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Milking quinoa for livelihoods

We’ve been contacted by Alexander Wankel of Pachakuti Foods with news of an intriguing Kickstarter campaign. Pachakuti is…

…a social enterprise committed to sourcing rare Andean superfoods directly from farmers to create unique products for a healthier life and a better world. By finding markets for underutilized crops, we strive to support biodiversity while providing a fair income for Andean farmers.

The unique product that is the focus of the Kickstarter is, of all things, quinoa milk.

Pachakuti Foods is launching the first quinoa milk made with carefully selected native quinoa varieties that have a naturally milky flavor and texture. Made from some of the yummiest quinoa in Peru, our quinoa milk is richer and creamier than quinoa milk made from conventional quinoa that is currently on the market. It is 100% vegan, gluten free, and contains high quality proteins with all the essential amino acids that the body needs.

They’re about half-way to their goal, which is $15,000.

This Kickstarter campaign is our first opportunity to hit the ground running, both by helping us raise money as well as tell the story of why quinoa diversity is important.

quinoa milk

So help them out, if you’re so inclined. Or maybe point them to a bank that might be interested in giving them a business loan.

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AVGRIS revamped

The World Vegetable Center has come up with a redesigned front-end for presenting data on its germplasm collection to the world.

The AVRDC Vegetable Genetic Resources Information System (AVGRIS) is an information system that manages the data of all vegetable germplasm conserved in the AVRDC genebank. The Genetic Resources and Seed Unit uses this system to efficiently manage genebank operations. AVGRIS links all germplasm conservation and management operations, from registration, characterization, evaluation and seed inventory to seed distribution to end-users.

Check it out. And before you ask, no, I looked, and Varrone is not there.

Screen Shot 2016-03-11 at 9.02.19 AM

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A tomato comes back home

The return to its native land of an historic tomato variety developed by the famous wheat breeder Nazareno Strampelli is making a splash in Italy. Originally published in the rather specialized organ L’Iformatore Agrario, the news has now been picked up by the more mainstream media, at least regionally.

The tomato variety Varrone, bred by the Italian geneticist Nazareno Strampelli (1866-1942) sometime in the late 1910s.
The tomato variety Varrone, bred by the Italian geneticist Nazareno Strampelli (1866-1942) some time in the late 1910s, lost, and now found. In Russia.

What’s particularly interesting to us here is that Varrone, as the variety is called, was eventually found in the genebank of the Vavilov Institute, in St Petersburg, Russia.

“It is a small tribute to the memory of Strampelli on his 150th birthday: from tomorrow it will be possible to eat spaghetti Cappelli-Varrone, 100% Strampelli, not only for the durum wheat but also for the tomato sauce,” says Roberto Papa, professor of agricultural genetics at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, who coordinated the research in collaboration with Sergio Salvi, biologist and biographer of Strampelli, and Giovanna Attene professor of agricultural genetics at the Università di Sassari.

The durum wheat variety Senatore Cappelli was also bred by Strampelli in the 1910s, and remained popular for decades. I’m sure Strampelli would have been pleased that his tomato has been found. Not so sure what he would have thought about losing it in the first place.

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Transforming agriculture in Africa

ResearchBlogging.orgI challenged our friend Andy Jarvis to summarize his just-out paper (with assorted co-authors) in Nature Climate Change 1 in a tweet, and this is what he came up with:

Not bad, but let’s unpack it a bit. Andy and his colleagues ran climate models for sub-Saharan Africa and looked at what would happen over the course of this century to the areas where different crops are currently being grown. Crucially, they tried to figure out when it would become untenable to continue growing a given crop in a given spot, thus triggering a switch to another crop altogether. Absent, that is, some kind of adaptation, such as bringing in varieties better suited to the new conditions, or altering agronomic practices.

As Andy says in his tweet, beans, banana and maize are the worst hit: farmers in 60% of the current African bean area, and about 30% of that of the other crops, will need to think about some other crop at some time during the 21st century. That hits home, as people who follow this blog will know that my mother-in-law’s farm is in maize-and-beans country. Well, fortunately, the highlands of central Kenya do not seem, in this analysis, to be too badly impacted. But what are the descendants of my mother-in-law’s equivalents in the dryer parts of East Africa, and in southern Africa, to do?

…farmers in the maize-mixed farming system might, in the long run, shift to more drought-tolerant cereals such as millet and sorghum, which we identify as viable substitutes in many locations, although these may experience yield reductions.

Alas, there’s more:

…in some areas in the southern Sahel and in dry parts of Southern and Eastern Africa even these drought-resilient crops might become increasingly marginal. For these areas, a more drastic transformation to livestock might be necessary, because cropping might not be a viable livelihood strategy in the long run.

Scary. Better get breeding.