- I love pictures of agrobiodiversity in markets.
- Humans did for trees on Rapa Nui after all, not rats.
- Like refining chocolate, extracting honey is a fragrant, messy process. Bring it on.
- Fair Trade coffee unfair to farmers, CIAT says.
- Another day, another genome. This time it’s cowpea.
- 2000 year old food forest in Morocco. Honestly! And guess what? It’s not thriving.
- Another video (long). Education of an Urban Farmer.
- Education of an ex-pastoralist farmer, Karamojong, Kenya
Nibbles: Kenyan drought, Ugandan agroforestry, American foodways, Beans, Forages, Bees to the nth, Indigenous farming, Brazilian and Cuban farming, Chinese aquaculture, Nigerian seedlings, Belgian dukes, IFPRI climate change study, Phytophthora
- Internets all aglow today, so hang on to your hats, here we go. Drought forcing Kenyans out of maize, towards indigenous crops, wheat and rice. Wait, what?
- Making money from tree seedlings in Uganda. Including indigenous stuff. Damn you, allAfrica, why are you so good?
- ‘Turkey’ Hard Red Winter Wheat, Lake Michigan Whitefish, the Hauer Pippin Apple, and the St. Croix sheep, among others, added to Ark of Taste. Ok, I’m gonna have to see some explanation for that wheat one.
- Singing the praises of pulses. Even Virgil gets a namecheck.
- Tall Fescue for the Twenty-first Century? Seriously, who writes these titles?
- nth study on bees announced. And n+1st reports. And n+2nd called for. CABI does a bit of a roundup. Bless you.
- Declaration calls for “…the creation of democratic spaces for intercultural dialogue and the strengthening of interdependent networks of food producers and other citizens.” Interesting.
- Small scale farmers produce most of what Brazilians eat. And no doubt manage most of the country’s agrobiodiversity. And Cuba?
- Chinese aquaculture goes green? Riiiiight.
- “Earlier this year, farmers from the north who had benefitted from previous improved seedling activities by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) demanded for more improved seed varieties from scientists.” Oh come on, gimme a clue. What crop? Improved how?
- Medieval Bruges palace cesspit reveals dukes ate Mediterranean honey. Sybarites even then, the Belgians.
- Scientific American says IFPRI says “traditional seed varieties and livestock breeds that might provide a genetic resource to adapt to climate change are being lost.”
- Late Blight 101.
Nibbles: WFP and Millennium Villages, Agroecotourism squared, Mango, Wild pollinators, CGIAR change process, Grape breeding, Landraces and climate change, Mau Forest, Eels
- “…WFP’s partnership with the Millennium Villages Project would deploy the full range of the Programme’s tools and help utilize the Millennium Villages as a platform for best practices.” Good. But let’s just hope the villagers’ own best tool — agrobiodiversity — doesn’t get left behind.
- More on the Cotacachi agroecotourism project in Ecuador.
- Heritage tourism in the Virgin Islands targets old sugar cane mill.
- The “mango villages” of India.
- Pollination needs to go wild.
- Ok, so the CGIAR is going to re-organize itself into mega-programmes (look at the PDF at the bottom of the page), one of which is on “Crop germplasm conservation, enhancement and use.” Big deal? I wish I knew.
- Pssst, wanna discuss grape breeding?
- More from IIED on landraces and climate change.
- Deforestation, drought and politics in Kenya.
- Tracking eel migrations.
Of collapse and restoration
There’s a new paper by Jared Diamond out, always a welcome event. Alas, it is behind a paywall at Nature, but it is fairly easily summarized. Drawing on recent studies of the collapse of Classic Mayan civilization in Central America and Angkor in Cambodia, and the rise of the Inka empire in the Andes, it makes two main points. One, that civilizations may collapse for multifarious reasons, but “human overexploitation of natural resources never helps.” Two, that “climate can change in either direction.” Not particularly novel or surprising conclusions, but Diamond does his usual slick job of marshaling disparate, multidisciplinary evidence from tourism hotspots all over the world and from throughout history to advance arguments of great contemporary relevance, slight whiff of environmental determinism notwithstanding.
In this case, what struck me particularly was the success story. That is, how climatic change after AD 1100, during the Northern Hemisphere’s Medieval Warm Period, may have helped the Inka’s conquests. The argument is that higher temperatures allowed them to extend agriculture to higher altitudes, increase their arable-land area and make more use of irrigation, leading to greater production and the possibility of feeding large armies. Of course, “military and administrative organization was essential to their conquests, [but] climate amelioration played a part.”
The evidence for agricultural expansion comes from the work of Alex Chepstow-Lusty and colleagues, who analyzed the pollen and other plant parts (and, indeed, other organisms) in mud cores from a high-altitude Andean lake bed. Some of the plant parts came from an alder-like tree. I had no idea that the Inka planted the nitrogen-fixing Alnus acuminata. Its remains increase in lake sediments dated from about AD 1100, along with ambient temperatures and the bodies of llama dung-eating mites, showing that there was starting to be more agriculture and livestock-keeping around the lake at that time.
The success story came to an end, of course. The Spanish cut most of alders down for fuel. Chepstow-Lusty is calling for “massive reintroduction of native tree varieties, such as the alder, to trap moisture blowing over from the Peruvian Amazon to the east. He also recommends repair of the now derelict Incan canals and terraces so they can once again support agriculture.” Have there been similar suggestions for the restoration of the agricultural infrastructure — physical and biological — of the Maya and Khmer? Maybe all the tourists could be put to work on this — or at least tapped for cash.
Nibbles: Preservation, Markets, Cuy, Fallows in slash-and-burn, Rice
- Pickling everything. Japanese edition.
- Mapping farmers’ markets in the US. Idaho has zero demand for organic produce?
- Domesticating the guinea pig. Cute AND good to eat.
- Longer fallows mean more diverse soil microinvertebrates, better soils in French Guiana.
- Archaeological remains of rice from China.