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Tying up some Amman loose ends

You’ve been wondering about those as yet unanswered questions from the Amman conference, haven’t you? Ok, here goes.

Jose Cubero asked why there are no commercial faba bean hybrids. He had no answer. The yield gain is considerable. BTW, did you know that protein content in faba bean is not negatively correlated with yield potential, as is apparently the case in other pulses? And that you can have totally selfing varieties, with closed flowers? I need to learn more about this crop.

Raj Paroda asked if aeration might be the answer to decreasing methane emissions from paddies. Well, it’s possible. Work in Japan is showing that prolonged mid-season aeration can cut methane emissions down to zero. But what will this do to yield? And what will it cost? Of course, “[m]any rice varieties can be grown under much drier conditions than those traditionally employed, with big reductions on methane emission without any loss in yeild. Additionally, there is the great potential for improved varieties of rice, able to produce a much larger crop per area of rice paddy and so allow for a cut in the area of rice paddies, without a cut in rice production.” See? Even when it’s not about germplasm, it’s really about germaplasm.

Theib Oweis wondered whether we shouldn’t measure — and select for in breeding programmes, by implication — productivity on the basis of unit of water consumed rather than of land used. Indeed we should, certainly in the dry areas. Potatoes had the highest yield per cubic meter of water of the crops on his list, and olives the highest economic return per cubic meter of water. You can get 8 t/ha of wheat, but the highest water productivity is actually at 6 t/ha. You need 1000 kg of water to grow 1 kg of wheat. I could go on and on, he had lots of figures like this.

And would you believe it, Ken Street did indeed think of a better way of identifying germplasm for evaluation, and it’s called FIGS.

How many did you get?

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Vote for innovative nutrition solutions

We had an email from Yvonna Tan alerting us to the Ashoka Changemakers competition for innovative solutions to improve nutrition. Yvonna wanted us to recommend her project to our readers, but we’re uncomfortable doing that. There are lots of great-sounding projects in the list, from fake goats to vegetable gardens. So while we’re greatful to Yvonna for poking us, we’ll leave you to choose the projects you want to support. You have to register, and that requires responding to an email, so it is a bit time-consuming. But the winning project gets $5000 so you might consider it time well spent. You have till 8 February.

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Documenting threatened languages in PNG

This project is recording and transcribing indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea, using voice recorders donated by Olympus. Papua New Guinea is home to over 800 languages, many with few remaining speakers, and many with minimal linguistic documentation. The work is being done by university staff and students who speak the local languages.

We hope to collect narratives, dialogues and songs for 100 languages, using the technique of “Basic Oral Language Documentation” (BOLD). Materials will be freely available for non-commercial use. The project runs for one year, from 21 February 2010 (UNESCO International Mother Language Day).

Such a cool idea. Wouldn’t it be great if they included in their documentation the local names of varieties of such crops as banana, taro, sugarcane, yams and sweet potato? These show incredible diversity in PNG, and are so central to the culture. Via.

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Three good ideas

I think I have already pointed out that Nigel Chaffey does an entertaining round-up of botanically themed items from the world’s media on every issue of Annals of Botany. The latest one has three stories — on training, innovation and information — of great relevance to some of our recurring obsessions here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

  • “Teaching Tools in Plant Biology is a new, online feature of The Plant Cell consisting of materials to help instructors teach plant biology courses. Each topic includes a short essay introducing the topic, with suggested further readings, and a PowerPoint lecture with handouts. The materials are peer reviewed by leaders in the field to ensure accuracy, like all material in The Plant Cell.” Anyone want to volunteer to do one on agrobiodiversity conservation?
  • InnoCentive, the global innovation marketplace, “where creative minds solve some of the world’s most important problems for cash awards up to $1 million,” is to tackle the problem of the European corn borer, though the solvers of this one get only $20,000, and must relinquish all intellectual property rights. Will be interesting to see if anyone bites. The deadline for submission just passed.
  • Annals of Botany is going to take part in a project “to establish whether content in various formats from disparate sources (e.g. literature from publishers and data from public databases) can be delivered to a central ‘knowledge brokering service’, which then makes the content machine-readable and allows key pieces of information to be extracted by data-mining approaches.” I really like this idea as a way of aggregating information on germplasm accessions, data from databases but also published results from papers etc.