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A spell of unusually cold weather in northern Mexico has severely damaged the maize crop in the state of Sinaloa. Officials estimate the losses could amount to four million tonnes of corn - 16% of Mexico's annual harvest. President Felipe Calderon said everything possible must be done to re-sow the fields over the next two weeks. There are fears the losses could force up the price of the corn tortillas that most Mexicans eat with every meal. Officials say up to 600,000 hectares (1.5m acres) of maize have been lost to frost in Sinaloa, which is home to some of...

Farmers genetically modified corn 4,000 years ago Researchers have claimed that farmers in the US and Mexico changed corn genes through selective breeding more than 4,000 years ago. The scientists say the modifications produced the large cobs and fat kernels that make corn one of humanity's most important foods. In a study that compares the genes of corn cobs recovered in Mexico and the southwestern United States, researchers found that three key genetic variants were systematically enhanced, probably through selective cultivation, over thousands of years. The technique was not as sophisticated as the methods used for modern genetically modified crops,...

A trade group overseeing an effort to unlock corn's genetic code says more than 120 researchers have already used a Web database created to speed up development of biotech crops.The National Corn Growers Association said this week that the researchers, representing 35 academic institutions, accessed maize gene sequences catalogued in the database. "There are only little pieces of gene sequences available in the public domain," said Jo Messing, a professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University, who has used the database. "The private collection offers a lot of those missing pieces." The 8-month-old Web site pools research done on the...

Many botanists did not see any connection between maize and other living plants. Some concluded that the crop plant arose through the domestication by early agriculturalists of a wild maize that was now extinct, or at least undiscovered. However, a few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte... George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes....

Mother of us all, or sister? Olmecs a puzzle By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, New York Times First published: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 On a coastal flood plain etched by rivers flowing through swamps and alongside fields of maize and beans, the people archaeologists call the Olmecs lived in a society of emergent complexity. It was more than 3,000 years ago, along the Gulf of Mexico around Veracruz. The Olmecs moved a veritable mountain of earth to create a plateau above the plain, and there planted a city, the ruins of which are known today as San Lorenzo. The Olmecs are...

[W]heat is losing its crown. The tonnage (though not the acreage) of maize harvested in the world began consistently to exceed that of wheat for the first time in 1998; rice followed suit in 1999. Genetic modification, which has transformed maize, rice and soyabeans, has largely passed wheat by—to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming an "orphan crop"... And with population growth rates falling sharply while yields continue to rise, even the acreage devoted to wheat may now begin to decline for the first time since the stone age... [W]heat is a genetic monster. A typical...

Ancient corncobs unlock riddle By MIKE TONER The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Prehistoric populations in the American Southwest transported corn over long distances -- and used networks of "farm to market" roads that enabled them to support large cities in areas that were unsuitable for agriculture. New studies of ancient corncobs show that large urban complexes like Chaco Canyon that thrived a thousand years ago in New Mexico imported corn from fertile farmlands that were 50 miles or more from major population centers. Archaeologists have long wondered how the sophisticated Chaco civilization, which built huge multistory dwellings in the high desert of...

Prehistoric communities in one part of Peru's Andes Mountains may have gone from maize to amazingly complex. Bioarchaeologist Brian Finucane's analyses of human skeletons excavated in this region indicate that people living there 2,800 years ago regularly ate maize. This is the earliest evidence for maize as a staple food in the rugged terrain of highland Peru, he says. Maize agriculture stimulated ancient population growth in the Andes and allowed a complex society, the Wari, to develop, Finucane contends in the August Current Anthropology. Wari society included a central government and other elements of modern states. It lasted from around...

Daniel Skotnick agriculture advisor, and Abdullah Al Asoum, economic bi-lingual, bi-cultural advisor with embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team Baghdad-5, speak with a farmer in Abernisha Village, northwest of Baghdad, July 13. Two tons of hybrid maize seed were donated to help rebuild Iraq’s agriculture and infrastructure. Photo by Pfc. Lyndsey Dransfield. CAMP TAJI — The Fertile Crescent portion of Iraq is notorious for its strong agricultural heritage throughout history. It has long blessed residents and their livestock with a plethora food.Unfortunately, in recent history investments and resources were diverted away from farming and food production, leaving Iraq's agricultural resources in utter...

Maize (Corn) May Have Been Domesticated In Mexico As Early As 10,000 Years AgoVarious unusually colored and shaped maize from Latin America. (Credit: Photo by Keith Weller / courtesy of USDA/Agricultural Research Service) ScienceDaily (June 27, 2008) — The ancestors of maize originally grew wild in Mexico and were radically different from the plant that is now one of the most important crops in the world. While the evidence is clear that maize was first domesticated in Mexico, the time and location of the earliest domestication and dispersal events are still in dispute. Now, in addition to more traditional macrobotanical...

