This makes me wonder, since most of the world’s food supply is from cultivated grains, as opposed to wild ones, and since yields have been increasing thanks to selective breeding programs, fertilizer use, and better farming practices, where’s the problem?
From the University of Haifa, Wild cereals threatened by global warming:
Wheats and barleys are the staple food for humans and animal feed around the world, and their wild progenitors have undergone genetic changes over the last 28 years that imply a risk for crop improvement and food production, reveals a new study. “The earliness in flowering time and genetic changes that are taking place in these important progenitor wild cereals, most likely due to global warming, can negatively affect the wild progenitors. These changes could thereby indirectly deteriorate food production,” says Prof. Eviatar Nevo of the Insitute of Evolution at the University of Haifa who directed the study.
Wheats are the universal cereals of Old World agriculture.The progenitors, wild emmer wheat and wild barley, which originated in the Near East, provide the genetic basis for ameliorating wheat and barley cultivars, which as earlier studies have shown, are themselves under constant genetic erosion and increasing susceptibility to environmental stresses.
The new study set out to examine whether the wild cereal progenitors are undergoing evolutionary changes due to climate change that would impact future food production. It was was headed by Prof. Nevo, along with Dr. Yong-Bi Fu from Canada, and Drs.Beiles, Pavlicek and Tavasi, and Miss Khalifa from the University of Haifa’s Institute of Evolution, and recently published in the prestigious scientific journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS).
Ten wild emmer wheat and ten wild barley populations from different climates and habitats across Israel were sampled first in 1980 and then again at the same sites in 2008 and grown in a common greenhouse. The results indicated that over the relatively short period of 28 years, all 20 wild cereal populations examined, without exception, showed a dramatic change in flowering time. All populations sampled in 2008 flowered, on average, about 10 days earlier than those sampled in 1980. “These cereal progenitors are adapting their time of flowering to escape the heat,” Prof. Nevo explains. The study also found that the genetic diversity of the 2008 sample is for the most part significantly reduced, but some new drought-adapted variants appeared that could be used for crop improvement. “The ongoing global warming in Israel is the only likely factor that could have caused earliness in flowering and genetic turnover across the range of wild cereals in Israel. This indicates that they are under environmental stress which may erode their future survival,” says Prof. Nevo. “Multiple effects of the global warming phenomenon have been observed in many species of plants and animals,” he adds. “But this study is pioneering in showing its infuence on flowering and genetic changes in wild cereals. These changes threaten the best genetic resource for crop improvement and thereby may damage food production.”
A number of species did show positive adaptive changes resulting from global warming, such as earliness in flowering or migration into cooler regions. “But overall,” says Prof. Nevo, “the genetic resources of these critical wild cereals are undergoing rapid erosion – and cannot be dismissed as a concern for future generations. Wild emmer wheat is the world’s most important genetic resource for wheat improvement, and it is up to us to preserve it. We are utilizing our gene bank at the Institute of Evolution for transforming genes of interest to the crop. However, a much more extensive effort needs to be made to keep the natural populations thriving, by preventing urbanization and global warming from eliminating them”.
[UPDATE] I trust Anthony won’t mind my expanding on this a bit.
Man, I hate garbage studies like this. I go to look at the temperatures they are using. Of course it’s paywalled, but the Supplementary Online Information (SOI) is here. Figure S4 in the SOI shows the temperatures that they used.
There are several strange things about this figure. One is that the title says “Fig. S4. The mean annual temperatures over nine stations in Israel (Source: Goldreich 2010),” but the left axis says “Mean (min temp.) deg.”. Which is it? Well, I went to look at the GISS data, and near as I can tell … it’s neither. Here’s what GISS has for Jerusalem, versus what they say:
Note that the temperatures according to GISS are about two degrees cooler than according to Nevo et al. Also, GISS never heard of most of those sites, and has very, very different values for the sites in common, with different years missing and much less data. For example, the R2 between their Jerusalem data and the GISS data shown above is a pathetic 0.25 … Why? I haven’t a clue.
