- Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds, Everyday Practices, and Food Security in Mexico. Growing landraces in Mexico as a feminist act.
- Resource-Use Patterns in Swidden Farming Communities: Implications for the Resilience of Cassava Diversity. In this bit of Brazil, all farmers have some cassava varieties, other varieties are more private, which means that diversity is reasonably well maintained if farms are lost at random. Ah, but what about if women farmers are lost?
- Indigenous Knowledge on Landraces and Fonio-Based Food in Benin. 35 landraces, some of them even agronomically good. No word on whether those are the common or the private ones.
- A Review on Genetic Improvement of Cauliflower. There’s a tension between hybrids and breeding for organic conditions even in cauliflower.
- Growth Performance of Indian Major Carps and Their Hybrids in Polyculture in Bangladesh. Looks like hybrids are bad in carp, though.
- Deep Evolutionary Comparison of Gene Expression Identifies Parallel Recruitment of Trans-Factors in Two Independent Origins of C4 Photosynthesis. Plants which diverged 140 million years ago have in the meantime evolved the same trans-factors (“protein that binds to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow [or transcription] of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA”) to come up with C4 photosynthesis. You know, this C4 rice thing just might be doable.
- Organic Diets Significantly Lower Children’s Dietary Exposure to Organophosphorus Pesticides. When “conventional” food was replaced by organically grown stuff, children had lower levels of nasties in the urine. No word on what it took to convince the kids to eat their veggies.
- Building the crops of tomorrow: advantages of symbiont-based approaches to improving abiotic stress tolerance. Why breed, when you can inoculate.
- A single evolutionary innovation drives the deep evolution of symbiotic N2-fixation in angiosperms. It all started long ago with a cryptic mutation, which was lost and gained multiple times, but some clades are unlikely to lose it when they have gained it.
- Seeds of Persistence: Agrobiodiversity in the American Mountain South. “…southern/central Appalachia is the most diverse foodshed at the varietal level in the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico studied to date.”
- Separating the wheat from the chaff – a strategy to utilize plant genetic resources from ex situ genebanks. Using fancy math to mine legacy phenotypic data can yield a couple extra alleles.
- Sustainability and Food & Nutrition Security: A Vulnerability Assessment Framework for the Mediterranean Region. Take each vulnerability (say to climate change, or price volatility) and break it down into exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity.
Happy birthday, Bioversity International
Good times for Seeds of Time
We somehow missed the news that Seeds of Time, Sandy McCloud‘s documentary about pioneering seed saver Cary Fowler, had won the Audience Award at the San Francisco Green Film Festival. Congratulations to all concerned. Here’s the trailer. Hope it comes your way.
Coincidentally, Prof. Brian Cox has been filming for the BBC up at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week.
Fascinating day filming at the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard – the world's seeds, stored for thousands of years! http://t.co/fIoPNWujVf
— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) June 25, 2014
Not so boring Bonn
A nice evening yesterday listening to a great talk by Dr Ola Westengen of NordGen on the importance of global efforts to conserve crop diversity, and in particular the role of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. That was followed by a reception in a very pleasant space in the Mediterranean section of the botanic garden of the University of Bonn. But not before a tour of the economic plants collection, which is across the road from the main grounds of the botanic garden. Well worth a visit if you’re ever in Bonn. Perhaps unusually, this botanic garden has a long history of interest in the study and conservation of crop diversity. For example, Friedrich August Koernicke, who worked there in the middle of the 19th century, made a famous collection of local cereal landraces. A little genebank is being developed for long-term seed storage, which should be ready by the end of the summer.
Robert Rhoades remembered
It was just over four years ago that Prof. Robert Rhoades, pioneer of agricultural anthropology, passed away. He’s remembered this month in a Special Issue of the journal Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment entitled Tending the Field.
Prof. Rhoades didn’t just invent the field of agricultural anthropology. Here’s an extract from one of the papers, Long in the Horn: An Agricultural Anthropology of Livestock Improvement, by Tad Brown, one of his students, on the conservation of the Pineywoods cattle landrace in the southern US:
Through my fieldwork, I also located one lone bull descending from a Holt cow in Alabama. It is the offspring of a cross with a Florida Cracker bull. After some deliberation, Rhoades bought that half-bred Holt bull, and he would jokingly threaten to start his own strain (see Figure 2). To Rhoades, a purebred landrace was a bit of a contradiction in terms. Just as cattlemen derived named-strains from the larger population of woods cattle, the division and recombination of family herds was the process by which people and cattle came to inhabit the southeastern pines. As such, the emphasis on genetics and purity of descent in livestock conservation efforts today can be somewhat averse to the social history from which the landrace breeds were derived (R. Rhoades, personal communication).
And here’s that Fig. 2. Prof. Rhoades practiced what he preached. How many of us can say that?