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Where will the protein come from?

As everyone and her dog ventures an opinion of how much more food will be needed to properly feed how many more mouths by when, it is worth bearing in mind an idea that was a little bit hidden in Oliver Morton’s wonderful introduction to The Anthropocene, in The Economist a couple of weeks ago.

Although nitrogen fixation is not just a gift of life — it has been estimated that 100m people were killed by explosives made with industrially fixed nitrogen in the 20th century’s wars — its net effect has been to allow a huge growth in population. About 40% of the nitrogen in the protein that humans eat today got into that food by way of artificial fertiliser. There would be nowhere near as many people doing all sorts of other things to the planet if humans had not sped the nitrogen cycle up.

There’s a chart, too.

Industrial nitrogen fixation does not, of course, require oil, but it does require lots of cleaner, cheaper energy, and there’s still no sign of that just around the corner.

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A rare coconut described

Coconut-hunter Roland Bourdeix does it again:

Here is the first description with pictures of one of the rarest coconut varieties from French Polynesia.

This is a Compact Red Dwarf, producing big round fruit of red-orange color; the young fruits show inside the husk a typical pink color, like the pink color found in the Pilipog Green Dwarf from the Philipinnes. This dwarf seems to be mainly allogamous. Its stem and leaves are quite similar to those of the Niu Leka Dwarf from Fiji.

This kind of dwarf will be very precious in the future, especially for production of hybrid seednuts. If you plant in geographical isolation this red dwarf mixed together with a green variety (dwarf or tall); then you will obtain seednuts s recognizable in the nursery. Seednuts with green sprouts will be the green variety, seednut with red sprouts will be the red dwarf, and seednuts with brown sprouts will be natural hybrids between the red dwarf and the green variety. Both conservation of the two varieties and production of hybrid seednuts are done in a single location. In this process, no need to make costly emasculation, because the red dwarf is allogamous. No need also to plant this seedgarden in a research institute: such a design can be easily managed by farmers in farmer’s fields, as geographical isolation is available.

So in the future, even in a small Pacific country, we could imagine 20 farmers producing locally 20 differents kinds of hybrids using their own varieties as male parents… This idea needs to be refined, but this could lead to a complete change in the policies of coconut seednut production at world level. An illustration of a quite similar process of seed production is given here for Samoa.

A question is about the genetic origin of this Compact Red Dwarf: is it a late progeny of Marechal hybrids? Or is it the progeny of a natural cross between Niu leka and a red dwarf such as Haari Papua? We will do soon some DNA analysis to study this point.

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Andean products on display

The Fifth Potato Festival is underway in the Surco district of Lima, Peru. It sounds like fun, but all the information about it online at the moment is in Spanish only. If you don’t read the language, and can’t be bothered fighting with the results of Google Translate, you can read a short piece on last year’s event in English. It’s actually about much more than just the potato. There are stands on a whole range of new Andean products:

…black quinoa, royal quinoa, red quinoa, quinoa sajama, maca, instant amaranth, instant cañihua, wheat, red corn, corn chullpi, bean mashco, barley mashco, black potato, white potato flour, etc.

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Selling seed of orphan crops in Kenya

The latest episode of BBC’s Horizon programme deals with a number of things we’ve blogged about here before, for example soil mapping in Africa and biochar. But the payoff for us here is the last segment, which is on a Kenyan seed company called Leldet, which…

…now offers farmers the opportunity to buy different varieties of previously forgotten under-utilised seeds, more suitable for the area. They supply them in smaller quantities so farmers aren’t over reliant on one crop.

Watch it quick, because I don’t know how long it will stay on the site.

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Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. 1

You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. 2 Like I’ve done here:

Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:

But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?