Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
More of one of our favourite leitmotifs. Lois Englberger tells me her team’s latest paper on variety-level nutritional composition has been accepted by the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis ((Carotenoid and mineral content of Micronesian giant swamp taro (Cyrtosperma) cultivars by Englberger L, Schierle J, Kraemer K, Aalbersberg W, Dolodolotawake U, Humphries J, Graham …
Jeremy says we sound like a broken record on the lack of agricultural thinking in biodiversity circles at times, and he’s right of course. More charitably, it could be thought of as judicious use of a leitmotif. In which case another one would certainly be the unfortunate dearth of information on nutritional composition at the …
Continue reading “Bigger not necessarily better in agrobiodiversity”
Jeremy blogged sometime back about the lack of variety-level nutritional data out there. And more recently we’ve had an exchange of comments on the limited extent to which potato germplasm collections have been screened for micronutrients. One reason is probably the fact that nutritional composition is difficult to measure. Well, today comes news from USDA …
Yet more about iron (and other assorted micronutrients). A recent post of mine elicited a comment from Glenn to the effect that breeders have screened germplasm collections of the major staples for micronutrient composition. I was skeptical about the extent to which this has been done (though not, I must add, about the fact that …
We know hardly anything about the differences among varieties of the same crop. Oh sure, we know what different varieties look like; that’s easy. But detailed differences in composition are hard to find. There are the classics, of course, like wetet be gunche sorghum in Ethiopia, whose name translates as “milk in my mouth”. It …
Continue reading “GI had no idea there was so much diversity”