- What words should we use? “[B]est management practices” or “more casual words like local, family-owned and farmer”.
- Words like “farming”. How to make a living “farming” without leaving your armchair. Via.
- Hungry work, that. If only I had a slice of acorn-finished pork to finish.
- Someone else who would like that: where in the world is Luigi Guarino? Wherever “it is imperative that genetic diversity is maintained for posterity.”
Waxing lyrical about heirloom grains
Yes, of course this is a self-indulgent bit of film. But fun for all that. They’ve tried to pack too much in — does everyone out there watching actually know what Carolina Gold is, or recognise those panicles? — and at times fitting it all in works against clarity. I got very distracted trying to see whether the chef’s tattoo was what I thought it was. And it was.
Found it here.
Nibbles: New drug, Bees, Blood oranges, Dahi, Melaku speaks, So does Rajiv.
- A drug company is almost ready to go with a pain reliever from the Peruvian rainforest, based on Acmella oleracea, “also known as toothache plant”. Clues, wherever you look.
- Why biodiverse beehives do better. It’s partly down to biodiverse bacteria.
- Producing blood oranges anywhere. I’ll enjoy my Sicilian ones more, now I know why only some are bloody.
- A hymn to the diversity of fermented milk products.
- Interview with Melaku Worede of Ethiopia; “we are still losing diversity at an alarming rate”.
- Rajiv Shah, administrator of USAID, explains what it is all about.
Non-traditional, non-indigenous knowledge is important
When I first came to Rome, I grew potfuls of Lantana (probably L. camara, but not sure precisely what species). Sure, it’s an invasive, noxious weed, but nobody’s perfect, and I liked the succession of flowers and that strange, almost catty scent of the crushed leaves. And in the autumn, I noticed a strange thing. Unlike all the other plant pots, there was nary a single weed growing beneath the Lantanas. That was an observation odd enough to make me check, and discover that Lantana is allelopathic; it makes life hard for anything growing underneath it.
An article by Professor Anil Gupta reminded me of this. The article was partly about Auta Gravetas, a Ugandan farmer who noticed that sweet potatoes at the edge of a field bordered by Lantana had fewer pests than plants near the centre of the plot. He experimented with putting lantana leaves between layers of dried slices of sweet potato, which extended their shelf-life by six weeks or more, an important consideration for very poor farmers. In 2000, this discovery won Auta Gravetas 1 first prize in a competition organised by IFAD. As Gupta observes:
The weed became a resource. … Neither lantana camara was indigenous nor had the knowledge been transferred by one generation to another over centuries. The way of knowing was traditional — by observing an odd phenomenon, discriminating, abstracting, hypothesising, testing and developing a robust rule or technology.
There’s probably a lot more that Lantana could be used for; given its anti-microbial (and other) properties. Gupta has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about this story, and writes about it often. But the point is well taken. Farmers can innovate in unexpected ways, and it requires all parties to be alert to the possibilities if those innovations are to be spread. And quite by coincidence, I’m sure, BBC News Africa reports today on a Cameroonian innovator and entrepreneur who also transformed his local food system.
Nibbles: Pharaonic gardens, Ironic bananas, Workshopped access, Seed Swap, Forgotten foods
- See Gardens of the Pharaohs at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities from 27 April to 2 September.
- Iron-deficiency anaemia? Engineer a banana!
- Eldis shares details of a workshop on access and benefit sharing under the International Seed Treaty.
- A hugely successful Seedy Sunday in Amsterdam. Call the Seed Police!
- The BBC remembers Forgotten Foods. No, not NUS.