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Mini-cows a hit in the recession

I just can’t resist stories about miniature livestock. Despite the fact that we’re still getting 250 hits a week from people looking for the pocket pigs we mentioned in a one-line throwaway post two years ago. Or maybe because of that. But it is a serious thing:

…miniature Herefords consume about half that of a full-sized cow yet produce 50% to 75% of the rib-eyes and fillets, according to researchers and budget-conscious farmers.

Which all reminds me of the dwarf cattle I saw on Socotra some years back. I wonder if anything is being done with them. And with what I suppose must be their relatives in the Dhofar region of southern Oman. I can’t imagine they’ll long survive the rapid development that seems to be going on in both places.

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Discussing threats to livestock diversity

A very informative contribution came in today from the moderator of the DAD-Net e-discussion on analyzing threats to animal genetic resources, listing a number of success stories:

1. Incentives have been used in several cases to conserve and even rescue breeds that were nearly extinct because of the reduction in population size due to the elimination by more productive breeds. Several examples are provided by the EuReCa (European Regional cattle Breeds) network in their breed of the month archive. The site for each breed also shows how breed societies can be effective in the management of AnGR. Notable cases include: Eastern Finncattle, Kerry cattle, Polish Red.

2. Exploration of niche markets through the branding of products from an endangered breed can reverse the trend of a particular breed.

3. Effect of the expansion of industrialised agriculture on indigenous breeds and how the breeds were driven almost to extinction.

4. How crossbreeding programmes (to increase productivity) coupled with unfavourable policies can be a threat to indigenous AnGR. See story on the Vechur cattle breed in India and how it was rescued from extinction.

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Biodiversity indicators include agrobiodiversity

The 2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership has relaunched its website. Not earthshattering news, I agree, but a good opportunity to remind ourselves that, perhaps surprisingly, the list of indicators includes one on ex situ crop collections and another on genetic diversity of terrestrial domestic animals. There’s also an indicator tracking the contribution of biodiversity to nutrition, and another looking at the area of sustainably managed agricultural ecosystems. All in all, not bad for agrobiodiversity. Must have taken a lot of lobbying, though.

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Using photos to share knowledge about agrobiodiversity

ResourceShelf reported on a Library of Congress blog post on the photographs in the US Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collection, the most popular among which are now available in a Flickr group under the heading FSA/OWI Favorites. That led me to some wonderful colour photos from the 30s and 40s from the same source. One of them particularly caught my eye. Not because it’s particularly well framed or for its dramatic subject matter. It’s just a pretty standard shot of some harvested oats fields in southeastern Georgia taken in May 1939. But someone — a Mr Raymond Crippen, actually, who sounds as if he has first-hand experience of wartime Georgian oat fields — has taken the trouble to annotate different parts of the image:

The most common grains in shocks were wheat, oats, barley. Farmers hated working with the barley. The “beards” stuck to sweaty arms, found their way down shirts – and they caused great itching.

This strikes me as a great way of documenting and sharing indigenous knowledge of agricultural practices and biodiversity. Has it ever been tried in a more formal way?

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Coffee wild relative voted among top 10 new species

Here’s a cool idea. Apparently the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international committee of taxonomists get together regularly and pick the top 10 new species described in the previous year. They’ve just announced the 2008 picks, and they include a crop wild relative. It’s Coffea charrieriana, a caffeine-free coffee from Cameroon. It was named after “Professor A. Charrier, who managed coffee breeding research and collecting missions at IRD during the last 30 years of the 20th century.” And with whom I had the privilege to work some years back in the early days of the African Coffee Research Network. Congratulations to all concerned.