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BBC’s Farm Swap is online

That BBC radio documentary about farmers trying to learn from each other is out at last.

In Farm Swap, Mike Gallagher meets two farmers who are working outside their own countries.

They are both prepared to experience a new environment but for very different reasons.

You can listen online or download a podcast.

In part one Pedro, an idealistic young Ecuadorian farmer, visits Hawaii…

During his 4 month visit to Hawaii, Pedro visits a coffee plantation and learns how to encourage sustainable agriculture.

But as well as discovering new farming techniques and sharing experiences to take back to Ecuador, what can Pedro teach Hawaiian farmers in return?

As I said before, I think farmer-to-farmer exchanges are potentially a great way to learn. I’ll be tuning in.

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Chile pepper domestication investigated

I haven’t read the paper on Capsicum annuum domestication by Seung-Chul Kim and colleagues in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Botany, but the EurekAlert piece on it is definitely intriguing. I was particularly struck by the finding that genetic differentiation between geographically distant populations is higher for the cultivated than for the wild species. That may be because people don’t move pepper seeds nearly as far as birds. Also, it seems this particular pepper should be included in the lengthening list of crops that were probably domesticated in more than one place. Need to get that pdf.

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Linking up livestock databases

The object of most biodiversity web sites in animal agriculture is the ‘breed’ or population, and not the individual animal within (an exception are some breed societies which present individual animal data on some of their most important breeding animals). With the linkage of CryoWEB and FABISnet, for the first time, production type databases with individual animal records are directly linked to the global breeds database network, thereby creating breeds statistics in FABISnet which are directly derived from production data. Perhaps the procedure can also be a model for other data in the biodiversity databases.

That’s from a piece on animal genetic resources databases by Elldert Groeneveld of the Institute of Farm Animal Genetic in Germany, published as article of the month in the Globaldiv Newsletter. It’s entitled Databases and Biodiversity: From Single Databases to a Global Network and you can find it on page 8. I suppose there is a similar problem in crops, where you might have evaluation data for various different lines selected from a single population. But somehow you don’t hear so much about it. Is it that the links between conservationists and users (that is, those doing the evaluation) are better developed in the livestock field?

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Featured: Madumbe

Patience partially pays; Bob answers Luigi’s year-old “what the heck is it?”

The word is Zulu, but also is also anglicized as Madumbe as in Zulu the “A” is almost silent. The plant is a Taro species grown in Natal and Eastern Cape in South Africa and looks more like the common Arum than the tropical Taro, the corm looks like the Arum corm. Just boiled it is delicious, unlike the Taro which is rather bland.

What we really want (obviously) is a binomial. Anyone?

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Evaluation networks redux?

More interesting thinking about the sites of variety yield trials from Glenn Hyman over at AGCommons. You’ll remember he posted a map a few weeks back of the distribution of such sites around Africa, categorized according to which crop evaluation network used them. This is part of a Gates Foundation-funded project to develop an online catalog of these places, including their environmental characterization, and eventually with links to the actual evaluation data they were used to obtain over the years. Glenn then posted about how knowledge of conditions at trial sites could be used to identify the best places for participatory/evolutionary breeding work. And now he’s linked to our recent analysis of interdependence among African countries for plant genetic resources under climate change and suggested that it would be interesting to figure out which sites represent future analogs for current climates: “[w]hat are the key sites for evaluating germplasm in view of climate change throughout Africa?” Is this the MacGuffin we need to get genebanks and breeders to talk to each other more?