Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

July 10, 2019July 10, 2019

Bill Gates has CGIAR’s back

We will need many new ideas like these to help farmers be prepared to meet the challenges of our changing climate. If they are, we will all have an answer to the question “What’s for dinner?” for years to come.

That’s His Billness on the importance of CGIAR and its scientists. Would have been nice to have a shoutout for the genebanks too, but I know he appreciates them just as much as the breeding work.

Can we feed 10 billion people? I’m optimistic that we can if we invest in research that will help poor farmers adapt to climate change. https://t.co/KjKNQRMBJy

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) July 9, 2019

July 8, 2019February 18, 2020

Brainfood: Molecular characterization, Ancient weed, Patagonian berries, Strawberry origins controversy, Potato & nutrition, European potatoes, Extension, Cacao, Maize & wheat breeding history, Rural employment, Production stability, Amazonian Neolithic, Fairtrade wages

Genebank genomics bridges the gap between the conservation of crop diversity and plant breeding. What do we want? An accurate genotype-to-phenotype map for all seeds stored in the genebank. When do we want it? As soon as we have the money to ensure their conservation.
The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs. Well, that’s like your opinion, man. Residues in incense burners used for mortuary rituals, if you must know.
Patagonian berries as native food and medicine. Good, and good for you.
Revisiting the Origin of the Octoploid Strawberry. Not 4 separate diploid progenitors, as another paper recently found, but rather 2 extant ones, once you re-do the math.
The Nutritional Contribution of Potato Varietal Diversity in Andean Food Systems: a Case Study. It’s great, but it’s not enough.
The origins and adaptation of European potatoes reconstructed from historical genomes. Sequencing of old herbarium specimens, including Darwin’s, shows that early introductions to Europe were from the Andes, and later admixed there with Chilean and wild material, forming a sort of secondary centre of diversity.
Effect of Intensive Agriculture-Nutrition Education and Extension Program Adoption and Diffusion of Biofortified Crops. Breeding is not enough.
Morphological characterisation and evaluation of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) in Trinidad to facilitate utilisation of Trinitario cacao globally. Now we know which ones are the best, for different reasons.
Evolution of US maize (Zea mays L.) root architectural and anatomical phenes over the past 100 years corresponds to increased tolerance of nitrogen stress. There has been unconscious selection for root traits resulting in better N use efficiency. An old paper, resurrected because of the next one.
Breeding improves wheat productivity under contrasting agrochemical input levels. Breeding wheat in Europe for good performance under high input levels has not markedly affected its performance under more challenging conditions. Diversity has held up too.
Positive outcomes between crop diversity and agricultural employment worldwide. Irrespective of input levels and economic growth rates.
National food production stabilized by crop diversity. Crop diversity is not just good for rural employment (see above), but for year-on-year production stability too.
Climate change and cultural resilience in late pre-Columbian Amazonia. And it was sort of the same in ancient Amazonia.
Effects of Fairtrade on the livelihoods of poor rural workers. Fairtrade improves wages of workers in cooperatives, but not on small farms.

July 4, 2019July 3, 2019

Go North, rice!

You might think that Queen’s Line off Drake Road, Chatham, ON N7M 5T1, Canada is the furthest north that rice grows in the world. That’s near Lake Erie, after all.

But you’d be wrong, and so was I. The latitude is 42°19’59.7″N. And there’s rice cultivation in China and central Asia, maybe even Italy’s Po valley, north of the 45th parallel, according to this map. ((Which we’ve blogged about before, natch.))

We know the furthest south that rice is grown.

July 3, 2019July 3, 2019

Fact-checking extreme seed-saving

The story of the 800-year old squash seeds has surfaced again. We blogged about it way back, pointing out that it was, in fact, fake. But Archaeology Review does a great job of debunking it yet again. Be careful out there, people.

July 2, 2019May 6, 2020

The spread of agriculture in Europe, genebank edition

A recent Nibble pointed to an image of new, updated map of the expansion of agriculture in Europe. As is usually the case when I see almost any map, I immediately started to think about mashing it up with the localities of genebank accessions. Downloading barley landrace data from Genesys and importing it into Google Earth was easy. And you can also import an image into Google Earth, so it is theoretically possible to superimpose accessions on spread of agriculture.

Unfortunately, the practice is not straightforward, because you have to distort the image by hand to fit neatly on top of the map in Google Earth, and that can take a while. I gave up after about an hour, and after some googling eventually found Map Warper, which does the distortion for you for free. Importing the warped map into Google Maps resulted in a perfect fit.

So here’s the result.

It looks like there are barley landrace accessions from most of the areas highlighted, with dates, in the spread of agriculture map, though they are by no means all equally covered. At least as far as Genesys knows. There have of course been a number of studies looking at the geographic pattern of distribution of genetic diversity in barley in and around Europe. As far as remember, none of them explicitly took into account how long the crop had been in different places. But the material could be available for such a study to be done.