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Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
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Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#12Home gardeners seem like a pretty good option here. For more regular vegetables, this is already a thing that exists with seed libraries and exchanges, and programs that preserve heirloom varietals and sell the seeds to gardeners. Buying these seeds is basically just a way to help pay for the continued cultivation by the breeder (unfortunately, unless you really know what you are doing and are quite careful, preserving a specific variety on your own in a home garden is difficult-verging-on-impossible, despite what 1000 online guides to "seed saving" will tell you).
The harder thing is the grains, since those typically require so much more work to get from the plant to the plate. I've looked into growing my own wheat before (I already have a large garden and have enough space that I could theoretically grow enough wheat to cover a substantial portion of my annual flour use), but the small scale/DIY options for threshing, sorting, grinding, and sifting are just not quite practical (for the level of effort I'm willing to put in, which I'm quite sure is higher than most home gardeners).
If a small scale solution to harvesting and processing wheat can be made relatively cheap and simple, I'd bet you could get home gardeners to support the continued cultivation of these varieties in the same way that they frequently support heirloom tomatoes etc.
Again, to be very clear, the gardeners themselves are (mostly) not doing the preserving. The plants home gardeners grow are a dead-end genetically (usually not being preserved at all, and even when they are, almost certainly representing mixes of several different varieties), but buy purchasing seeds from the larger scale growers, they are paying to support the continued cultivation of those varieties.
Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seeds are more than just a program. They are more an embryo than a cell.
How far are we from instantiating the proper embryo then?
Quite far. Not only do you need to synthesize the proper genomic sequence (barely possible), but it needs to be packed into a valid chromosome structure with a valid epigenome.
Then that needs to be placed into a cell with valid RNAs, compatible chloroplasts and mitochondria, compatible proteins in a compatible configuration, etc.
Creating all of that de novo for a plant is well beyond current capabilities.
This is why when we clone e.g. a sheep, we transfer a nucleus from the cell of one individual into the cell of a different individual. It is much easier to mix and match pieces of different cells from the same species, than to create those pieces from raw materials.
Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#14Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#15What's with the 5-digit year format? Premature prep for y10k?
Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#16I recently came across the videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison, who is an amazingly clear presenter about permaculture: https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos For example, he has nice videos about chinampas in Mexico https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs , a medieval Indian canal tunnel of a style found throughout Iran https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kplvq0C-cdE , efforts to return a Hawa…
I had some time several months ago and happened to look through a copy of Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism instead of reading on my phone. It has some good sections about the styles of permaculture you mentioned. But it is more of a collection of short chapters on each technique rather than a deep dive into any one.
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/julia-watson-lo-tek-design-b...
Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#17A conclusion I reached while reading this article that I can't shake is Adolf Hitler was more forward-thinking, and compassionate, in a way, than Vladimir Putin.
Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#18What's with the 5-digit year format? Premature prep for y10k?
That’s longnow’s whole deal. Getting people to think about the future far beyond a human lifespan.
Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#19What's with the 5-digit year format? Premature prep for y10k?
The Long Now Foundation's mission is "Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years —
a timespan we call the long now."
The leading zero is a way to trigger people to think about the next 10,000 years.
Re: Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food
#20What's with the 5-digit year format? Premature prep for y10k?
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