Shabby, shabby work. Their figures don’t even agree with themselves, much less with external data.
w.
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Wait a second – They start off repeatedly talking as if early flower is a BAD THING. Then at the end of the article it is mentioned as being one of the positive or beneficial changes? WUWT???
Also, it sounds as if the 28 year old seed was grown in the same greenhouse at the same time as the new seed…. if so, and this coming from vague and quite possibly incorrect memory, I was under the impression that old seed no matter how well stored typically degrades with time and is less robust in terms of early growth, flowering, etc.??
Now, if I’m off on that base assumption, e.g., that both sets of seed were being grown together, then we’d have to see the actual study, but I’d like to know how they managed to accurately control for differences in soil nutrients, CO2 levels, watering, etc., etc.
(Sarc on)
The same grains flower six months earlier when grown in the southern hemisphere so that must mean…………..Oh no ! It`s worse than We thought , THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE MUST BE WARMING FASTER !!!!
(Sarc off)
Or it could just be , as previous commenters have suggested , that plants are genetically “programed” to react to changing conditions , AS DO ALL LIVING THINGS because every “old” species that has exists MUST have survived the the Younger Dryas cold period and the holocene optimum , nevermind previous glacials and interglacials . Nevermind that the difference in the flowering times between old and new seed could simply be down to the obvious that regardless of how well it is stored , seed is still fertillized plant ovum and that it changes over time as it is still alive but dormant ….NOT inanimate .
Rational Db8 (used to post as Rational Debate) said @ur momisugly February 26, 2012 at 4:17 pm
Yeah… go figure 🙂 In any absolute sense, early (or late) flowering is neither good, nor bad. Early flowering means a longer growing season and for many crops that equates to higher yield. If flowering occurs while there are frosts, then early flowering is a bad idea. Many crop flowers are sensitive to being frozen. It’s a horses for courses thing.
Seed at optimum moisture content and sufficiently low temperature can be kept for a very long time indeed. I have been having problems obtaining my favourite cauliflower seed and it’s a bit of a pain generating seed, so I have stashed some. There’s a good into to the topic here:
http://www.seedcontainers.net/a_guide_to_long-term_seed_preservation.html
Byron said @ur momisugly February 26, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Thanks for the laugh mate 🙂
What annoys me most about this is the “heads I win tails you lose” aspect of he conclusions.
We see here plants adapting well to (apparently) increased temperatures by flowering earlier to take advantage of the longer growing season. It is being reported as potentially dangerous genetic change threatening the viability of these crops. OUR FOOD SUPPLY IS AT RISK!!!!
So what would the conclusion have been if the plants did not flower earlier? Do you think they would have said ” these plants are unaffected by climate change so our food supply is safe”. No? Perhaps you suspect like me that the conclusion would have been more along the lines of “these plants failed to adapt rapidly enough to increased temperatures showing that they will not be able to handle rapid climate change”. OUR FOOD SUPPLY IS AT RISK!!!! Indeed I suspect this is the conclusion the study was designed to elicit and the business about genetic change is a somewhat weak last minute replacement when the results didn’t quite come out as expected.
“Heads I win, tails you lose”. No matter what happened in the experiment it would have been spun as evidence of a potential climate catastrophe.
Here’s the release with contact info which the above direct UofH link does not: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-02/uoh-wna022312.php
here’s a report, only 14 pages, I came across on a quick Bing of “wild cereal flowering” from Journal of Experimental Biology: http://www.niab.com/uploads/files/Cockram_2007.pdf
John Kettlewell said @ur momisugly February 26, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Thanks; that was interesting. I had no idea that early wild cereals were biennial 🙂
Well… it actually takes just one bad year for something like that to happen. One bad year with a large heat wave at exactly the right time which prevents most of the “late” flowering wheat to reproduce, and next year almost all what’s left flowers 10 days earlier. Something like 1998 comes onto mind, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the one, we all know heat waves can come anytime. You even don’t need any net warming for that.
How about the equally likely possibility they were adapting to the dramatic changes in water usage in the area and not the temperature anyway. This is one thing I keep on hearing about how you have to mention temperature and climate change to fund a study even if you think the cause is something else.
