Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

August 18, 2009August 18, 2009

No little houses on this prairie

I promised you more on the Doolittle Prairie, and here it is. But first, thanks to Candy Gardner for arranging the visit, and to Mark Widrlechner for leading the tour.

Doolittle Prairie State Preserve, near Story City in Iowa, is a small remnant of native tallgrass prairie. The 26-acre state-owned protected area supports about 220 plant species. ¹ About half of the area, the northern part, has never been ploughed or grazed, though hay was cut until the 60s. The southern part has been grazed, and the southwest corner ploughed until 1965 and then replanted with seed from the northern section. All around are fields of maize and soybean. Management is by cutting and burning, to keep down exotics, and encroaching shrubs and trees.

It’s a very evocative place. You can just imagine the deer and the buffalo roaming on it back in the day. There are still deer. Buffalo, not so much. ² It’s also pretty interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective, because it’s got quite a number of crop wild relatives for such a small place.

A couple of species of wild sunflowers, for example. This one is Helianthus rigidus:

helianthus

There are also native species of Allium, Elymus, Lactuca, Fragaria, Prunus, Ribes, Rubus, and Vitis:

vitis

All in a beautifully colorful setting, at least at this time of the year.

general view

So, a bit of a CWR hotspot, in its own small way, and protected to boot. You may remember the recent global review of the role of protected areas in CWR conservation. I don’t think that CWR have been mapped in the US in the same way as has been done in Russia, however. ³ Once you have geo-referenced CWR locations, you could easily mash the result up with the online map of protected areas to see which national parks and reserves contribute most to CWR conservation. Anybody out there working on this? I bet little Doolittle Prairie would be on that list.

rainbow

August 17, 2009August 17, 2009

Traditional foods get the upscale treatment in Kenya

Matoke, spinach (local, or genuine Spinacea oleracea?) and rice (why not sorghum, or millet?) about to be served at a Nairobi restaurant. ⁴ The photo illustrates an article in the Daily Nation, following up on Agriculture Minister William Ruto’s call for traditional crops to be given a greater role in Kenya’s food security plan. According to the article, Kenya’s farmers, or their representatives, seem to want more and better incentives to turn away from maize. I wonder, though, whether the most far-sighted farmers, and restaurants, won’t show the way by adopting agricultural biodiversity and thus turning a healthy profit, thank you very much.

August 17, 2009August 17, 2009

Mystery of the undead Fukuoka

File this one under spooky. Yesterday, walking in the Italian countryside, I spotted an unusual sign. It says, in effect, Permaculture, Fukuoka Method. How many people passing that sign would have the faintest idea what it meant? My companion had no idea who had put it up, or why. I told him briefly about Fukuoka, and he said he’d ask around among his neighbours and see what he could discover. And I took a close look at the hedge in which the sign was planted, and I couldn’t really see anything too unusual about it. A couple of apples, possibly not wildlings, brambles, rose-hips.

The spooky part? Exactly one year ago today, we noted the death of Masanobu Fukuoka, who died a year before I snapped that sign.

Was it really a permaculture hedge? And is this something general in Italy, posting signs of this nature? Maybe someone could enlighten me.

August 17, 2009August 16, 2009

“We have very little data”

That’s Javier de la Torre talking about ecological niche modeling at GeoWeb. Well, I would qualify that by saying we have too little digitized data. Certainly for many crop wild relatives, for example. Javier was involved in a recent online mashup of the global protected area database. His GeoWeb slides are below, catch his talk on YouTube.

Biodiversity: Where is important

View more documents from jatorre.

August 17, 2009

Getting to the bottom of potato late blight resistance

There’s a bit of an argy-bargy developing in the comments to Robert’s provocative post Inorganic farming. Anastasia raised the question of transgenics for fungal resistance, which Robert echoed. Patrick then waded in bullishly to ask why transgenics were needed, when breeder Tom Wagner “has created quite a number of potato lines totally resistant to late blight”. And that created a clamour from Robert to the effect that he couldn’t find any evidence of Wagner’s success on this front.

Two points.

First, although Patrick was perhaps too modest to say so, he has arranged for Tom Wagner to be at a meeting in Oxford, England, as part of a Greater European Tour that Tom is undertaking in the autumn. So anyone who wants to know about his selections for late blight resistance can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. And report it here, please.

Secondly, don’t panic. Scientists at the University of Dundee in Scotland and elsewhere have discovered a single gene that, they say, is the key to blight resistance. “We are really excited by the discovery of RXLR. This has provided a signature to search for proteins that are delivered inside host cells, where they may be exposed to plant defence surveillance systems,” said Professor Paul Birch, the team leader. Clearly it won’t be long before the threat of late blight is a thing of the past.