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Aeroponic potato seeds in Kenya

A fascinating article on the Voice of America website tells us that Kenyan scientists, with colleagues at the International Potato Center (CIP), have developed a technique for growing potatoes plants in air (with water and nutrients) and then distributing the resulting plants to farmers, who report yield increases of 4 to 5 times. 1 The article dates back to June 2010, but CIP just shared it with its Facebook friends, and that gives me the chance to say I don’t fully understand:

Seeds are germinated in the laboratory. The seedlings are then fixed into holes cut out of Styrofoam sheets. And then after the seeds are developed further, they are harvested and distributed to farmers.

Talk about “seeds” and “germination” makes me think they’re talking about true potato seed, which has been the next big thing in potatoes for as long as I can remember. But if that were true, I would have expected the article to make more of it. And what will it do for potato diversity in Kenya? I have no idea what the market-leading cultivars are or the extent of concentration; how many varieties will the researchers make available?

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Is lack of sex really the problem for grapes?

There’s a very interesting article in the New York times reporting on a major investigation of the molecular diversity among grape cultivars.

The report is based on a big paper in PNAS, which I confess I have not had time to read carefully. That said, a few things about the NYT’s coverage confuse me. One is the whole depiction of “relatedness”.

Thus merlot is intimately related to cabernet franc, which is a parent of cabernet sauvignon, whose other parent is sauvignon blanc, the daughter of traminer, which is also a progenitor of pinot noir, a parent of chardonnay.

This web of interrelatedness is evidence that the grape has undergone very little breeding since it was first domesticated, Dr. Myles and his co-authors report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So how did those varieties arise? Maybe breeding means only “deliberate crosses made by a breeder”. Are they saying that the molecular data support the breeding records? Or are actual breeding records, especially for the older and better-known varieties, too sketchy to know? There’s more too, but I’m going to have to find time to read the PNAS paper properly. Or maybe you already have, in which case, feel free to comment.

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Selection of pulses for better nutrition

Hot on the heels of the UK’s call for “advances in nutrition and related sciences” to be put to work to improve the efficiency of animal production, comes a paper surveying the protein content and composition of “107 cultivars of important grain legume species”. The primary motivation seems to have been to improve feed quality for pigs, especially for the organic sector which is not supposed to feed supplementary amino acids to make up the shortfall. From the abstract, it seems that feed quality could indeed be enhanced by selecting specific varieties. And a more diverse diet, to supply the amino acids in which most pulses are low?

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The UK government’s report on the future of food and farming

There’s been widespread interest in the UK Government Office for Science’s final report on The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability. Most of the excitement has centred on the claim that GM foods are essential to feed future populations. I’m not going to go there; that way lies madness. Nor have I had time to read the whole thing, although I did take a pretty close look at the papers on which the final report was based. So I’m grateful to colleagues at the Global Crop Diversity Trust who pointed to a nugget from the Executive Summary. Among its “general priorites” for new science, are:

  • Development of new varieties or breeds of crops, livestock and aquatic organisms, capitalising on recent advances in the biosciences.
  • The preservation of multiple varieties, land races, rare breeds and closely related wild relatives of domesticated species. This is very important in maintaining a genetic bank of variation that can be used in the selection of novel traits.
  • Advances in nutrition and related sciences. These offer substantial prospects for improving the efficiency and sustainability of animal production (both livestock and aquaculture).

The Trust, naturally, lighted on that middle one, but as I read it I found myself humming “Is that all there is?” It isn’t. There’s also “Undernutrition needs to be tackled by direct and by indirect intervention,” promising approaches for which “include biofortification of staple food crops with micronutrients, and the health conditionalities embedded in cash transfers”.

It will be fascinating to see how this extremely comprehensive report influences future policy on agricultural research and development, widely construed, not just in the UK but around the world.

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What’s that got to do with the price of onions?

Human brains are exquisitely evolved to detect patterns. Mine detected two items with a common theme, separated by only 70 years.

Item 1, from The Economist:

The Indian press is obsessively following the price of onions, which saw a massive spike at the end of last year and the beginning of this one. On Twitter, Indians have noted sarcastically that at one point last week, the prices of a kilo of onions, a litre of petrol and a bottle of beer (presumably in some places, since alcohol taxes vary a lot by state because of state-level taxes) were all the same. Onions get a lot of attention in India partly because many people believe (perhaps rightly, I can’t claim to be sure) that they’re one of the things that even the poorest Indians buy (along with rice or wheat, cooking oil and salt). There’s a stereotypical image of a very poor person in India subsisting on a couple of rotis, a pinch of salt, and some raw onions for flavour.

Item 2, from George Orwell’s diaries:

The onion shortage has made everyone intensely sensitive to the smell of onions. A quarter of an onion shredded into a stew seems exceedingly strong, E. the other day knew as soon as I kissed her that I had eaten onions some 6 hours earlier.

Even more spookily, Orwell immediately goes on to discuss the complex relationships, among price, quantity demanded, supply, and quality of goods.

An instance of the sort of racketeering that goes on when any article whose price is not controlled becomes scarce – the price of alarm clocks. The cheapest now obtainable are 15/- these the sort of rubbishy German-made clocks which used to sell for 3/6d. The little tin French ones which used to be 5/- are now 18/6d, and all others at corresponding prices.

By “racketeering,” does he mean to blame speculators? I certainly hope so.