Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

September 21, 2021

More Oz seed conservation resources

I’m not sure what their relationship is to the “Strategies and guidelines for developing, managing and utilising ex situ collections” from the Australian Network for Plant Conservation, which we blogged about a few days ago, but the similarly Australian Florabank Guidelines, “15 modules that roughly follow the seed supply chain,” also seem pretty useful.

September 20, 2021September 28, 2021

Brainfood: Food system, Transformation of, Climate change effects on, Pandemic and, Future of, Effect of Green Revolution on, Mesoamerican CWR, Moroccan crop diversity, USA crop diversity, GM, Environmental behaviours

Food systems: seven priorities to end hunger and protect the planet. Oh good, includes “Biodiversity and genetic bases need to be protected. Seed varieties must be preserved, and their phenotypes and genotypes explored in the contexts of climate change and nutrition. Traditional food and forest systems, including those of Indigenous peoples, need to be better understood and supported in national agricultural research systems.” Phew.
Future Changes in Wet and Dry Season Characteristics in CMIP5 and CMIP6 Simulations. The above is just as well because longer hotter and drier spells are coming to the tropics, and crops will suffer.
Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security. Plus there’s this too. Resilience has a cost.
The future of farming: Who will produce our food? Smallholders…
When agriculture drives development: Lessons from the Green Revolution. …and that may be bad.
Ok, the above two entries need unpacking. The second paper shows that the “agricultural engine of growth” was totally a thing during the Green Revolution, but the first that it now appears to be broken.
Extinction risk of Mesoamerican crop wild relatives. Oh no, on top of everything else, we might lose avocados and vanilla.
Determinants of Smallholder Maintenance of Crop Diversity in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Markets, land and water. So what would any new Green Revolution do to diversity? Have we learned anything?
Landscape complexity and US crop production. …are positively correlated. For Morocco too, I wonder?
Utilize existing genetic diversity before genetic modification in indigenous crops. At least in Ethiopia.
Compulsion and reactance: Why do some green consumers fail to follow through with planned environmental behaviors? Because some believe in technology, and other is abstinence. Which means they need different messages to encourage them to put their money where their mouths are. Would it work in Ethiopia?

September 15, 2021September 22, 2021

Featured: Breeding with wild peanuts

David Bertioli points out, in a comment to a blog post about a recent paper of his, that there’s more than one way to use peanut wild relatives in breeding:

Your previous blog detailed the impact of Charles Simpson’s crosses in Texas, which used the “tetraploid route” of introgression which donated a chromosome segment from A09 which confers root knot nematode resistance. The PNAS paper focuses mostly on progeny from the North Carolina “hexaploid route”, which ended up traveling most around the world. These introgressions, from A02 and A03, confer resistance to Late Leaf Spot, Rust, and to a lesser extent Web Blotch.

Would be interesting to compare the impacts of the two “routes.”

September 14, 2021September 14, 2021

Feeling even better about crop wild relatives

The publication of “Legacy genetics of Arachis cardenasii in the peanut crop shows the profound benefits of international seed exchange” in PNAS rang a faint bell:

Here, we uncover the contribution of one wild species accession, Arachis cardenasii GKP 10017, to the peanut crop (Arachis hypogaea) that was initiated by complex hybridizations in the 1960s and propagated by international seed exchange.

And yes, it turns out we had blogged about this wild peanut species more than a decade ago, in Another feel-good crop wild relative story.

Some things have changed since 2008, I’m happy to say. I seem to have had some difficulty pulling together data ((And the links are now dead.)) at the time, whereas Genesys had no trouble at all showing me 45 accessions. And GKP 10017 even has a DOI now.

September 14, 2021September 14, 2021

Fruit portraits

Masumi Shiohara was born in Nagano Prefecture in 1974. He worked as a development engineer at a microfabrication manufacturer. After leaving the company, he took over his family’s orchard from his parents, and is now running the farm. He is also involved in breeding and has developed a number of varieties.

He also takes amazing photos to record the characteristics of the different varieties he grows.

When filing a plant patent application, we keep records to identify each of the varieties and to compare those with other similar varieties. A collection of these records is called a characteristic table. As a fruit farmer and breeder, I continue to use photographic techniques to illustrate all of the important items in the trait table in a single piece of work. My photographs become a form of botanical art.

Art indeed. For a more mundane approach to varietal identification, however, check out these resources on Orchard Notes.