Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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A warty problem

By now, of course, you know the difference between a true zucchini and a cocozelle. In the course of researching that little gem, I came across one of the stranger byways in the annals of pumpkin science.

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In December 2007, Siegers Seed Co., of Holland Michigan, applied for a US patent for “warted pumpkin”. The patent helpfully tells us that such a pumpkin has an “at least one wart associated with the outer shell of the body”. And, while IANAPL, it seem to me that the patent attempts to cover any warted pumpkin whatsoever, no matter how large, prominent or numerous said warts may be.

Which is very odd because warted pumpkins are nothing new. And again, IANAPL, but I thought that a patent had to include some sort of novelty.

As Hank Will, then as now Editor in Chief at Grit magazine wrote:

My ancestors grew warted gourds, pumpkins and squashes long before Siegers was even in business, and they received the seed from Native American gardeners who had warted cucurbits in their patches for who knows how long.

Will listed five examples of “prior art,” including a description from the granddaddy of cucurbit taxonomy, Antoine Nicholas Duchesne. The lack of novelty was one of the factors that led the US Patent & Trademark Office to reject the application in quick time. The rejection even cited images from our friends at Seed Savers Exchange to show that warty pumpkins had long been in existence. The patent rejection, however, was “non-final” and I have not been able to find out what happened after that. ((If you know, let me know.))

How did Siegers come to invent the warty pumpkin that everyone else seems to have known about forever? The “inventor” (who was a director of marketing at Siegers) was both very observant and very inexperienced.

In a large commercial field of multiple unknown pumpkin varieties, a single fruit was discovered displaying a greater degree of warting than has ever been observed in prior experience by the inventor.

The brilliant marketing idea was that these warty pumpkins would make extra ghoulish Jack-o-lanterns, and Siegers even went so far as to register the trade name Super Freak, with varieties called Knucklehead and Goose Bumps, and one called Gremlins that I swear is a repackaged version of the “ornamental gourds” that were all the rage dried, varnished and gathering dust a while back.

One independent trial concluded:

We had both of these in our trials and thought they were sort of ugly, but nonetheless, they appeared to be a hot item at a garden center where we test-marketed them. These varieties will not be easy to use as carving pumpkins because of the hard shell associated with the warty character.

So maybe it was a good marketing idea, even if it was a terrible idea to claim novelty and a patent.

Thanks Lori Holder-Webb for making your picture of warty pumpkins available.

P.S. A website the company apparently created, “dedicated to the Superfreak™ Series,” and designed to give “growers and consumers alike … valuable information about all of Siegers Seed Company’s unique pumpkins, gourds and fall specialty items” ((From here.)) has been overrun by spam. That seems kinda fitting.

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How to get over your quinoa guilt trip, kinda

We’ve poked fun in the past at people who think that high prices for quinoa are taking food out of the mouths of poor farmers in Bolivia and Peru, but here’s a confession.

We didn’t have actual objective evidence that this was not the case. Just a gut feeling, based on experience and knowing people who know quinoa farmers. Oh, and lots of research on other commodities by Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton.

Now we do have evidence, from real agricultural economists, which I’ve written about at length (and thanks for giving me the length) at NPR’s The Salt.

Your Quinoa Habit Really Did Help Peru’s Poor. But There’s Trouble Ahead.

Bottom line, from the researchers:

“The claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it [is] patently false.”

And that goes for nutrition too, as the article explains.

So what’s the trouble ahead? There are three, actually, two of which will be familiar to readers of this site.

First, the boom in export markets is focussed on very few of the 3000 or so extant varieties of quinoa, which hold the future to further adaptation of quinoa as environmental conditions change. Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services could help to solve that.

Secondly, the sustainability of quinoa growing in the high Andes is in doubt because more intensive practices are resulting in soil erosion and degradation. No easy solution, unless the farmers band together and implement some minimum sustainability standards. That might give them an edge in an increasingly competitive market, the basis for confronting perhaps the biggest threat …

Prices have already started to drop, and are already well down on their peak. That’s hardly surprising. High prices have sucked in global competitors. Farmers in South America are holding on to their stocks in the hope that prices will rise again, but few of the people I spoke to have any expectation that they will rise.

As Marc Bellemare, one of the agricultural economists, told me:

“If we’re going to rejoice when prices go up, maybe we should worry when prices go down.”

A quick, selective trawl in our archives produces:

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Nuanced seed suppliers

Giant multinational seed companies are the spawn of the devil. All farmers really need is the freedom to exchange seeds among themselves and all will be well.

Right?

Actually, the world is a little more complex than that, although you would be hard pressed to discover that. No more excuses. The Access to Seeds Index has just launched its latest large report which you can get from the new and revamped website. So, what’s it all about?

The Access to Seeds Index measures and compares the efforts of the world’s leading seed companies to enhance the productivity of smallholder farmers. By matching the expectations of stakeholders in and around the seed industry with company performance, it helps to clarify the role that the seed industry can play and brings transparency to the contribution of individual companies.

And the report makes for interesting reading. For a start, although the giant multinational seed companies say that they’re committed to sustainable intensification and seeds for smallholder farmers, “the majority of these commitments lack tangible targets, limiting accountability”.

There are bright spots too. In East Africa, the Index notes, “regional companies play a vital role in providing access to seeds. They do so by addressing issues largely ignored by global peers such as breeding for local crops, addressing needs of women farmers and reaching remote villages.”

Of particular interest to us, three of the four focus areas by which the Index scores companies relate directly to agricultural biodiversity: conservation and use of crop and genetic diversity, access to genetic resources and intellectual property rights. The picture is slightly more nuanced than you might expect, but rather than attempt to distill pithy take-aways from the complexity of the report, I’ll just suggest you head over to the website — the East Africa Index is a good place to start — and dig around. The presentation of the data is almost as interesting as the data.

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Nibbles: Dirty methane, Ag wages, Myrrh, Irish DNA, Oca harvest, Rice domestication, Millets

  1. The US is hiding meaty methane emissions.
  2. What’s an Indian agricultural labourer earn? It depends …
  3. The traditional year-end revisitation of the magic of myrrh.
  4. A year end knees-up argument of whether the Irish are from the Caspian steppes or some other place.
  5. The traditional harvest of odd non-potatoes, oca at year’s end, and oca at year’s beginning.
  6. A convenient year-end summary of crop domestication, mostly rice.
  7. Speaking of which, millets (and Jeremy) hit the big time.