Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Dave Wood muses on the successional stage of crop progenitors and the origins of agriculture:
…if early crops were directly derived from massive pure stands of wild relatives, then such crops have an ecological heritage of stability. If so, we can now stop worrying about stability based on diversity in agro-ecosystems and start worrying about just what factors once determined the obvious stability of climax vegetation of crop relatives of our major cereals.
See if you can spot the problems with this line of reasoning:
Over at Muck and Mystery Gary does a fine job of unpacking all that logic. Sample:
[T]his would make some sense if they fed the whole corn plant to their cattle rather than just the seeds, and did so while the plant was still alive and vegetative, so that then cattle would get some green with all of that yellow. Better still, grow corn varieties bred for grazing (they exist) that produced more leaf, more nutritious stalks, and less seeds.
There’s more too, on how exaggerated claims from one end of a spectrum call forth exaggerated claims from the other, rather than the nuanced interpretation they really need. Gary talks about backlash. I suspect anyone trying to make sense of the arguments, in beef as in just about anything, would suffer whiplash instead.
Food Systems and Public Health: Linkages to Achieve Healthier Diets and Healthier Communities is a special edition of the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition. Scads of research papers and articles, all free to download, at least some of which almost certainly will have a bearing on one of our main interests, the use of agricultural biodiversity to feed into dietary diversity, with all the benefits that can bring.
So many papers, so little time …
Cary waxes lyrical on the origins of agriculture:
We who love diversity and love agricultural history should revel in the complexity of the subject. Smith’s profound and insightful work adds so much. I only wish more of us appreciated it. If more did, imagine how differently we in the genetic resources community might see the world. It would, actually, change the world.
While our sympathy goes out to the residents and tourists on Madeira, who have had to cope with the worst storms since 1993, we are pleased to have had some goodish news from our friend Eliseu Bettencourt. He managed to speak to colleagues at the CEM-UMa (Centre for Macaronesian Studies – University of Madeira) and was assured that colleagues and the ISOPlexis Genebank were OK, despite the terrible floods on Saturday 20 February. “The only thing that happened to the Genebank was a power cut for a few hours,” and that had no effect on the normal functioning of the cold rooms.
That is good news for the genebank and its staff. I wonder, though: is there a safety duplicate of the ISOPlexis collection at Svalbard, or anywhere else?