- The Green Revolution has messed with rice rituals in Bengal.
- National Pig Day is coming up. Bacon for breakfast at last!
- The Star Trek tricorder finally arrives, though only for plant diseases so far.
- Organic beer can be good. You had me at beer.
- Speakin’ of bacon, make mine endangered.
- Biodiversity Fair held in Bhutan “to recognise the farmers’ contribution …; create awareness … and encourage farmers …; promote in situ conservation and … ex situ (gene bank) conservation; and provide … opportunities to exchange seeds.”
Hawaiian agrobiodiversity memories
I came across an evocative little piece in The Garden Island on Sunday, thanks to a Google alert. It’s about an upcoming course on permaculture design that will be looking in depth at the ahupua’a, the old Hawaiian practice of land subdivision and management.
To ensure adequate space for forests and agriculture in each ahupua’a, pre-colonial Hawaiian communities applied careful land-use planning. Valley floors, where the most fertile soil is concentrated, were reserved for agriculture. They often included walled-terraces developed to grow kalo (taro), the most important staple food crop for Hawaiians. Houses were built on hillsides and in sandy areas in order to save prime agricultural lands. As contemporary Kaua’i attempts to move towards more self-sufficient communities, we can look towards this model of reserving prime agricultural lands for agriculture to perpetuate our ability to feed ourselves.
The piece reminded me of a visit I made with the family to the Limahuli Garden and Preserve on Kaua’i. It’s a beautiful place, explicitly organized around the ahupua’a concept.
And it even maintains small collections of different varieties of local root crops such as taro and sweet potato. Which was mainly why I was there. Although the visit came too late to allow me to include the data in the directory of Pacific collections. Maybe the next edition…
Agrobiodiversity and conflict
Not many biodiversity hotspots escaped conflict during the past 50 years. 1 And, I’d say, not many centres of crop diversity either.
Nibbles: Trees, Fibres, Journal, Local sourcing, d’Yquem, Capybaras
- Sacred groves explained.
- Filipinos encouraged to grow fibres.
- New AJFAND is out.
- “Inclusive business models†good for livelihoods, maybe agrobiodiversity too.
- Because it’s there. Disease and fermentation.
- There’s a booming market for chiguiro meat in Venezuela, which is bad for the chiguiro in Colombia.
Mapping agrobiodiversity, then and now
I found this great 19th agricultural map of France at Mapping the Marvelous, a feed I’ve only recently subscribed to which is proving a real find. It was linked there to a post about city orchards at a blog called Food Mapping, a “visual exploration and mapping out of the issues surrounding local food, including the associated debates regarding economics, environmentalism, geography, sustainability and taste.” That’s also gone into the feed reader.