Posts

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Brainfood: Chinese royal jelly, Diverse wine yeasts, Heirloom values, Oil and biodiversity, Grassland management, Maize and culture, Minimum viable populations, Good coffee

Posted on

Cooperation-88 featured in National Geographic

Farmers once cultivated a wider array of genetically diverse crop varieties, but modern industrialized agriculture has focused mainly on a commercially successful few. Now a rush is on to save the old varieties—which could hold genetic keys to de- veloping crops that can adapt to climate change. “No country is self-sufficient with its plant genetic resources,” says Francisco Lopez, of the secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The group oversees the exchange of seeds and other plant materials that are stored in the world’s 1,750 gene banks. — Kelsey Nowakowski

That’s the introduction to a nice feature in the current National Geographic, part of the series The Future of Food. Problem is, I can’t find it online any more. I swear it was there, but it’s not any more. Maybe it was a copyright issue, and it will come back later, when National Gepgraphic is good and ready.

Anyway, the piece is entitled The Potato Challenge:

Potatoes in southwestern China had long been plagued by disease, so scientists began searching for blight-resistant varieties that could be grown in tropical highlands. By the mid-1990s researchers at Yunnan Normal University in China and the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru had created a new resistant spud using Indian and Filipino potatoes.

The resistant spud is Cooperation-88, of course, and if and when the piece finds its way online you’ll be able to admire some fancy infographics summarizing how it was developed and the impact it has had.

Posted on

Farmer-saved seeds are not fake

“Fake seeds” have been making the news in Uganda recently, on the back of a World Bank paper:

Of the many factors that keep small-scale Ugandan farmers poor, seed counterfeiting may be the least understood. Passing under the radar of the international development sector, a whole illegal industry has developed in Uganda, cheating farmers by selling them seeds that promise high yields but fail to germinate at all – with results that can be disastrous.

Counterfeiting gangs have learned to dye regular maize with the characteristic pinkish orange colour of industrially processed maize seed, duping farmers into paying good money for seed that just won’t grow. The result is a crisis of confidence in commercially available high-yield seed.

So it’s good to see one of the dozens of Youth Agripreneurs Project proposals being considered by GFAR tackling the issue.

Problem is, as Ola Westengen points out in a tweet, the project seems to be confused about what “fake” or “counterfeit” seeds are.

This from the project proposal:

…only 13% of farmers buy improved seed from formal markets in Uganda. The rest rely on seeds saved from the previous season or traded informally between neighbors, but such seeds generally produce far lower yields than genuine high yield hybrids… This problem can be addressed by empowering local seed businessmen or empowering the locals to produce their own seed through training.

So the “problem” is farmer-saved and -traded seed? That’s hardly addressing the havoc being wrought by Uganda’s seed counterfeiting gangs.

I’m all for helping farmers build their capacity in seed production, but there’s no reason why they should then produce nothing but “high yield hybrids.”