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A coffee journey

Sometimes you come across a story that illustrates so many of the themes of agrobiodiversity conservation that it’s almost too good to be true. I have it on very good authority that the one I’m about to tell you is indeed true, though. The authority is the former head of the genebank at the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza in Costa Rica (CATIE), who is now the head of the genebank at The World Vegetable Centre (AVRDC) in Taiwan.

He told me the story over coffee at the Trees Wind cafe in Tainan City, a short ride from AVRDC’s headquerters. The story is about the coffee he was drinking. I was drinking a very superior arabica from the highlands of Taiwan. But that’s another story, or at least a different aspect of the story. The coffee my host was drinking is called Geisha and it comes from Hacienda Esmeralda in Panama.

He discovered it by chance at Trees Wind when he first moved to AVRDC a year and a half ago and was exploring the surroundings. The name jumped out at him from the menu because he knew it from his days managing the CATIE coffee collection. The owner of Esmeralda had visited the CATIE genebank some years back, looking for coffee germplasm to try out. He’d been growing coffee for decades, having originally got his material from CATIE, but he was now expanding into a higher altitude plantation and wanted new varieties to try. He settled on an accession called Geisha. Nothing to do with Japan, though: this is an Ethiopian landrace, very low yielding, but very high quality; and from the right sort of altitude.

My host didn’t hear much after that about how the material he sent out to Panama fared. Not until, that is, he sampled a cup of the stuff in Tainan some years later. And an expensive cup it is too: 225g of beans will set you back TWD 1800 (USD 56). Coffee is now also grown in Taiwan, along with tea. The stuff I had was great, and about a third of the price of Geisha from Panama, though on a par with interesting brands from Ecuador, Ethiopia and Indonesia.

So, material collected in Ethiopia probably back in the 70s by an international FAO mission, conserved at a regional research institute in Costa Rica, grown in Panama, marketed around the world, and finally sipped in Taiwan by people whose stimulant of choice was quite different until fairly recently, in competition with material from a dozen other countries on three continents. Quite a journey. Quite a lesson in agrobiodiversity interdependence, conservation and use.

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Mexico builds a genebank

INIFAP has photos of progress in building Mexico’s new National Genetic Resources Centre. It’s about a third finished, and needs to be ready in time for this year’s celebrations of the bicentenary of Mexican independence. Total cost is about US$ 30 million, if I interpret the figure in the text correctly. I hope the recurrent costs necessary to keep the place running once it’s built will also be forthcoming with similar generosity.

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Where the (European) buffalo roam

Again from Michael Kubisch.

The European bison or wisent, like its North American counterpart, has faced near extinction during its recent history. Both species have been brought back from the brink starting with relatively small populations — in the case of the European bison perhaps with fewer than 50 individuals. The wisent population now numbers somewhere over 3000, but these animals suffer from low genetic diversity and are furthermore separated into a relatively large number of often very small and isolated herds. This is problematic because it is thought that the survival of a species depends on a minimum number of breeding individuals, although there isn’t necessarily much agreement on what that number needs to be.

There is consensus, however, that the fractured nature of the European bison population is unlikely to guarantee its long-term survival. What is needed is a larger breeding population containing perhaps as many as a thousand individuals. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary for these animals to belong to a single contiguous population, as long as smaller populations exist on stretches of connected land that enable them to come into contact with each other. But even that requires suitable land and lots of it — not an easy quest on a crowded continent.

But there is hope. In a recent study described in the journal Conservation Biology, a multinational group of researchers has determined that the Carpathian Mountains could provide a possible habitat for a wisent metapopulation. This area already contains a number of smaller herds, has the type of vegetation wisent seem to like and (in part thanks to a decrease in human population pressures), and consists of relatively large tracts of suitable land. Implementing this idea would obviously require both existing herds to be enlarged and new ones to be established. Whether the means can be found to accomplish this is hard to predict, but there is no doubt that it would constitute a significant step towards preserving one of Europe’s most magnificent herbivores.

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Featured: More origins

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.

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Corn-fed is grass-fed

See if you can spot the problems with this line of reasoning:

  1. Grass-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.
  2. Corn (maize, and barley, and wheat) is a grass.
  3. Corn-fed beef is grass-fed beef.
  4. Corn-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.

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.