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Coping with climate change

SciDev.net reports on a project launched a couple of years ago to unite farmers, weather-wallahs and government in Benin to “help farmers make informed choices about when to sow and harvest crops”. About 300 farmers are enrolled in 60 field schools across the country.

[T]o develop, test and implement farming strategies suited to local conditions. These include mulching, planting pits, adopting integrated crop management and using organic fertilisers.

What, no agricultural biodiversity? No new varieties or crop selection? No participatory plant breeding? We think they’re missing a trick.

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Empty vessels and GMOs

You know the old story about the two women ranting at one another from their respective doorsteps on opposite sides of a narrow street. And a passing wit 1 remarked: “They will never agree, for they argue from different premises”. That’s how I feel about almost everything and everyone involved in almost every kind of discussion of genetic engineering.

Watch, if you will, this extract from a longer discussion with Michael Pollan, foodsayer extraordinaire.

Now, tell me, what exactly did he say that might cause someone else to say

I’m thinking he is just another tool. Now he suddenly supports “open source” genetic engineering…absolutely not….playing god/artifically manipulating DNA is not our place.

What’s with the “scare quotes”? How does a self-described seed breeder manage to elide playing god with artificially manipulating DNA?

I’m reminded of another quote, this one definitely attributable to Woody Allen. It runs something like this 2

The great advantage of being smart is that you can always act like an imbecile, while the reverse is never possible.

Hell yeah.

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Tracking down P efficient brassicas

In following up a recent University of Nottingham press release (nibbled a few days ago) on a project to breed vegetables with higher levels of Ca and Mg I came across an earlier, related project by the principal investigator, Dr Martin Broadley. This was to evaluate P-use efficiency (PUE) in Brassica oleracea as a model system. There’s lots of genetics, but also this objective:

Determine the PUE of up to 50 commercial B. oleracea varieties and 400 varieties from the HRI Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) representing a wide geographical and genetic distribution of B. oleracea and close relatives

And this deliverable:

A database of Brassica oleracea PUE phenotypes. This database will identify the range of PUE in modern varieties. This will allow varieties to be matched to their nutritional environment. The range of PUE found in accessions in the HRI-Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) will also be defined. This database will be delivered to growers, via a summary factsheet and subsequent consultation.

Cool, I thought. Rather complicated evaluation information on an important collection made readily available to users (breeders, growers, researchers) in a natty database. I had visions of Andy Jarvis and his crew mapping the provenance of accessions on soils base maps to look for correlations between PRU and low P. Problem is, though the dataset is probably somewhere on brassica.info, I wasn’t able to track it down in over half an hour of messing around. No doubt I’m missing something which is right in front of my nose. Alas, the link provided in the project final report seems to be broken. I suspect the data I’m looking for is lurking in the supplementary tables on the project webpage at Defra, but a bunch of spreadsheets is not really what was promised. Another soul-sapping foray into genebank database hell.