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Asweddumized

As designated rice-editor at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, this clipping from The Nation, a Sri Lankan newspaper, landed on my desk. But I am not sure what to make of it.

Researchers (or farmers?) have discovered a (new?) type of rice that can be vegetatively propagated:

The long Mavee rice plant can be cut in pieces and sown to grow as any normal rice. It took the researchers nearly six years to find the specific qualities in the Mavee cultivation, and those plants that contained this quality were later named as Maha Mavee.

Mavee is a variety, maha means wet season (as opposed to yala, the dry season). And as it grows up to “10 feet during flash floods” (that’s quick!) I suppose it is a ‘deep-water’ or ‘floating’ rice type.

So what? Well, the newspaper calls them miracle plants. According to “attorney-at-law and a renowned environmentalist,” Jagath Gunawardane, this is a big deal:

The discovery of this new method of vegetative propagation is likely to revolutionise the entire industry. The Government now needs to help the farmers maintain this cultivation technique, and also prevent companies from claiming patent rights for this ground breaking breakthrough in the agricultural field.

Presumably because of savings in seed cost. Interesting. But then again there are four or five “miracle rices” discovered every year…

To briefly go off on a tangent in an area that I am not a total dummy about, I recently learned the word “asweddumized.” I came across it in the (English language) agricultural statistics of Sri Lanka. I was told that the word was first introduced in 1958 by S.W.R.D. Bandaranayaike, then the Sri Lankan Prime Minister. It stems from the Sinhala word “aswaddanawa,” meaning converting forest land into cultivatable land that has bunds for retaining either irrigation or rainwater, mainly for rice.

But back to the subject at hand. What do you think the prospects are for Maha Mavee? Are there examples of normally seed propagated crops that become vegetatively propagated? Fruit trees through grafting is one example, but that is for a different reason: the propagation of a particular genotype, rather than saving seeds.

People have tried the opposite with potatoes. It seems obvious: ‘true’ (botanical) potato seed is much cheaper than seed tubers, carries fewer diseases, can be stored, etc. But this has not been very successful. Potato was too variable from seed (which makes it so much fun to try this at home), as quality (uniformity and size) is important in the market, and yields were lower. The International Potato Center (CIP) has worked on these issues, and Hubert Zandstra (a former director of CIP) remains optimistic about these seeds, and particularly about their benefits to poor farmers. He thinks that early ‘bulking’ (the formation of tubers) and apomixis may save the day for true potato seed.

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Featured comment: citrus

Onkel Bob on Show Yourself (not that it has any relevance to that):

Why didn’t Turks create the same garden scheme as the Persians? Is it their pastoral roots? One would think they would want citrus fruits in their winter pastures. Even after settling in Anatolia, (what we currently call Turkey) the Seljuks and subsequent Turkish migrations never developed the garden schemes we see in SW Asia/Levant.

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(Not much) agrobiodiversity on display in Nairobi museum

The main building of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi has had a facelift, courtesy of the EU. Pretty good job on the outside, but the new exhibits were a bit of a disappointment.

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There’s a big hall about Kenya’s animals, of course, and another series of displays about its cultures, arranged by life-stages (birth, youth, adolescence, initiation: you get the picture), though this includes very little about agriculture:

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But there’s nothing at all on the country’s ecosystems and protected areas, and nothing on its plants, at least inside the building (apart from a display of an herbarium specimen in the small hall describing the museum’s history). There is a little botanic garden dedicated to medicinal plants (arranged by family, the wisdom of which is debatable), but this misses the opportunity of describing the Amaranthus on display as not just a medicinal but also a nutritious traditional leafy green (see my next post):

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However, the entrance hall does have a terrific display of cucurbit diversity:

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These bottle gourds are used by the Maasai and other pastoralists to store water, milk, blood, and mixtures thereof. Here’s a close-up:

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Taro in the Indo-Pacific

The 19th Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association is going to take place 29 Nov.-5 Dec. 2009 at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences Conference Centre, Hanoi, Vietnam. One of the suggested sessions is on taro:

Wet Cultivation of Colocasia esculenta in the Indo-Pacific: Archaeological, Technological, Social, and Biological Perspectives.

David Addison (American Samoa Community College) and Matthew Spriggs (Australian National University)
add1ison(at)gmail.com; matthew.spriggs(at)anu.edu.au

Wet cultivation of taro (Colocasia esculenta) is among the most productive traditional agricultural techniques in the world, rivaled only by the homologous systems based on rice (Oryza sativa). Some of the largest stone constructions in the Pacific relate to wet taro cultivation. Research on wet taro in Oceania has focused on: the role of agricultural intensification in development of political and social complexity; aggression and territoriality; risk management; and initial island colonization. This session seeks to bring together researchers from across the Indo-Pacific region to discuss the wet cultivation of Colocasia esculenta from diverse perspectives. Participants will be asked to have papers ready for posting to a website by 1 October 2009. This will give everyone a chance to read each other’s ideas in detail. The IPPA session will then consist of short presentations and ample time for discussion. Selected participants will be asked to revise their papers immediately after the conference for publication in an edited volume scheduled for early 2010.

Thanks to Lois Englberger for the tip.

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Domestication trifecta

We’ve blogged a number of times about the paradigm shift that’s occurring among students of plant domestication, driven by increasing interaction and synergy between archaeologists and geneticists. The idea of “rapid, localised” domestication is down if not out: all the talk these days is of domestication as a protracted, multi-locational and biologically complex process.

Well, there’s a very nice review of the history of this shift in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, at least as it concerns the crops domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. It is only very recently that geneticists have looked at their molecular data in the light of archaeological results and realized that there were other ways to interpret them apart from the conventional idea of domestication in one place over the course of a few human generations.

Meanwhile, a paper in Annals of Botany looks at another source of data, i.e. written sources. Chinese investigators have looked at references to eggplants in ancient encyclopedias, concordances and even poetry, and charted changes in size, shape and taste over the past 2000 years. The oldest reference dates back to 59 BC, and since then the Chinese eggplant has gone from round to a variety of shapes, has increased dramatically in size, and has become much sweeter.

Finally, our friend Hannes Dempewolf and co-authors have a paper in GRACE which looks in detail at domestication in the Compositae. Why have only a handful of species in this family been fully domesticated? Secondary defence compounds, inulin as a storage product and wind dispersal, the authors suggest.