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Skimmed milk cow

A New Zealand biotech company has identified a pretty special mutation in a Friesian cow called Marge. Marge

produces a normal level of protein in her milk but substantially less fat, and the fat she does produce has much more unsaturated fat. She also produces milk with very high levels of omega3 oils.

The trait is heritable, and a commercial herd producing milk that is healthier and butter that is spreadable right out of the fridge is expected to be ready by 2011. The boffins at ViaLactia are looking for the gene involved.

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Farmers know best?

A comment on a recent post suggested that one should “start with the assumption that farmers know what is in their best interest.” No doubt that is as true of Indian farmers as the rest of us, but unfortunately in many cases there are other pressures out there that mean that you can’t act on your perceived long-term self-interest, or indeed the information on which you can make that determination is not available or turns out to be faulty. As with the sweetleaf item that started this, we don’t know the full story, so we should be careful not to jump to conclusions, but an article in today’s Hindu newspaper describes a decision by farmers that seems to have gone wrong. Agricultural biodiversity, and its associated knowledge, is an important reason – maybe the most important reason – why unfortunate decisions don’t always result in catastrophe.

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A little clean-up

Sunday morning; what could be nicer than to do a little weeding, planting and general tidying up? Nothing, if you have a row to hoe. Alas, if you don’t, there’s always blog maintenance.

I’ve updated various things so they ought to run more smoothly, fixed a page for The Competition, and done various other things that ought to be invisible.

One thing that is visible is a new category we call Nibbles.  It’ll appear over on the right, and is designed for linking to things that don’t really require much comment, but that we think may be of interest. We’ll see how it works out. If you have any comments, add them to this post. Thanks.

Oh, one more thing. The RSS feeds do not seem to be working all that well. Not sure why. The various different feeds (Posts, Comments, Nibbles) all seem to point to exactly the same place, which can’t be right. I’m working on it.

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Training materials for sustainable agriculture

The Centre for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz has some “instructional resources” on sustainable agriculture online. That’s mainly a course outline and references. There is stuff on agricultural biodiversity in the course outline, but somehow you don’t get the idea – or at least I didn’t – that this is something that is central to sustainability. More of an added benefit, or a fortuitous side-effect. See if you get the same impression.

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Another silver bullet?

The discovery of an enzyme which sits at a crucial step on the metabolic journey from glucose to that important anti-oxidant, vitamin C, opens the way for the kind of silver bullet thinking we have previously been somewhat critical of on this blog. Or it may not. We’ll see.

One of the researchers says:

We now have two strategies to provide enhanced protection against oxidative damage: Stimulate the endogenous activity of the identified enzyme or engineer transgenic plants which overexpress the gene that encodes the enzyme.

But I wonder whether this discovery will also allow the rapid evaluation of cultivars for vitamin C content?