Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

August 8, 2013August 8, 2013

A diverse look at productivity

Take a look at the graphic up there and tell me what you see? If you’re anything like me, you’ll be a bit surprised. In this kind of “heat map” green is usually good and red is usually bad, but what on Earth is good across much of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and bad just about everywhere else?

Yield — if you think about it properly.

A recent paper by Emily Cassidy and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota ¹ got a lot of press recently focused on the claim that feeding more people a nutritionally sound diet would be a lot easier if we just ate lower on the food chain. That’s an argument that lots of people have made, backed up to varying degrees with good numbers. What’s different this time is that the numbers are a lot more rigorous and, in my opinion, a lot more accessible. That map above, for example, shows the calories delivered to the food system per calorie produced. In other words, crudely, the amount of human food as opposed to animal feed.

Obvious, when you think about it, that the number of people fed per hectare is surely a better measure of agricultural productivity than the simple yield. That’s what underpins the money quote:

We find that, given the current mix of crop uses, growing food exclusively for direct human consumption could, in principle, increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected 2–3 billion people arriving through population growth). Even small shifts in our allocation of crops to animal feed and biofuels could significantly increase global food availability, and could be an instrumental tool in meeting the challenges of ensuring global food security.

There are other eye-opening graphics in the paper, for example a ranking of the major crops based on calories delivered to the food system versus calories lost. As you can imagine, maize doesn’t do well at all. Nor does barley, because so much goes to feed. I highly recommend taking a look at the full paper, which is freely available.

Cassidy et al. are decidedly not calling for everyone to go vegan. For a start, that would leave a lot of grass and other forages uneaten and a lot of nutritional holes in the diet of many people. They are suggesting that the “problem” of feeding future global population may be easier to solve than currently imagined, if people shift their diet. The problem of how to help people shift their diet, they don’t address.

August 6, 2013August 6, 2013

Too hot to think

It is hot in Rome at the moment, and hotter still at my desk. In fact, my computer gave up the ghost on Friday and had to have a brain transplant. All back to normal, for now, but not a lot to report, apart from trying to maintain a steady stream of Nibbles. A couple that didn’t fit there. First, the picture: an undoctored image of two consecutive items from my Twitter stream that just happened to take my fancy. Secondly, a trial of pickling cucumber varieties that didn’t even mention asier (about which I too knew nothing until 4 days ago). That post is about a year old, but someone else linked to it in the past couple of days. And, if you’re thinking of something to do with excess cucumbers, and you fancy a touch of the exotic, how about creating a pressure-infused cucumber martini? Sounds like a blast. Cheers!

August 5, 2013July 8, 2013

Brainfood: Coloured wheat, Very wild wheat, Yam bean, Turkish pigeons, Impact of margarine, Refugia, GM and choice, Indian sorghum, Cameroonian oil palm

The anthocyanin content of blue and purple coloured wheat cultivars and their hybrid generations. In other news, there are blue and purple wheat cultivars.
Phylogenetic relationships and Y genome origin in Elymus L. sensu lato (Triticeae; Poaceae) based on single-copy nuclear Acc1 and Pgk1 gene sequences. It’s a very diverse genus, probably polyphyletic, and has exchanged genes with Aegilops/Triticum in the past. And could again in the future, presumably.
Microsatellite Markers for the Yam Bean Pachyrhizus (Fabaceae). They work, both on the 3 (sic) cultivated species and 2 wild relatives.
The domestic livestock resources of Turkey: inventory of pigeon groups and breeds with notes on breeder organizations. 72 breeds? Really?
Land use impact assessment of margarine. Land occupation by the crops involved has a bigger impact on ecosystem services and biodiversity than the transformation process.
Bio-cultural refugia — Safeguarding diversity of practices for food security and biodiversity. Important for food security locally, but also because of the memories of how the “surprises of the past” were handled.
Farmer’s choice of seeds in four EU countries under different levels of GM crop adoption. More GM adoption = less choice. For maize in 4 European countries anyway.
Sorghum landraces patronized by tribal communities in Adilabad district, Andhra Pradesh. And now safe in NBPGR too.
Molecular characterization of oil palm Elaeis guineensis Jacq. materials from Cameroon. It’s all one big populations, and you don’t need that many accessions to represent the whole.

