the red pericarp of wild rice became the white pericarp of cultivated rice. The answer is that a mutation arose in the japonica subspecies, crossed to the indica and became fixed in both under very strong selection pressure by ancient rice farmers. They must have really liked those funny mutant white grains when they first noticed them! Oh to have been a fly on the wall — or a brown plant hopper on the rice stalk — when the white pericarp mutation was first noticed in some ancient paddy…
Then comes news that the three CGIAR centres with an interest in rice — IRRI, WARDA and CIAT — are to boost their collaboration to solve the pressing production problems of Africa. There’s talk of forming a consortium. More flags being prepared.