- Population and Environmental Correlates of Maize Yields in Mesoamerica: a Test of Boserup’s Hypothesis in the Milpa. Fallows don’t really reduce much with increasing population density. Yields, on the other hand, do.
- If They Grow It, Will They Eat and Grow? Evidence from Zambia on Agricultural Diversity and Child Undernutrition. Unlike other recent studies, this one finds positive correlations among production diversity, dietary diversity and nutritional outcomes.
- Community agro biodiversity conservation continuum: an integrated approach to achieve food and nutrition security. Provides the theoretical underpinning of the finding in the previous paper: conservation, cultivation, consumption and commerce.
- Home Garden Agrobiodiversity Differentiates Along a Rural—Peri–Urban Gradient in Campeche, México. Different species in urban homegardens compared to rural, but same overall diversity levels.
- Does certification improve biodiversity conservation in Brazilian coffee farms? Meh.
- Crop Species Diversity Changes in the United States: 1978–2012. It’s gone down.
- Mediterranean basin Ficus carica L.: from genetic diversity and structure to authentication of a Protected Designation of Origin cultivar using microsatellite markers. Microsatellites can recognize the protected ‘Kymis’ cultivar. Rejoice.
- Population genetic structure of Oryza rufipogon and O. nivara: implications for the origin of O. nivara. Multiple origins of nivara from rufipogon, and climatic differentiation.
- Complex tritrophic interactions in response to crop domestication: predictions from the wild. What’s good for humans is (generally) good for herbivores.
Parsnip seeds of success
Whatever the ICRAF genebank can do to get germplasm out there, the Warwick Crop Centre can also do, though admittedly these seem to be improved varieties, developed in collaboration with the private sector:
Seed packs to celebrate @warwickuni50 – and highlights @WarwickLifeSci @WarwickCrop and @Elsomsseeds partnerships pic.twitter.com/Y4mukYZ7RQ
— UKVGB (@WarwickGRU) September 24, 2015
That New Yorker story on heirlooms and Luther Burbank
On Friday Luigi nibbled the New Yorker’s recent story What Comes After Heirloom Seeds?, singling out Luther Burbank rather than the more contentious issue of where plant breeding is headed. The New Yorker’s fact-checking is legendary, at least among a certain demographic, in which I number myself. So I want to draw attention to a single punctuation mark, which in my view is imbued with as much snidery as a punctuation mark can be.
Burbank’s prolificacy grew out of a creativity that could seem almost shameless. He was willing to cross just about anything that had leaves: a plum with an apricot (originally a plumcot, now a pluot); a tomato with a potato (a worthless novelty); a blackberry with an apple (no clue); a peach with an almond (!). Burbank’s theoretical validation came from Charles Darwin and his 1876 survey, “The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom,” which Burbank seems to have mistaken for a how-to manual. He called himself an “evoluter” of plants.
Can you spot it? Yup, it’s that exclamation mark after the peach X almond cross. At first, I took the whole paragraph to be an expression of the author wilfully showing off his ignorance. After all, the examples seem like pretty obvious crosses to me. So I did a little cursory fact-checking of my own. Seems he’s a gardener. No, wait, he writes about gardening; not the same thing at all.
Why the surprise at peach X almond then? Blowed if I know. So I’ll just science it to death.
Section Amygdalus and section Persicae are closer [to] each other than to any other sections.
What that means is that the peach and the almond were probably the most closely related of the crosses Burbank made, and thus probably the easiest and the least worthy of notice.
The quote is from Phylogeny and Classification of Prunus sensu lato (Rosaceae), by Shuo Shi, Jinlu Li, Jiahui Sun, Jing Yu and Shiliang Zhou, published in the Journal of Integrative Biology (2013) 55: 1069–1079. 1
I’m surprised the New Yorker wasn’t aware of it.
Wheat scientists descend on Sydney
The International Wheat Congress kicks off in Sydney this week, with its stellar lineup of speakers, and social media accoutrements, to remind us that, despite all the talk of gluten intolerance and the like, wheat is a big deal…
Countries where wheat provides more than 1/3 of daily calories: Braun #IWC9 pic.twitter.com/SRjCegCBkW
— CIMMYT (@CIMMYT) September 21, 2015
…it’s under threat, but CGIAR is on it:
About 70 percent of spring bread and durum wheat varieties released globally over the 20-year period between 1994 and 2014 were bred or are derived from wheat lines developed by [CGIAR]… Benefits of CGIAR wheat improvement research, conducted mainly by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), range from $2.8 billion to $3.8 billion a year…which highlights the economic benefits of international collaboration in wheat improvement research.
Brainfood: Cowpea evaluation, Varietal mixtures, Eragrostis core, Nigerian cassava diversity, Turkish alfalfa, Italian wild grapes, Cleome veggie, AnGR history
- Genotypic difference in salinity tolerance during early vegetative growth of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) from Myanmar. 3 out of 21 seems a pretty good proportion.
- Epidemiological and evolutionary management of plant resistance: optimizing the deployment of cultivar mixtures in time and space in agricultural landscapes. Best to combine with rotations.
- Barnyard millet global core collection evaluation in the submontane Himalayan region of India using multivariate analysis. Three groups: India, Japan, and everything else.
- Determinants of on-farm cassava biodiversity in Ogun State, Nigeria. Experience and size of farm.
- Historical Alfalfa Landraces Perform Higher Yield Under Dry Farming in Turkey. At least at these two locations in Kars. One does wonder why breeders bother, though.
- Identification and characterization of Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris populations in north-western Italy. Was thought to be lost in Piedmont, but 5 small wild populations found, in danger of contamination from the crop.
- Cleome viscosa: a promising underutilized minor crop. Worth a try, though the name is hardly promising.
- Changing values of Farm Animal Genomic Resources. From historical breeds to the Nagoya Protocol. Everything is political now. Welcome to my world.