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How to fix plant breeding

Big Picture Agriculture is a great source of stories about, er, the big picture in agriculture. Catching up with Kay I came across this beaut:

GM labeling activist movements are misguided. Fred Kaufman explains that the real problem lies in U.S. plant patent laws which have done more harm than good, overall. Food patent laws stand in the way of good scientific research.

The most direct and efficient way to undermine the food industrialist monopoly of the molecular seed business is to reform these laws (particularly the utility patent law of 1985), and make food property rights less exclusive, less lucrative, and less enduring. … Instead of tilting at the windmill of food labels, food nonprofits should hire a fleet of I.P. lawyers and send them to Washington to demand reform of the Plant Patent Act. When there’s less profit in genetic modification, things will get better for consumers, farmers, and scientists—pretty much everyone except corporate executives.

I really have nothing to add.

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Quinoa in Pakistan

Heralding the International Year of Quinoa, here’s an odd video of quinoa in Pakistan.

Don’t freak, as I did, if it looks a little odd if you open it in a browser; that’s just the 3D out to get you. There’s a link to get rid of that annoyance, but not to improve the rest of the production.

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The history of the tomato

One reason to love the internets, back into which, fully refreshed, we plunge, is this comment:

[T]he plant Galen mentions is the λυκοπέρσιον, lykopersion, not lykopersikon. The name means ravager or slayer of wolves, like our wolfsbane. The transition to the “wolf-peach” happened sometime later, probably a scribe’s error. Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon describes it as an Egyptian plant with strong-smelling, yellowish juice and identifies it as Hyoscyamus muticus, one of the very poisonous, tropane-bearing Solanaceae. There are plenty of other seriously deadly Solanaceae in Egypt but this is as good a guess as any.

That’s from Pat the Plant 1 in response to this (very familiar) bit in a long and fascinating post about the tomato from Hollis at In the Company of Plants and Rocks.

“Lycopersicum” means “wolf peach”, and probably was selected by Linnaeus from the classical literature. Lycopersicon was a plant described by the Roman physician Galen as being both delicious and dangerous — appropriate for the tomato during Linnaeus’s time (see discussion below). No one has figured out what Galen’s lycopersicon actually was, and there’s no reason to think it was the tomato of the Americas, given that he lived in Europe during the second century AD. (“Wolf peach” is sometimes attributed to German were-wolf legends, for example here).

I found Hollis’ post, somewhat belatedly, via the latest Berry go Round, hosted by Susannah at On the other hand. Being partly responsible for BGR, I feel bad that it has been a little hit and miss lately, and glad that Susannah is going to feed and water it going forward until it is once again bursting with the best botany blogging the internets can offer. Why not submit your own work?

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Brainfood: Beans, Pollinator decline, Wheat mixtures, Outcrossing