Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

May 28, 2013May 28, 2013

The purple breadfruit of Tamotu

I really hope the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of the Solomon Islands won’t mind me reproducing this snippet on a cool breadfruit variety from the province of Temotu, courtesy of the April issue of their monthly electronic newsletter, Agrikalsa Nius. ¹

breadfruit

May 27, 2013May 29, 2013

Brainfood: Urban German grassland, Urban Flemish gardens, Totally wild beans, Inter-specific Vigna crosses, Vietnamese cattle, Sustainable intensification, Gender, Oak seeds

Urban land use types contribute to grassland conservation: The example of Berlin. And perhaps also to CWR conservation?
Garden management and soil fertility in Flemish domestic gardens. Little about their diversity, though, alas.
Drought Tolerance in Wild Plant Populations: The Case of Common Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Greater ecological amplitude than the domesticate.
Introgression of productivity and other desirable traits from ricebean (Vigna umbellata) into black gram (Vigna mungo). It ain’t easy, but may be worth the effort.
Assessment of genetic diversity and population structure of Vietnamese indigenous cattle populations by microsatellites. Some traditionally recognized breeds are close enough genetically to be conserved as a group.
Ecogeographic survey and gap analysis of Lathyrus L. species. Only 6 of 36 species are adequately represented in genebanks.
To close the yield-gap while saving biodiversity will require multiple locally relevant strategies. Location, location, location.
Co-evolution of landscape patterns and agricultural intensification: An example of dairy farming in a traditional Dutch landscape. And here’s an example.
Gender and Agricultural Innovation in Peasant Production of Native Potatoes in the Central Andes of Peru. And I suppose this is another, in a way.
Ecological significance of seed desiccation sensitivity in Quercus ilex. Drying causes mortality. Could be used to predict response to climate change. In other news, oak seeds are recalcitrant.

May 26, 2013

Seeds for Needs in India

Seeds for Needs is a series of projects aimed at getting diverse material into farmer’s hands so they can assess it for themselves and decide whether and how they want to make use of it. An interesting twist on the idea is to harvest the results from hundreds of farmers and make greater sense (and use) of all that information. Now here’s a little video from Bioversity International about how things are going in India.

The growth of the farmer network, from 50 to 500 in a year, is fantastic, although I can’t help thinking that Jacob van Etten is still dreaming of hundreds of thousands of participants in his grand experiment in crowdsourcing.

May 26, 2013May 25, 2013

Getting past that 75%

China has lost 90% of the wheat varieties it had 60 years ago. The US has lost over 90% of the fruit tree and vegetable varieties it had at the start of the 20th century. Mexico has lost 80% of its corn varieties, India 90% of its rice varieties. In Spain, the number of melon varieties has gone down from nearly 400 in the early 1970s to a dozen.

What, not 75%? Anyway, too bad there are no references, but the Indian figure may come from the sources we discussed a while back. And of course “lost” is too dramatic. Some varieties may no longer be grown by farmers, but could still be in genebanks. But it is good to see a trope that’s well past its sell-by date being avoided for once.

May 24, 2013May 23, 2013

Spall barred global feeble

Well, it should really be Svalbard Global Seed Vault, but that’s how it was rendered by the automatic captioning in this TEDxMonterey talk. Anyway, it was partly the Vault that inspired Dornith Doherty to embark on her project to document seed banks photographically, Archiving Eden. Wish I’d thought of that.