Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Huaca Pucllana is a huge brick mound in the Lima neighbourhood of Miraflores, dating back 1500 years. A very impressive site, still being excavated and restored. It’s difficult to do justice to the sheer scale — in both extent and height — of the thing in ground-level photo such as the ones below, but check it out in Google Maps.
I hadn’t known about lucuma yogurt (or yoghurt) before seeing this in Lima. Wikipedia says it’s a popular ice cream flavour. I haven’t tried that, but the yogurt is great.
And speaking of added-value products of agrobiodiversity, how about this: potato chips (or crisps) from a whole range of different weird Peruvian high-altitude varieties:
An article in the latest Economist discusses the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme. There’s been a fair amount in the media about this lately, and in particular about whether the bumper maize harvests of the past couple of years can be attributed to the extra fertilizer 1 now finding its way onto farmers’ fields increasingly sown to modern varieties, or just to better rains. I think the jury is still out on that one, but check out this statement from the piece in The Economist:
…local seed varieties, little altered from those first brought by the Portuguese centuries ago…
I don’t know about you, but I think that rather underestimates the power of natural selection, drift and recombination. Not to mention 500 growing seasons’ worth of painstaking selection by twenty generations of African farmers.