August 2, 2013August 3, 2013

In search of the elusive asier — pickling cucumbers with a difference

Fermentation is absolutely my favourite food process. Not just for bread, beer and yoghurt, but also for proper pickled cucumbers. ² So when a bread-baking blog I follow wrote about recreating a long-ago taste of pickled cucumbers, my heart went pitter-pat. I read Joanna’s story, and skipped on over to the recipe itself. Alas, these are not proper pickles. Indeed at one point the author insists “Be sure that when you boil the vinegar for the second time that it’s a good full, rolling boil to kill any bacteria”. Not my kind of thing at all. I could have just called it a day, except that there’s another aspect to the story that got me going. The cucumbers themselves seem to be rather special. Not easy to search online for, because most search engines seem to think you’re interested in Asia, so I went all social and put a call out to my friends in places where they might know about these things. ³

Ah yes, said Ove:

They are a group of cucumbers with thicker “flesh” than ordinary cucumbers. “The ‘Nordic Encyclopedia of Horticulture’ (5th edition 1945) names four varieties: ‘Dansk Asie’, ‘Langelands Asie’, ‘Middellang’ and ‘Ideal’”.

And he helpfully provided a photo.

Though there’s something to be said for pickled cucumber seed cavity, it isn’t much, so now I was very intrigued. I turned, first, to the USDA’s descriptors for Cucumis. That offers two characteristics of interest: cavitydiam, measured in mm at the thickest part of the fruit, and frtdia_a, measured likewise in cm. A quick download and mashup, and I’d have a seed cavity to fruit diameter ratio for all the cucumber accessions! Unfortunately, although they are listed as characteristic descriptors for Cucumis species, I couldn’t find a way actually to search for them. Agriculture and Agrifood Canada was even less helpful. ⁴ A document from ECP/GR mentioned flesh thickness and seed hull (which could be cavity or testa, I suppose) but was no more helpful.

Ah but … I had names! USDA knows nothing about the names from the Nordic Encyclopedia of Horticulture. The Garden Seed Inventory (6th edition) from Seed Savers Exchange does however list Langelang Giant ⁵ and says it has “white flesh with excel. texture, small core”. Langelands Kæmpe (Langelands Giant) is still available in Europe and a similar variety called Fatum in Germany. The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook for 2012, which lists all varieties offered by members, doesn’t seem to have any of the named varieties, although there are several that have larger or smaller cores than normal.

Most interesting, for me, was an entry for Danish Pickling in Vegetables of New York, Vol I Part IV, The Cucurbits.

This is a comparatively new variety which was introduced in 1912 by L. Daehnfeldt of Odense, Denmark … The variety produces fruits which are extremely large and long and thickly covered with fine spines. … Flesh medium thick, very fine texture, white in color, rather tart. Seed mass small and solid, with few seeds formed.

It is hard to tell how spiny Joanna’s Langelands is, but I think I see quite a few.

I couldn’t find much trace of any of the others in the Internet, with no useful sign of Ideal, probably because the word is just too common, even in conjunction with cucumber. However, the 1975 European Common Catalogue lists Ideal as a synonym of Delikateß added at that date, while Middellang was deleted from the common catalogue.

And there I came almost to an end. The name “asier” remained a puzzle. Were these Scandinavian favoured cucumbers originally from Asia? No, said Ove. “Asie (singular, asier is the plural) comes from Indian/Persian achár, originally meaning ‘bamboo shoots pickled in vinegar and spices’.” To which Stephen added “Wonder if it’s related to the as- in asparagus which also means shoot, also from west Asia..?” Over to you, philologists.

And what have I learned? That it remains incredibly difficult to find varieties with specific characteristics, even when you know what you’re looking for. That a cucumber with a small seed core is probably a great idea, even if you’re not planning to ferment it. That I would quite like to try growing it (hint, hint).

Oh, and that not everyone is as keen on fermentation as I am. If you want to get a bit deeper into it, can I recommend this very introductory podcast, in which, among other gems, Sandor Katz – fermentation revivalist – expressly compares the value of diverse microbes in fermentation and diverse varieties on farms?

July 30, 2013July 30, 2013

What’s eating India?

Resources Research undertook a labour of love to produce this graph. It shows, for 20 Indian states, roughly how much of pulses and cereals each tenth of the population eats each month. I urge you to go and read the full post for the details.

Bottom line: Of the 200 populations, 43 are “severely deficient” in cereals and pulses required per month.

The graph is based on data from national surveys of “Consumer Expenditure,” so I don’t know whether it includes food people grow rather than buy, but I doubt that makes much difference overall.

Makanaka makes lots of interesting points about the data, comparing the 2009-2010 survey with a similar one done five years before. Overall, this is a terrific example of open data allowing people to offer alternative interpretations to the standard line.