Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

June 26, 2012June 26, 2012

Superwheat: not another comic hero

BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today this morning had visited the John Innes Centre to hear all about superwheats, promising yields of 15 t/ha as opposed to the current (UK) average of about 8t/ha. Intrepid reporter Anna Hill couldn’t supress a little chuckle as she gazed in awe at 5 foot (150 cm) tall plants towering over her, each ear enclosed in a little plastic bag.

The John Innes Centre is looking in wheats from thousands of years ago for traits to feed the 9 billion, traits that might have been left behind because they weren’t incorporated into the pool when modern wheat breeding began.

There’s a lot there to take issue with. The researcher ¹ described landraces as having developed “almost naturally,” which rather downplays the role of farmers in both selecting and maintaining the characteristics of their landraces. It also gives the lie to the idea that these landraces are thousands of years old. I don’t know exactly when they were collected, but I’d be willing to bet is was less than 100 years ago, at most.

Then there’s the whole idea of going back to landraces in search of forgotten traits as if this was some Eureka-style breakthrough in breeder thinking. John Innes’ breeders are hardly the first to have thought of this. In fact CIMMYT went one better, and actually recreated modern wheat by re-hybridizing the parental species, broadening considerably the genetic base for breeders.

(Those breeders, by the way, have just published a summary of the yield gains in their elite spring wheat programme over the past 15 years (1995-2009). Average annual gains across 919 environments in 69 countries are of the order of 0.65%. Of course, that’s no reason to be complacent — the trend may be slowing — but still … ²)

And finally, the bit that really made me squirm was when Anna Hill put Alford (if it was he) on the spot by asking what traits he was looking for, and whether he had found anything, and the poor researcher was left to utter pleasantries about transport systems, and leaf area, and robust plants and disease resistance and photosynthesis and “it’s very complicated”. It all seemed to reflect a press release in search of a story.

Anyway, listen for yourself.

June 25, 2012June 25, 2012

Collecting manual for plant genetic resources updated and online

Collecting plant genetic diversity is one of those great fat handbooks essential for anyone interested in, er, collecting plant genetic diversity. New it’ll set you back USD230. What’s more, the information in that dead-tree edition is truly ancient, much of it dating back to before 1995. But here’s good news. A brand-spanking new (and almost complete) version is available for your online edification, and our very own Luigi Guarino remains one of its editors. Old information has been updated. New information has been included. The whole thing can be downloaded (and printed, if you must). What’s more, “the editors invite your comments”.

What are you waiting for?

June 25, 2012June 25, 2012

Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes

Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.

June 22, 2012June 21, 2012

MAPPR responds

A couple of days ago we donned the guise of an investor seeking a site for their cassava processing plant in Tanzania, and ended up expressing some reservations about the advertised ability of HarvestChoice’s MAPPR online mapping tool to help us out with that tricky task. We thus issued a challenge: “You be that policymaker in the blurb that wants to ‘identify regions of a country with high concentrations of both poverty and cropland.’ If you can do that, I promise to host the results here. And apologize to the MAPPR team.” Well, Stanley Wood has risen to the challenge in a comment on that post, which we now reproduce below. He also explains how the team intends to go about improving MAPPR, based in part on user feedback such as this. As for the apology, I’m happy to issue it. But I have one question for Stanley and the team. Do they really think the average policymaker is going to want to fiddle about sorting columns in an Excel spreadsheet to “identify regions of a country with high concentrations of both poverty and cropland”? Especially as they kind of have been promised a nice map in which the answer would just jump out at them… Anyway, we look forward to test-driving future versions of a tool with obviously a lot of potential, but which just isn’t quite there yet, and could obviously do with a bit more attention to the kind of specific use cases Stanley presents here, and we dealt with earlier. Many thanks to Stanley for taking the time to reply, and very best wishes to him and the MAPPR team.

Thanks for a very helpful posting in terms of sharpening our focus on potential MAPPR improvements. That rather long pipeline already includes alleviating some of the frustrations you encountered, particularly the inability to download user-created maps in addition to the table and chart download options. As shown on your screenshots of the Market Shed summary tool it is already possible to download the map in GIS format (the button with the – admittedly arcane – inscription “Download .SHP”), but that feature is indeed absent in the other summary options. What you (and others) have highlighted is also the lack of an option to download the map you created map in a cleanly annotated .png or similar format to put directly into a report or presentation. I think we maybe a month away from adding that capability.

We will follow up with our way more technical folks on the likely causes of the dreaded “404″ and see what that issue might be. I also don’t know what HI is, but I’m sure Chris can enlighten us. We will soon be adding server memory to enhance performance which might be a fix if it proves to be a capacity issue.

On the final comment about poverty and cropland, I went into MAPPR myself and made a map and table in less than a minute highlighting their coincidence at a district level in Tanzania. I saved the map and downloaded the table (and just as you did I had to grab the map with Print Screen for the time being).

Are some aspects of MAPPR both limiting and a bit kludgy? Indeed so. But feedback like yours and that of other users, in addition to our own pipeline of fixes and enhancements, can only serve to make it better. Indeed, since you’re an investor, we welcome your investment in our data and tools to speed up those improvements!

Meanwhile, please keep the feedback coming.

Stanley Wood

June 21, 2012May 13, 2013

Agro-business flourishes in Mali

“By selling these seeds in small packets at local markets as well as in her shops, these are more accessible and affordable for resource-poor women farmers.”

One picture is worth a thousand words, they say. The one up there is the last in a series of images on The Guardian’s Global Development blog.

Mali’s first woman seed entrepreneur Maïmouna Coulibaly has launched an agribusiness which brings tasty and nutritious seed varieties on to the market. ‘When the seeds are good, so are the yields. But people need to like the taste to buy it at the market. When we do food tastings we find out what works,’ she says

The whole slideshow promotes the new and improved varieties that Maïmouna Coulibaly is selling because they are so much better than local varieties. But how about that product placement? Wonder what that’s worth?