Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

March 26, 2014March 26, 2014

More on TePuke rice in New Zealand

Attentive readers may remember a post from some years back about the return of TePuke rice from IRRI’s genebank to New Zealand. Via our friends at IRRI, here’s photographic proof from Tony Olsen, a local farmer, that he actually planted that variety at what would be a world record southern latitude for the crop (even further S than Rocha, in Uruguay)…

…and that it actually grew, despite a not very sunny summer.

We wait to see whether there’s a decent harvest.

Incidentally, although IRRI was able to send Tony some seeds of TePuke, he says that:

A friend of mine helped me track down some TePuke Gold Rice seeds from the widow of the gentleman who supplied them to the NZ authorities that forwarded them to your institute in the 1970’s.

Which just goes to confirm that people really like holding on to their seeds.

Anyway, what with dire predictions about what will happen to rice yields in its Asian heartland, it might well be that places like New Zealand and Uruguay, now on the edge of the crop’s range, are going to feature much more prominently in the future. Maybe even parts of Japan, which has a young breed of farmers coming through who I’m sure are just itching to take on such upstarts.

March 25, 2014March 22, 2014

Wild peanuts hotspot visited

The light blogging during the past couple of weeks has been due to me travelling and Jeremy being submerged in work. We’re trying to get back into it, but things are still going to be a bit slow as we catch up. Just to tide you over for a while, though, here’s a quick taste of where I went. The guy on the right is Dr José Valls of Cenargen, which is part of Embrapa and houses the national plant genetic resources collection of Brazil. He’s showing us (that would be myself and Nora Castañeda of CIAT, who took the photo, which you can see better by clicking on it) the entire range of colour diversity in wild peanut flowers. He should know about that, because he is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on these plants, and manages one of the world’s most important collections of Arachis diversity. And here’s a quick view of only part of it, in which you can probably see about 50 (out of a total of maybe 80) different wild relatives of the peanut.

It is efforts such as those of José and a small band of like-minded peanut taxonomists, geneticists and breeders around the world that have led to the success of the peanut from the American South to East Timor, by way of Africa.

Incidentally, though I call, rather facetiously, José greenhouse a hotspot of agrobiodiversity in my title here, he pointed out to me that he thinks the centroid of wild Arachis species diversity is probably within walking distance of his desk in Brasilia. I think we have the data to test that…

March 24, 2014

Who pays for banana research?

A little squib in The Economist a week ago caught my eye.

The banana world was split over the merits of a merger between Chiquita and Fyffes that will create the fruit’s biggest distributor. Antitrust regulators will look closely at the deal, especially in Europe, which imposed stiff tariffs on Latin American bananas until 2012. But some say a merger makes sense, given the current squeeze in profit margins as a result of the costs of tackling potentially disastrous diseases in banana crops.

There’s a graph too, of banana exports by country. But that’s besides the point. The point, as I see it, is in that final sentence. I’d love to know how much Fyffes and Chiquita (and Dole and Uncle Tom Cobley and all) are contributing to research to combat the spread of Tropical Race 4 of Fusarium wilt. Indeed, some would say that the industry is the problem.

March 24, 2014February 27, 2014

Brainfood: Carpathian landuse, Yield & biodiversity, Cajanus @ICRISAT, Wheat meddling, Grape acne, Safflower diversity, Mangosteen origins, Agroforestry and SDGs, Brazilian Gir

Forest and agricultural land change in the Carpathian region—A meta-analysis of long-term patterns and drivers of change. Collapse of socialism bad for agriculture, good for forests. At the level of cover anyway, who knows what’s happened to diversity.
Closing yield gaps: perils and possibilities for biodiversity conservation. Better yields potentially good for birds, but everyone needs to work together.
The Wild Genepool of Pigeonpea at ICRISAT Genebank-Status and Distribution. There are still some gaps.
Meddling Wheat Germplasm to Augment Grain Protein Content and Grain Yield. I just love that title.
Interkingdom transfer of the acne causing agent, Propionibacterium acnes, from human to grapevine. First time ever, apparently, that a human pathogen attacks a crop. But do I have to start worrying about wine?
Discrimination and genetic diversity of cultivated and wild safflowers (Carthamus spp.) using EST-microsatellites markers. C. palestinus is the closest.
New evidence on the origin of mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana L.) based on morphology and ITS sequence. Not an interspecific hybrid after all.
Knowledge gaps and research needs concerning agroforestry’s contribution to Sustainable Development Goals in Africa. Can agroforestry concepts and practices form an effective, efficient and fair pathway towards the achievement of many Sustainable Development Goals? Yes, but only if governance of food production is multi-sectoral and system-based.
History, structure, and genetic diversity of Brazilian Gir cattle. Diversity is not as restricted as might be feared, so it can probably take a breeding programme with high selection intensity.

March 22, 2014March 23, 2014

Globalized diets paper globalizes

You may, unless of course you’ve been visiting Mars, have come across in the past couple of weeks coverage of Colin Khoury’s (along with co-authors) paper on “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.” That’s Colin to the left in his office at CIAT, when I visited him last week. The paper has really caught the imagination of the media, and is now one of PNAS’s most attention-grabbing articles ever, in the top 5% of all articles in fact. One of the better write-ups was in NPR, but there’s lots, lots more, in multiple languages. Including a brief mention by World Bank VP Rachel Kyte and CGIAR Fund Council Chair at a Wageningen University event. But where did the idea for the study come from? Well, we are not prone to boasting here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, but please forgive us on this occasion if we point out that it is a post by Colin in these very pages about four years ago that marks the beginning of his journey to superstardom. From little acorns…

And let us not forget that we can do something about these trends.