Ancient Mexican maize varieties Maize was first domesticated in the highlands of Mexico about 10,000 years ago and is now one of the most important crop plants in the world. It is a member of the grass family, which also hosts the world's other major crops including rice, wheat, barley, sorghum, and sugar cane. As early agriculturalists selected plants with desirable traits, they were also selecting genes important for transforming a wild grass into a food plant. Since that time, Mexican farmers have created thousands of varieties suitable for cultivation in the numerous environments in the Mexican landscape—from dry, temperate...

Contact: Grady Semmens gsemmens@ucalgary.ca 403-220-7722 University of Calgary Corn's roots dig deeper into South AmericaEarliest signs of maize as staple food found after spreading south from Mexican homeland Corn has long been known as the primary food crop in prehistoric North and Central America. Now it appears it may have been an important part of the South American diet for much longer than previously thought, according to new research by University of Calgary archaeologists who are cobbling together the ancient history of plant domestication in the New World. In a paper published in the March 24 advanced online edition of...

Everyone seems to think that ethanol is a good way to make cars greener. Everyone is wrong SOMETIMES you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilisation, if not before. Take some sugary liquid. Add yeast. Wait. They have also known for a thousand years how to get that ethanol out of the formerly sugary liquid and into a more or less pure form. You heat it up, catch the vapour that emanates, and cool that vapour down until it liquefies. The result burns. And when Henry Ford...

Contact: Mary Pohl mpohl@mailer.fsu.edu 850-644-8153 Florida State University FSU anthropologist finds earliest evidence of maize farming in Mexico TALLAHASSEE, Fla.--A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought. Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The analysis extends Pohl's previous work in this area and validates principles...

Public release date: 19-Feb-2007 Contact: Gregory Harris gharris@ucalgary.ca 403-220-3506 University of Calgary Practice of farming reaches back farther than thoughtArchaeological findings from Panama show agriculture's roots run deep Ancient people living in Panama were processing and eating domesticated species of plants like maize, manioc, and arrowroot at least as far back as 7,800 years ago – much earlier than previously thought – according to new research by a University of Calgary archaeologist. One of the most hotly debated issues in the discipline of archaeology is how and why certain human societies switched from hunting and gathering to producing their own...

Mummy’s amazing American maize The far-reaching influence of Spanish and Portuguese colonisers appears not to have extended to South American agriculture, scientists studying Andean mummies up to 1,400 years old have found. The University of Manchester researchers working with colleagues in Buenos Aires compared the DNA of ancient maize found in the funerary offerings of the mummy and at other sites in northwest Argentina with that grown in the same region today. Surprisingly, they found both ancient and modern samples of the crop were genetically almost identical indicating that modern European influence has not been as great as previously...

Mugabe seizes black farms to drive his maize economy By Daniel Pepper in Zhampali, Zimbabwe (Filed: 28/05/2006) For years, Zimbabwe's white farmers have felt the wrath of Robert Mugabe, as they have been thrown off their land to make way for soldiers and ruling party cronies. Now, black farmers have also become the focus of his unwelcome attentions. Lot Dube's crops of onions, tomatoes and sweet potatoes were growing nicely when soldiers marched into Insiza district, in the south of the country, set up camp and declared that all crops other than maize would be destroyed. Robert Mugabe has ordered...

Maize in global gene bank crisis 15 May 2006 From New Scientist Print Edition. WITH the future of bananas in the balance (see "A future without bananas?"), there's more worrying news for another major food resource. Maize, the world's most widely grown crop, is facing its own genetic meltdown The world's crop gene banks are in crisis, a meeting of maize researchers and organisations in Texcoco, Mexico, was told last week. At least half the seed stocks are unable to germinate because of incorrect storage, with potentially dire consequences for the world's food supply. Maize - known as corn in...

Week of March 4, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 9 , p. 132 Ancient Andean Maize Makers: Finds push back farming, trade in highland Peru Bruce Bower Nearly 4,000 years ago, large societies emerged in the Andes Mountains of southern Peru that would culminate 1,500 years later in the rise of the Inca civilization. Now, scientists have the first evidence that these Inca predecessors cultivated maize and imported plant foods from lowland tropical forests located 180 miles to the east. HIGH TIMES. Researchers excavate Waynuna, a site in Peru's Andes Mountains that has yielded evidence of early agriculture and food...

HARLINGEN - Tortillas made with contaminated corn may have caused a rash of newborns with missing or rudimentary brains in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1990s, new data suggest. According to the February issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers now have human studies linking a toxin in corn mold called fumonisin with babies' neural tube defects. Scientists have been searching more than a decade for answers to the surge of anencephalic babies - babies born without brains or with underdeveloped brains - in the Rio Grande Valley from 1990-92. There were six such cases in six weeks...