What I mean by ‘Gramscian Science’ is the use of non-neutral words and phrases in scientific publications to influence and frame the debate, or manipulate the debate toward some political goal.
For example, replacing the fairly harmless sounding ‘climate change’ with the scary sounding ‘climate chaos’.
Most regulars here know the climate is a chaotic system, but it sounds bad to the manonthestreet.
Philip Bradley said @ur momisugly February 26, 2012 at 11:44 pm
Thanks Philip. Gits can be a bit thick sometimes.
Does this research show that climates change, as we know that they do, or that plants adapt to their environment, as we know they do, or what?
Not the most productive piece of work.
Follow the money. These guys know if they wave their hands around while warning about CAGW they stand a much better chance of being funded.
I’ve only skimmed, but I’m getting a “what’s the point?” feeling on all this. I once heard a envrio person claim that 10K+ years ago man lived on like 1000’s of grains and today he lives on 20 world wide…. hrm… maybe because those 20 were easy to domesticate? And then the “we don’t want modified food” people tick me off because they are all like ‘we want it natural’ well ever since the ag revolution of abotu 10K years ago, it hasn’t be ‘natural’ mankind had modifed through selective breeding and later GM for more desirable traits in his food.
What is my point? I’m not sure I have one either I guess. 🙂
So, no mention of growth, repoduction rate, and yield.
ozspeaksup says:
February 26, 2012 at 5:29 am
How pray tell, did the GM crowd “force” farmers to give up the grains that they used to plant?
Did govt pass a law outlawing the use of historic grains or something?
MarkW said @ur momisugly February 27, 2012 at 9:46 am
No, but plants are promiscuous. If bees, or wind carry patented genes into your crop, you break the law when you save your own seed. If your market is for GMO-free produce, you lose your market.
Here in Tasmania we initially went with a moratorium on GMO for widely grown crops while we evaluated what was happening elsewhere on the planet. Then a few years later, a trial of canola was approved. A few weeks after the seed was delivered to the farm where the crop was to be grown, several patches of that GMO crop were found growing by the roadside. Notably the accidental spills were near farms growing canola for markets that demand GMO-free.
So, it’s a bit more complicated than many armchair critics realise. But then so is life…
AC says:
February 27, 2012 at 8:54 am
I’ve only skimmed, but I’m getting a “what’s the point?” feeling on all this. I once heard a envrio person claim that 10K+ years ago man lived on like 1000′s of grains and today he lives on 20 world wide…. hrm… maybe because those 20 were easy to domesticate? And then the “we don’t want modified food” people tick me off because they are all like ‘we want it natural’ well ever since the ag revolution of abotu 10K years ago, it hasn’t be ‘natural’ mankind had modifed through selective breeding and later GM for more desirable traits in his food.
What is my point? I’m not sure I have one either I guess. 🙂
—————————————————
Au contraire, AC, you have made some valuable and relevant points 🙂
People who run the ‘we used to live on thousands of grains’ line fail to mention that we used to die by 35, often from starvation, as well. However, I encourage environmentalists who subscribe to this view to start subsisting only on the wild grains that grow within walking distance of where they live. Please.
As you point out, improving food yields has been the cornerstone of human development. I really wish that the people who espouse the romanticised view of our primitive past would just go somewhere and live it. There are two possible outcomes, and neither of them involves an ongoing commitment to this nonsense once it has been tried.
Saving Seed is both very easy and far harder than folks think. Saving GMO contamination free seed can be nearly impossible in some places (and it IS contamination).
Each plant has a different seed durability. Some are called ‘recalcitrant’, meaning that they will not let go of their water and dry out. Most fruit trees are like that. A recalcitrant seed usually has to be planted the very next planting season or it dies. They can not be frozen or saved for long. (SOME can be preserved in a flash liquid nitrogen freeze, but not well, nor easily).
Others, like onions, dry well, but can be kept for only one year at room temperature. More under refrigeration. Others like lentils can keep dried for a very long time ( I have some that were saved at room temperature for 16 years and still had good germination).
