- Scope of novel and rare bulbiferous coconut palms (Cocos nucifera L.). Produces bulbils instead of floral parts.
- Holocene landscape intervention and plant food production strategies in island and mainland Southeast Asia. Like the Amazon.
- Grazing alters insect visitation networks and plant mating systems. More outcrossing in grazed birch woods.
- Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders’ Society of Moravia: Mendel’s Forgotten “Research Network.” Before peas, there were sheep.
- Genetic Characterization of Grape Cultivars from Apulia (Southern Italy) and Synonymies in Other Mediterranean Regions. About half are also grown somewhere else.
- Fibre-yielding plant resources of Odisha and traditional fibre preparation knowledge − An overview. 146 species, no less.
- Functional Traits Differ between Cereal Crop Progenitors and Other Wild Grasses Gathered in the Neolithic Fertile Crescent. How do cereal progenitors differ from all the other grasses our ancestors used to eat? Adaptation to competition and disturbance. They were weeds, basically.
- Testing a silvicultural recommendation: Brazil nut responses 10 years after liana cutting. Biodiversity bad for Brazil nuts.
The rice in Spain grows mainly for the snails
With the floods in UK perhaps UK research institutes should turn their attention to rice as a crop. Need more rice experts! #UKrice
— GaryFoster (@Prof_GD_Foster) February 20, 2014
I suspect Prof. Foster was being facetious, and in any case would have to fight it out with other researchers working in a different direction, but maybe temperatures in England will soon be as suitable for rice cultivation as the rainfall regime. In Europe (and indeed Japan and New Zealand) the northern limit of rice cultivation seems to be at about 40-45 deg N, which covers the famous growing regions of the Po Valley in Italy and the Camargue in France. However, the very northernmost limit of rice cultivation in the world is at about 53 degrees N, which would put it at the latitude of Liverpool, say. So the south of England may not be entirely out of bounds in the future, if you factor in climate change and clever plant breeding.
Of course, as we read yesterday, temperature is not the only constraint to rice production in Europe. Spanish rice farmers are fighting an exotic snail, which may spread from the Ebro delta, which incidentally is on the 40th parallel N or thereabouts. Although rice has been in Spain since maybe the 8th century, its cultivation in the Ebro is relatively recent.
The first Designation of Origin for rice in Europe was granted to Calasparra rice which is grown in a mountainous area along the river Segura in the region of Murcia, the varieties being Bomba and Balilla X Solana. Both are sold as either brown or white rice. Bomba rice is the best-known of the Spanish varieties. Its grains are rounded but they increase lengthwise by almost fifty per cent during the cooking process and are very absorbent.
Also protected by a Designation of Origin is the rice grown traditionally in the Júcar river basin and in the Albufera, the most famous of the natural wetlands in Valencia where the varieties are Senia, Bahía and Bomba. The rice, mostly Bahía, grown in the Ebro delta in Tarragona (Catalonia) is also covered by a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).
For the benefit of prospective English rice farmers, Bomba is available from the Spanish genebank, and elsewhere too. No word on whether there is material somewhere resistant to the ravages of Pomacea insularum.
Featured: Seed law
So I asked whether James Ming Chen “would actually prevent seed saving,” and Clem rapidly shot back more questions.
If you mean “Will seed saving (legal or otherwise) actually be prevented” then I can’t say from skimming Chen’s paper cited here. However, if the question amounts to “Is he serious”, then I’d have to say – very much so.
I’m not finding any mention of publicly available germplasm in the piece, perhaps I’ve not looked closely enough. All the argument seems to be in favor of breeder’s rights and indeed there is plenty of disgust with the opportunity cost borne by breeding businesses that must invest in protection schemes so as to capitalize on their investment in breeding.
What I’m curious about in the seed law discussion on your side of the pond is how public domain germplasm will be treated… would seed of an heirloom variety be only available through gifting and non-commercial exchange? If someone grows a public domain seed and subsequently offers the same for commercial sale, will a purchaser have any recourse or claim if said seed is found to be other than described?
Ooops. I’ve just bitten the end of my tongue off, not rising to the bait of the “opportunity costs” borne by the poor beleaguered seed industry.
What’s up in seed laws?
The notion of farmers saving seed from one harvest to plant for the next is deeply ingrained, especially in ideas about subsistence and sustainable farming. Indeed, that process is usually seen as the foundation of all agriculture, to be abandoned at our peril. In the early 1990s, we saw attempts to shift the discussion on intellectual property from the farmer’s right to save seed of a formally-protected variety to the farmer’s privilege to do the same. Much of the rhetoric that attempts to stick it to The Seed Man focuses on seed saving, and the impact that F1 hybrids, GMOs and other evils will have on farmers who want to save their own seeds.
It is not surprising, therefor, that there’s a lot of sound and fury around the subject. From which melée I offer two snippets.
Bifurcated carrots is keeping a close eye on the progress of the proposed new European seed laws through the labyrinthine corridors of power. He’s hopeful that the lack of progress is a good thing, because it will start the whole process again.
While the seed industry thinks the proposal can be fixed with a few small changes, this is not the position of most seed related NGOs around Europe. It is certainly not our position. The current proposal is not without some good aspects, but overall it’s seriously flawed and should be rewritten.
James Ming Chen, a lawyer, will have no truck with any silly emotional, nostalgic idiocy.
Seed-saving advocates protest that compelling farmers to buy seed every season effectively subjects them to a form of serfdom. So be it. Intellectual property law concerns the progress of science and the useful arts. Collateral economic and social damage, in the form of affronts to the agrarian ego, is of no valid legal concern.
But would he actually prevent seed saving?
CGN18108 it is
Simon Foster very kindly took the trouble to post a comment setting the record straight on the source of that blight gene:
Apologies, a previous tweet from ourselves erroneously confirmed the accession as CGN18000. It is in fact CGN18108 which is still listed in the database as Solanum okadae (was subsequently found to be S. venturii in DNA fingerprinting studies).
The origin of Rpi-vnt1 is detailed in the original research paper describing the cloning and characterisation of the gene and which is cited in the Roy. Soc. paper published yesterday. All acknowledgement of sources was published in that paper.
Foster SJ, Park T-H, Pel M, Brigneti G, Sliwka J, Jagger L, van der Vossen E, Jones JDG. 2009 Rpi- vnt1.1, a Tm-2(2) homolog from Solanum venturii, confers resistance to potato late blight. MPMI 22, 589 – 600. (doi:10.1094/MPMI-22-5-0589)
Here’s the relevant bit of that paper:
Accessions of S. venturii and S. okadae were obtained from the Centre for Genetics Resources in Wageningen, the Netherlands (CGN) (Table 1). The S. venturii accessions were originally listed as S. okadae in the CGN database but have recently been reclassified based on work using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers to study the validity of species labels in Solanum section Petota (Jacobs 2008; Jacobs et al. 2008).
So my apologies to Dr Foster. There is indeed a very full and proper acknowledgement of the source of the gene in the earlier paper. However, I do still think that it would not really have taken much effort to also include an acknowledgement in the later paper. The confusion over which accession was actually used that I fell into, admittedly without taking the trouble of following the references, is evidence of why it’s important to do so.
Now to suggest to CGN that they may want to change the species name of CGN18108 in their database…
LATER: Just realized we started talking about all this quite a while ago.