- An analysis of the transformative potential of major food system report recommendations. Most recommendations are nudges rather than transformative. But is that such a bad thing?
- Linking farm production diversity to household dietary diversity controlling market access and agricultural technology usage: evidence from Noakhali district, Bangladesh. Farm diversity is associated with dietary diversity, but less if markets and irrigation are to hand. Phew, that’s good.
- Leveraging millets for developing climate resilient agriculture. Never mind the yield, feel the stability. Plus they’re good for you.
- Exploring the legacy of Central European historical winter wheat landraces. Not great that breeding has narrowed the genepool. Will it happen to millets next?
- A European perspective on opportunities and demands for field-based crop phenotyping. Would be good to have more sites in Central Europe, no?
- Genetic dissection of seasonal vegetation index dynamics in maize through aerial based high-throughput phenotyping. 1752 accessions fall into 2 phenological groups. Do it in Europe next?
- Changes in soybean cultivars released over the past 50 years in southern Brazil. Yield has gone up, but protein concentration down. No word on stability. Nor overall diversity. Good and bad.
- The grain quality of wheat wild relatives in the evolutionary context. Breeders should focus on the timopheevii lineage if they want to do some good.
- Signatures of selection in recently domesticated macadamia. Further evidence for the one-step domestication of clonal crops.
- Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process. One-step is precisely how domestication did NOT happen for seed crops in the Neolithic though.
- Conservation and use of genetic resources of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) by gene banks and nurseries in six Latin American countries. Not a great situation for such a financially important crop. Makes you think.
- Chloroplast phylogenomics in Camelina (Brassicaceae) reveals multiple origins of polyploid species and the maternal lineage of C. sativa. Such a lot of work, and they still don’t know in which landscape domestication took place.
- Making the invisible visible: tracing the origins of plants in West African cuisine through archaeobotanical and organic residue analysis. 3500 years of continuity in West African cooking investigated via lipid profiles on pottery. And fast forward…
Brainfood: CGIAR, Wheat adoption, Durum erosion, Napier grass diversity, Asian trees, Cannabis origins, Potato genome, Somaclonal variation, Sugarcane collections, On farm beans, Crowd-sourced diets, Banana mapping, Medicinal enset, Vitis diversity
- Viewpoint: Aligning vision and reality in publicly funded agricultural research for development: A case study of CGIAR. Some countries and crops are being short-changed.
- Institutional and farm-level challenges limiting the diffusion of new varieties from public and CGIAR centers: The case of wheat in Morocco. No way either Morocco nor wheat are being short-changed, and yet both micro-level and institutional factors are holding back new varieties there.
- Estimation of genetic erosion on Ethiopian tetraploid wheat landraces using different approaches. No such adoption problems in Ethiopia, it seems.
- Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits in Napier Grass (Cenchrus purpureus) and QTL Regions Governing Forage Biomass Yield, Water Use Efficiency and Feed Quality Traits. Napier grass is clearly not being short-changed. I’m sure my MIL would approve.
- Tropical and subtropical Asia’s valued tree species under threat. Not valued enough, though.
- The origin of the genus Cannabis. If CGIAR decides to work on cannabis, Yunnan would be the place to start getting material from.
- Phased, chromosome-scale genome assemblies of tetraploid potato reveals a complex genome, transcriptome, and predicted proteome landscape underpinning genetic diversity. Clonal propagation and limited meiosis has really short-changed the potato, but this work, which includes CGIAR, will really help breeders get rid of accumulated nasty alleles.
- Somaclonal variation in clonal crops: containing the bad, exploring the good. And then there’s somaclonal variation…
- Sugarcane Genetic Diversity and Major Germplasm Collections. Ripe for the above treatment. Followed by take-over by CGIAR.
- On-farm conservation in Phaseolus lunatus L: an alternative for agricultural biodiversity. On farm conservation must not be short-changed.
- Leveraging Digital Tools and Crowdsourcing Approaches to Generate High-Frequency Data for Diet Quality Monitoring at Population Scale in Rwanda. Younger people get short-changed in their diet; but, surprisingly, women do not.
- UAV-Based Mapping of Banana Land Area for Village-Level Decision-Support in Rwanda. Can’t help thinking we’re being short-changed by not mashing this up with the above somehow.
- The Genetic Diversity of Enset (Ensete ventricosum) Landraces Used in Traditional Medicine Is Similar to the Diversity Found in Non-medicinal Landraces. The title short-changes the casual reader. Medicinal varieties are in fact different from non-medicinal varieties, but do not cluster together. Mapping from space next?
- Phenological diversity in wild and hybrid grapes (Vitis) from the USDA-ARS cold-hardy grape collection. No sign of short-changing grapevine, at least in the US, resulting in some interesting opportunities for its expansion into new areas using wild relatives.
The humble spuds gets its 15 minutes of fame
I’m just back from a few weeks’ break in Kenya, where the big news was that over the holidays KFC ran out out chips (French fries). It was not a question of inadequate production, though. There are plenty of potatoes in Kenya.
The problem, apparently, was that potential local suppliers had not gone through KFC’s quality assurance process that makes sure “our food is safe for consumption by our customers”, the company’s East Africa chief executive Jacques Theunissen told the Standard newspaper.
So KFC ended up importing potatoes from Egypt, and ran into supply chain snarl-ups.
Makes you think. What’s the point of fancy breeding projects to boost local production, including by the likes of the International Potato Centre, based on decades of research, and using genetic resources painstakingly collected all over the Andes over many years, if in the end local growers get screwed over standards they don’t even know about?
Anyway, let me say a few words about what exactly it is I linked to above about potato collecting, because it really is worth having a look at.
Professor Jack Hawkes was a world-renowned potato and genetic resources expert who spent much of his professional life at the University of Birmingham. He made his first trip to South America in 1939 to collect wild and cultivated species of potato. And on this expedition and others that followed he made several 16 mm films, which have recently been converted to digital format, and become available to view more widely for the first time.
Dr Mike Jackson, no slouch at collecting potatoes himself, put the website together with help from Dr Abigail Amey, who wrote the narrative to accompany the films.
Happy new year.
Sorry no Brainfood today…
…but we’ll be back with that and more in the new year.
An exhibition of the life of Nikolai Ivanovich
Jeremy has his latest Eat This Newsletter out. Do subscribe if you’re minded to, there’s always great stuff there. Here’s a taster. To get the reference at the end, you’ll have to read the whole newsletter :)
In 1932, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov – the man who more or less invented the modern genebank and first understood the importance of crop diversity – visited Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He was there for the Sixth International Congress of Genetics and it was his final trip outside the USSR, because the forces of unreason were already pouring their poison into Stalin’s open ears.
Ninety years on, The Mann Library at Cornell has mounted an exhibit about Vavilov. Cultivating Silence: Nikolai Vavilov and the Suppression of Science in the Modern Era demonstrates the importance of Vavilov’s work and how he and genetics fell foul of Soviet science in the 1930s. I would be there if I possibly could. Instead, I’ll content myself with visiting The Mann’s Library’s online introduction to Vavilov and Cornell, a marvellous jumping-off point for anyone interested in the subject.
Oh, and, about that proletarian food movement…