Putting THOSE seeds into a seed vault under refrigeration is a good idea. (SOME keep best frozen, some refrigerated). I’ve been storing seeds for a few decades now and most of them have kept well for a decade when frozen in a jar. (You must keep them DRY while frozen or refrigerated). Even then, as you go beyond a decade or two some variation is lost. The ‘grow out’ from a 20 year frozen sample will NOT have the same mix of individuals…
Then there are the things, like potatoes, where the tuber is the “seed” and also hard to store…
Now, after a ‘reasonable’ storage time of, say, 5 to 10 years in the freezer, you go to do a ‘grow out’.
Each plant has a different risk of contamination from others. Some have “self fertile” flowers that never open so have little risk. Some beans are like that. Others have open flowers and you must worry ‘how close’ is the nearest similar species (but different variety). Common ‘risk’ distances are in the 1 to 2 MILE range. So if you are growing squash in your back yard, ANY neighbor inside a mile or two radius with a different variety can contaminate your seeds… For ‘wind pollinated plants’ like corn, the speed of the wind is what matters. 10 miles or more may be needed to keep purity of type. Now think about that a minute. PiR^2 area. Roughly 314 Square Miles around your plot must be “not corn”.
Now this would not matter much were it not for the insidious laws passed to hand ownership of the world genetic heritage over to Monsanto and the likes. So if ANY GMO gene gets into YOUR carefully preserved heirloom seeds YOU are held guilty of theft of intellectual property and your seed stock must be destroyed. Never mind that it was you who suffered the insult of invasion and damage to your work… And no, they don’t go and sort out the “good heirloom seeds” so you can keep a founders stock to restart. It ALL gets destroyed. Sometimes a lifetime of work.
Now put those two together:
You MUST grow out the heirloom to maintain it. Growing it out is likely to destroy it.
Have a nice day…
BTW, I eat a fair amount of GMO stuff most likely. I’m not fanatic and don’t go out of my way to avoid it. With that said, there are some very real risks in it. Just 2 of many:
1) Many have a insecticide gene in them (BT gene). Unlike external pesticides, you can not wash off a substance that is INSIDE the whole plant. What happens if someone develops an allergy to the BT Toxin? Well, hope they don’t need to eat… (Folks can develop allergies to anything to which they are frequently exposed. Prior to this, few people ate the same pesticide every day of their life…)
2) The GMO Gene is “shotgunned” into the genome with a “locked on” gene. This is done in a very sloppy way. The “theory” was “one gene, one protein”, but we now know that is not true. So we cram this into exiting genes, then lock on that gene and anything else that is stuck onto it in the process. As we now know that one strip of DNA is more like a hologram and may make several different proteins, we also know that now we may also be making a bunch of different proteins and / or broken some others. Testing is NOT required to show if this causes any toxin genes to get “locked on” (and many plants make self protective toxins. Potato, for example, makes solanine when exposed to sun and it can and does make you sick). All that is required is that the plant grows. (MOST don’t, which also means we know a lot of the insertions cause lethal damage to the plant embryo. A huge number are ‘changed’ and what ever lives is grown…) So we are not making carefully crafted KNOWN or CHOSEN changes. We are randomly causing “crap to happen” while locking ON one desired gene. We have no idea what the results to health might be.
GMO may be a good idea some day, but as presently practiced, it has major risks that are being ignored. As someone prone to allergies, who has a specific food allergy, I’m not looking forward to the day that THAT protein gets added to some other grains without my knowledge…
SO, back at the article:
What they OUGHT to have done is sequenced the first grains, then sequenced the latter grains. Only THEN could they say if the genetics changed. They also ought to have grown plots of the original seeds (saved) along with the later seeds to compare. Further, specific checking for GMO or Domesticated genetic markers ought to have been done to rule out wind born genetic contamination unrelated to Global Warming.
