- European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
- Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
- Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
- The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
- The diversity of sauces.
- Cooking Flipper.
- Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
- Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
- “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
The boom in heritage turkeys
I sent my post asking what is behind rocketing turkey numbers to DAD-Net and received this interesting comment from Marjorie Bender, Research & Technical Program Director, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which she kindly agreed to share here:
The growth is reported as occurring in the US, but the reported numbers are much larger than make sense to me.
The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy has been actively researching and promoting non-industrial, naturally mating turkey varieties for over 10 years. ALBC has periodically censused this population. In 1997 the breeding population (male and female) of naturally mating turkeys was 1335. In 2003, the breeding population had more than tripled, rising to 4412. In 2006, the population had more than doubled again, reaching a total of 10,404 breeding birds.
I don’t know where their numbers came from, or how they are counting. ALBC counts breeding stock, not number of head raised.
In 1997 ALBC initiated some research on the health of the immune systems of several varieties of naturally mating turkeys and an industrial strain. The naturally mating turkeys had a significantly more robust immune system. At about the same time Slow Food USA contacted ALBC about getting ‘heritage turkeys’ on their members’ dining tables. We provided them with contacts for hatcheries and breeders and they linked them up with consumers. The main food editor at the New York Times taste-tested several and LOVED them. She wrote a wonderful article raving about them. People started looking for Heritage Turkeys, and folks started raising them but with trouble. ALBC developed a production manual and workshop — How to Raise Heritage Turkeys on Pasture — which has educated a number of people. ALBC also conducted breeder selection clinics to improve the quality of the varieties – most of which had suffered from lack of selection of the decades. The market has continued to grow, as has the motivation to produce these.
Thanks, Marjorie.
And W. Stephen Damron, a professor at the Animal Science Department at Oklahoma State University had this to add.
I’m guessing that part of this is better reporting (perhaps just separating out the turkeys from chickens in the counts) and part of it is that turkey is perceived as a “cut above” chicken as a food and is probably being used more in some developing countries (those with population segments that can afford it) as a stepping stone to “better” diets.
If you look at heirloom breeds of turkeys (not the modern big breasted type), you find that the turkey is actually much hardier than it is given credit for and can forage for itself in situations where the chicken can’t.
The politics of toddy
Coconut farmers receive Toddy Movement members released on bail.
That’s the intriguing title of a short piece from Tamil Nadu on the NewKerala.com website. It turns out that dozens of farmers had been thrown in jail a few days ago for tapping coconut toddy without the permission of the state government. The farmers claim that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi has reneged on an election promise to rethink the ban on toddy in force in the state. So they started tapping and selling the beverage in their fields in protest. The reaction seemed a bit heavy-handed to me, but apparently toddy is a bit of a political hot potato (as it were) in Tamil Nadu:
In Tamil Nadu, this beverage is currently banned, though the legality fluctuates with politics. In the absence of legal toddy, moonshine distillers of arrack often sell methanol-contaminated alcohol, which can have lethal consequences. To discourage this practice, authorities have pushed for inexpensive “Indian Made Foreign Liquor” (IMFL), much to the dismay of toddy tappers.
Last year the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Tamil Nadu government to prohibit the manufacture, sale and consumption of toddy in the state (there is no ban in other states). The Chief Justice explained the decision in part thus:
“it is a policy decision of the State government. There is no fundamental right to manufacture or trade in liquor. The problem with toddy is it affects ordinary people in villages. Whisky or other liquor is not easily accessible to the common man.”
So that’s allright then. Now, the statement made in an article in The Hindu a few years back about the consequences of the ban for rural livelihoods may be a bit exaggerated:
The Salem district unit of National Agriculturalists Awareness Movement (NAAM) staged a demonstration here on Friday asking the State Government to allow toddy tapping… They said the denial of toddy tapping had ushered in poverty in rural areas.
But toddy must represent a significant contribution to the income of thousands of farming families — and no doubt has done for generations. And the ban may well be contributing to the disappearance of specialized coconut types. Why replant and tend varieties favoured for toddy if you can’t make the stuff?
Go on, Chief Minister Karunanidhi: legalize it!
African cooking in the spotlight
…there is no African cuisine.
What? Hang on, take it easy, don’t jump to conclusions, read the rest of the post at BetumiBlog.
Nibbles: Coca to cacao, BXV, Chinese gardening, Forest conservation, Amazon, Soil bacteria, Prairie, Genetics, Wildcats, Milk product
- “No a la droga, si al caucho y al cacao.”
- Spotting banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) with biochemical tests.
- The tree that owns itself. Take that, lawyers!
- “The old Chinese gardener in ragged blue coat and trousers with a wispy white beard who potters around smoking one of these long pipes with a tiny bowl — and a mongol cap, periodically performing elaborate grafting techniques on the plum tree.”
- Mexican coffee growers protect surrounding forest. Nepal forest community moving in similar direction?
- Mapping the competition between soy and forest in Brazil.
- Weird agrobiodiversity corner: pseudomonad bacteria help maize take up nutrients.
- Using herbicides to help prairie establishment (including sunflower wild relative).
- Stop press: “Agricultural genetics is one of the easier parts of the solution.”
- “…wildcats preferred resting sites in shelter structures near forest edges.”
- Video on Greek yogurt. Jeremy comments: “I’m going back to Crete.”