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Getting to grips with hairy vetch

A post over at Biofortified entitled “Will cover crops feed the world?” asked an intriguing question:

Why not take a survey of red clover and hairy vetch germplasm, looking for those that fix nitrogen at high rates, have good winter survival, and decay at a reasonable rate to provide fertilizer for crops the following year, and then combine those traits? (And while you’re at it, you could try to do something about hairy vetch’s horrendous seed yield. Non-shattering trait, anyone?)

Well, I thought to myself, maybe you can find those traits already combined. So I looked on Genesys to see what germplasm of Vicia villosa, or hairy vetch, we have to play with. Quite a bit as it turns out: 1374 accessions from 60-odd countries, conserved in 30-odd genebanks. These are the accessions which have georeferences:

I looked in a little more detail at the USDA collection over at GRIN. As luck would have it, there are data on 40-odd accessions from a 2001 evaluation trial. Among the descriptors recorded are N content and winter survival. I downloaded the Excel spreadsheet, and some quick sorting revealed a couple of accessions which are both high in N and have decent winter survival, eg PI 232958 from Hungary and PI 220880 from Belgium. Another dataset shows that some accessions in the collection are non-shattering. Alas, neither of the previous two accessions were characterized for that trait, or at least I couldn’t find the data online, but I was intrigued to see that PI 220879, also from Belgium, is non-shattering.

I posted Biofortified’s question on Facebook too and Dirk Enneking came back almost immediately with more advice:

Provorov and Tikhonovich suggest that the recently domesticated species such as Vicia villosa are better at N-fix. For non-shattering, try the named cultivars such as Ostsaat etc. and grow them where there is sufficient humidity at harvest time to reduce shattering.

Now, where’s my finder’s fee?

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Evaluating nutrition interventions

The Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre has a review out of “agricultural interventions that aim to improve nutritional status of children.” There is both good and bad news. The bad news is that

The studies reviewed report little or no impact of agricultural interventions on the nutritional status of children. This result confirms the results of previous systematic reviews on the same topic.

Ouch. The good news is that

…unlike previous reviews, we attribute this result to the lack of statistical power of the studies reviewed rather than to the lack of efficacy of these interventions.

Hardly reassuring, though, is it. A couple of orange sweet potato (OSP) studies are included in the review. As I said in a post a couple of days back on a recent paper on OSP, which came too late for this review, evaluation of nutritional and health impacts is hard. Perhaps the new Bioversity publication “Improving nutrition with agricultural biodiversity” will help? It might with project design, but its section on evaluation doesn’t seem particularly detailed, and there’s nothing on impact assessment. Maybe that’s to come? Hopefully someone from Bioversity will tell us.

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The business of bananas and apples

Quite by chance, two items that give insights into the backstory behind the No. 1 and No. 2 fruits in the world.

The always intriguing Nicola Twilley takes her class (Artificial Cryosphere) on a tour of New York’s biggest banana handler. Sure, we all know that the banana is the industrial fruit par excellence, but I guarantee Nicola’s report will open your eyes. And give you a million conversation stoppers, should you ever need them. Did you know, for example, that a recently gassed banana ripening room smells “like a wine-soaked carpet, the morning after”?

Meet the Sweetango! Next up, the patented, “managed variety” apple SweeTango®. I heard an interview with journalist John Seabrook at NPR, although unfortunately the New Yorker article that got him invited to talk about SweeTango® in the first place is not available for free. Among several fascinating elements in the story, I was struck by the control that the University of Minnesota is exercising over SweeTango®, which has its own website. Farmers cannot just sell direct to supermarkets or wholesalers. They have to sell back to a consortium established by the University, which aims to keep quality standards high. I wonder how much the University will make on the deal. I also wonder whether, like some of the DOC wines here, excess apples might be found for sale, unlabeled, at the side of a Minnesota county road. And it looks like there’s a lot more to Seabrook’s article than SweeTango®, about apples and apple breeding in general.

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Searching British newspapers for agrobiodiversity now virtually possible

The British Newspaper Archive is potentially a great resource for research into agricultural biodiversity in the past.

We have scanned millions of pages of historical newspapers and made them available online for the first time ever.

Search millions of articles by keyword, name, location, date or title and watch your results appear in an instant.

I did a search on the apple variety Pearmain and got 44 hits from 1753 to 1944.

So, for example, the Caledonian Mercury has a classified on Monday 1 January 1753 which says:

…glifh Apples, fuch as Nonpareis, Holland Pippens, Royal Rennets, Kentilh Pippens, Pearmains, and Rulfets, inno IcfsQuantity than a Box containing two bufhels; alfo very Hne and large Chcfhire Cheefe, from a 200 Pound-weight and do^tovard, the beft Gl…

Alas, if you want any more than that, you have to pay, and rather steeply too. Pity.

LATER: All the more so as Google seems to have discontinued its Timeline feature in News Archive search. Which I hadn’t noticed and I’m quite sad about now.