If nothing else, having the original genome on file would let us recreate it some day if needed. ( I’m not against genetic manipulation or creation of species ‘from scratch’, only the stupid way we do it now with a shotgun and field trials of the survivors…)
My small guide to DIY seed saving is here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/seed-saving/
It’s not hard once you try it (at least for the easy closed flower types). Even if you don’t ‘grow your own’, just putting the commercial seed packages in a jar in the freezer lets you use one packet of seed for many years. So you don’t need to buy a new $3 packet of tomato seeds each year, since they usually have far more than the 3 or 4 seeds you need to get more tomatoes than one person can eat 😉
Also, on the “ate 1000 grains”: I doubt it.
Most locations don’t have that many species. Folks in any one place would have a much more limited variety. For example, near me, each spring a sea of wild mustard and radishes bloom. Yellow flowers for mustard. White to Redish or purplish for radishes. There’s some “Foxtail” or wild barley. And a bit of wild oats. Not a lot else. (At least, not enough to make a meal of anything). I get more variety in my “7 grain bread” from WholeFoods…
Humans from all over the planet in TOTAL might have used more, but any one population did not. So Mexicans had corn. South Americans had Amaranth. Asians millet (eventually rice). The Middle East has wheat and a bit more north barley and rye. We now all have all of them… Yeah, things like Sorghum are less common in the modern diet. As, too, is using the left overs of “greens” seeds (like mustard or radishes) as a grain. But nothing prevents you from doing it if you like. Most folks, though, find such seeds a bit “much” in the flavor department. (Many have toxic substances so only a little can be eaten, or, like mustards, tolerated… not all of us can ‘take the heat’ 😉 Probably it is the drop of Flax consumption that is the most problematic: it has high Omega-3 fatty acid content and helps prevent inflammation problems.
So, no, the average ancient did not go out picking 1000 different kinds of seeds in one day and making bread from it… but they probably had some strange condiments 😉
BTW, Sorghum makes pretty mediocre beer, but many of the other grains are ‘not bad’ ….
E.M.Smith says:
February 28, 2012 at 1:47 am
“Probably it is the drop of Flax consumption that is the most problematic: it has high Omega-3 fatty acid content and helps prevent inflammation problems.”
THANKS Chiefio! I knew that flax oil contains some unsaturated oil but didn’t know it’s omega 3… Now I know how to put some omega 3 into the diet of my son (who refuses to eat fish).
(And I crosschecked, wikipedia also says it’s omega 3)
Philip Bradley says:
February 26, 2012 at 1:14 pm
“I live in a similar climate to Israel (Perth Western Australia, we are perhaps 2C to 3C warmer than TA), and have what we call grass verges along two sides of my house.”
That means, compared to Israel, you are living in the post-apocalyptic future of CO2AGW.
Are those motorcycle gangs still terrorizing the area? Have humans adapted?
You are most welcome! There are also Omega-3 enriched eggs in healthfood stores and some regular grocers. (Feed the flax to the chickens 😉
Also, while grains and seeds are rich in Omega-6 (and it is the 3/6 ratio the shifts inflammation so getting omega-6 down can be as useful as getting omega-3 up) the actual GRASS leaves are high in Omega-3. That means that “grass fed beef” is a better source as well. So a “grass feed beef hamburger” is on the menu too… (probably not a hard sell 😉
Free Range Chickens tend to eat grass to some extent, and bugs that eat grass, so it’s a small help as well.
Also algae and similar can help (spirulina and such) so maybe a ‘green milkshake’ 😉
Basically, the trick, is that things that eat leaves and algae get more Omega-3 in them (thus the fish) and things that eat seeds get more Omega-6 in them (thus the modern problem where our 6/3 ratio is way high on 6 due to all the added grains and feeding our animals on grains).
Oh, and while a bit expensive, both lamb and goat tend to be grass or browse (bushes) fed, not grain fed, so ‘a feature’…
But by far the easiest way to do it is just a Flax Meal rich Muffin… slather jam on it and kids will down them by the dozen…
You can even buy Flax Oil at health food stores, but it’s rather expensive. Fairly neutral flavor. Easy to ‘slip into things’… though I’d rather have a lamb chop and Flax Muffin 😉