Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

February 16, 2016February 15, 2016

American vs European taste

Julia Belluz has a long article over at Vox on Why fruits and vegetables taste better in Europe. Compared to the US, that is. Here’s the bottom line. Or lines:

American farmers put an emphasis on yield and durability, not flavour
American shoppers favour access over seasonality
The US government regulates for safety — but not quality
Finding flavourful food is a matter of priorities

I’m really not sure whether like is being compared with like here, and, if it is, whether one can generalize to this extent anyway about American or European farmers, shoppers and governments. Ms Belluz seems to agree, in a tweet, that she might be winging it a bit:

I know, I know. No systematic reviews on this one. More a matter of perception and lowly anecdote

But read the whole thing for yourself, and join in on the discussion on Twitter.

Hey, @juliaoftoronto! Let's talk. Is there evidence that Euro produce actually does taste better? https://t.co/Ds0ZVcOAv3

— Tamar Haspel (@TamarHaspel) February 12, 2016

February 15, 2016February 15, 2016

Autonomous potato innovation in the Andes?

I have nothing against jua kali. In fact, I love the informal sector, without which life would be a lot more expensive, and less interesting, back home in Kenya. But a piece in The Guardian extolling its virtues, by Aditya Bahadur and Julian Doczi, researchers at the Overseas Development Institute, says some funny things about “frugal”, “bottom-up” and “autonomous innovation” in potato cultivation in Peru.

Some organisations already recognise the value of autonomous innovations for resilience. Practical Action supported indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes to find a local solution to food shortages caused by bouts of extremely cold weather.

An externally led response might have led to these communities importing food or relocating. Instead, Practical Action helped them to rediscover an ancient process of cultivating native potato varieties that can survive temperatures as low as -35°C. In this way, communities have found a solution that is aligned with their culture and diet to survive extreme weather.

At first I thought this was something to do with chuño, the freeze-dried potato of the Andes. But the link to the Practical Action website doesn’t mention anything like that.

There are 256 varieties of potato that can survive the harsh conditions of the high Andes. Practical Action is helping families living at altitudes of 3800ft to maintain this crucial biodiversity by developing varieties of local potatoes, as well as improve technical aspects of production. These methods ensure people are able to get enough to eat, as well as an income at local markets.

A revolving fund for accessing native potato seeds and seeders for local production has been set up. Ongoing technical assistance is being established through the training of 40 Quechuan farmers, chosen by the community themselves, as technological leaders.

So, help with conserving and accessing adapted local varieties, and technical advice and training on production methods. Worthy, no doubt, but hardly “autonomous innovation,” nor can either really be described as “rediscover[ing] an ancient process of cultivating native potato varieties.” I’m sure there’s some cool jua kali going on to do with potatoes in the mountains of Peru. But this isn’t it.

And 256 hardy Andean varieties? Really? Not 257, perhaps?

February 15, 2016

Coffee at CATIE

In her new piece in Barista, Hanna Neuschwander really makes up for not mentioning CATIE’s genebank by name in her Coffee in the New Millennium. I take it all back.

catie

February 15, 2016February 15, 2016

Brainfood: Species shifts, Rewilding caution, Managing grassland, Natural control, Expansion, Rutin, Citrullus core, Open source seeds, Nagoya consequences, Tree diversity

Altitudinal shifts of the native and introduced flora of California in the context of 20th-century warming. Introduced species are better at spreading upward than the native flora.
Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation. Step away from the shiny new box.
Threatened herbivorous insects maintained by long-term traditional management practices in semi-natural grasslands. Because they can’t compete with generalists better adapted to the new-fangled conditions.
Agricultural landscape simplification reduces natural pest control: A quantitative synthesis. Aphid control 46% lower in simple landscapes with lots of cultivated land, compared to more diverse landscapes.
Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security. Expansion could really help with food security, also in importing countries, but is likely to occur in biodiversity hotspots, which means the devil will be in the spatial detail.
Quantitative analysis of rutin content using silkworm genetic resources. Wait, silkworm powder?
Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Formation of a Core Collection of 1197 Citrullus Accessions. Microsatellites detect differences between American and E. Asian ecotypes and select diverse subset of 130 accessions from Chinese collection.
Open Source Foodways: Agricultural Commons and Participatory Art. Seeds as art.
Implications of the Nagoya Protocol for Genome Resource Banks Composed of Biomaterials from Rare and Endangered Species. There are many, some of them unforeseen.
Functional Resilience against Climate-Driven Extinctions – Comparing the Functional Diversity of European and North American Tree Floras. Loss of species diversity may be decoupled from loss of functional diversity.

February 14, 2016

On mammal diversity and vegetation biomass

Two global maps coincidentally turned up almost side-by-side on Twitter this weekend. Interesting in their own right individually, they threw up a question for me when I was forced to look at them together in my feed. A paper in Diversity and Distributions mapped what the diversity of large mammals would look like if not for what humans have wrought. Here it is.

Fig 1: The natural diversity of large mammals is shown as it would appear without the impact of modern man. The figure shows the variation in the number of large mammals (>45kg) that would have occurred per 100x100km grid cell. The numbers on the scale indicate the number of species. Credit: Soren Faurby.

And a paper in Global Change Biology mapped above-ground vegetation biomass across the tropics.

"We combined two existing datasets of vegetation aboveground biomass (AGB) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 2011, 9899; Nature Climate Change, 2, 2012, 182) into a pan-tropical AGB map at 1-km resolution ." — “We combined two existing datasets of vegetation aboveground biomass (AGB) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 2011, 9899; Nature Climate Change, 2, 2012, 182) into a pan-tropical AGB map at 1-km resolution.”

So my question is this: why does high-biomass vegetation support a relatively large diversity of mammals in SE Asia, but not in tropical Africa or South America?