- Oldest rice research facility in Western Hemisphere turns 100.
- ICRISAT DG plugs his genebank, says “India should start investing for the long-term sustainability of the farming sector particularly in dryland agriculture.”
- Seed-saving in Arkansas.
- The Archaeobotanist reviews rice domestication. And again.
- Nordics to discuss how to develop products based on local livestock breeds.
Lewis, Clark, Jefferson and Pawnee corn
Our friend and colleague David Williams remembered a reference to the maize of the Pawnee on reading a recent post and eventually tracked it down.
I found this tidbit about Pawnee corn in the book Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose (1996). The author reports on page 418 that, after the intrepid explorers returned from their trip:
Out in St. Louis, the leading citizens were almost exclusively interested in what Lewis had found with regard to Indians and furs. Back east, his botanical and zoological discoveries excited the members of the American Philosophical Society. They wanted seeds, specimens, descriptions. Jefferson promised Benjamin Smith Barton that Lewis would hurry onto Philadelphia after visiting Washington, bringing with him “much in the lines of botany, & Nat. history.” Jefferson kept for himself, to plant at Monticello, seeds of “Missouri hominy corn,” of Pawnee corn, nine “nuts from Missouri,” and two boxes of unidentified seeds. Over the following years, Jefferson faithfully reported on the Indian corn, which he pronounced excellent.
Although the passages in quotation marks were not specifically attributed to their source by Ambrose, footnoted citations for quoted passages immediately preceding and following this paragraph refer to information reprinted in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd edition, by Donald Jackson (ed.) (1978).
It’d be interesting to delve into those “Letters” to learn more about Jefferson’s “faithful reporting on the Indian corn” that he grew from those seeds, perhaps providing some more specific information about the nature and attributes of that Pawnee corn.
It certainly would. I did some googling and came across this teaser in an article on Jefferson and the plants brought back by Lewis and Clark by Peter Hatch, Director of the Monticello Gardens and Grounds:
“Pani” or Pawnee corn, named for the southern neighbors of the Mandan and Arikara, was planted eight times among the fruit trees in the South Orchard and was Jefferson’s favorite of the Indian corn varieties collected on the journey. A dwarf corn, only 24-inches high, bred for the severity of the short northern Plains growing season, Pani ripened as quickly as six weeks from planting. Jefferson compared it favorably to the short season Quarantine (or “40 day”) corn he received from André Thoüin of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The controversial German botanist, Frederick Pursh, who first published the botanical results of the expedition in his Flora Americae Septentrionalis of 1814, wrote that, “it produced as excellent ears as any sort I know.” A similarly dwarf variety, perhaps identical, Mandan corn, was sold by McMahon in 1815.
Do the Pawnee still have this short, precocious variety? Stay tuned…
Attack of the Giant Parsley
David Brenner, a curator at the USDA genebank at Ames, Iowa, has just grown what may be the world’s tallest parsley plant.
Brenner says the seeds for the record-breaking parsley plant were first collected from Hungary in 1983. Even though it resembles a large bushy weed, he says it’s a perfect example of parsley. “It also had big tubers,” Brenner says. “The roots are almost four inches across and in Europe, the roots of parsley are another food crop, almost like a potato, so it has a double-barreled purpose.”
The Guinness people have been summoned. The existing record is six feet and this plant is almost eight.
GRIN knows about six Petroselinum accessions collected in Hungary in 1983, from five different villages, and donated in 1987. However, they’re listed as “inactive.” Not for long, I guess. But with the news making it to the media and Guinness on the way, I hope Dr Brenner manages to regenerate a lot of seed. To find out which one of the six the giant is, we’ll have to wait for the characterization data to go online. Look for that “plant height” descriptor…
Shifting baselines and genetic erosion
A posting from the good people at Bioplan ((A mailing list on biodiversity policy issues set up and maintained by the UNDP and UNEP.)) forwarded to me by my friend Mary Taylor has just alerted me to an article over at Mongabay which would probably have eluded me as I’m on the road at the moment and not checking the feedreader very systematically. So thanks, Mary.
The post is about the “shifting baselines” theory, apparently an influential concept in conservation thinking during the past decade and more but one that alas I hadn’t come across. It proposes that…
…due to short life-spans and faulty memories, humans have a poor conception of how much of the natural world has been degraded by our actions, because our ‘baseline’ shifts with every generation, and sometimes even in an individual. In essence, what we see as pristine nature would be seen by our ancestors as hopelessly degraded, and what we see as degraded our children will view as ‘natural’.
And if people can’t register the loss, how can conservation be made important to them?
I’ll leave you to read the details of the paper at Mongabay. It’s about the perception of changes in the local bird fauna among 50 rural Yorkshire villagers, compared to the “reality” revealed by the results of regular ornithological surveys. Suffice it to say that the authors found evidence of both “generational amnesia” (when people fail to pass knowledge down from generation to generation) and “personal amnesia” (when people forget how things used to be earlier in their lives).
Is this relevant for studies of genetic erosion in crops? For plants, including crops, there is a pretty good way of documenting changes in distribution, abundance and even genetic diversity, and that’s by comparison of the present situation with herbarium specimens and genebank samples. And old seed catalogues have also been scoured for evidence of loss of varieties of fruits and vegetables in Europe and the United States. I’ve suggested myself in the past that these are all valid, complementary approaches to the estimation of genetic erosion, though they all have their shortcomings. But I can’t think off the top of my head of a study which has combined making historical comparisons with asking people about how many varieties of a particular crop they used to grow, to gauge the accuracy of their recollections, though my own recollection of the literature may be faulty too! It seems to me that farmers are more likely to accurately recollect the crop varieties they used to grow than almost anything else, including the birds that fly around them, especially if you get a group of them together to discuss the issue, but it would be an interesting thing to test.
One of the authors of the paper does mention specimens in passing in his Mongabay interview.
“If the issue is with personal amnesia, just talking to people and triggering their memories about how things were, perhaps with the aid of props like photos or old specimens, will help them to ensure that their perceptions of change are accurate,” Milner-Gulland says.
That’s as part of a discussion of the “increasingly creative” ways of “finding data regarding past conditions that may no longer be remembered” that certainly has relevance for crops.
“One author (Julian Caldecott) used school meal records from remote village schools to reconstruct wild pig migrations in Borneo. There are many authors now using historical records and archeological remains, for example in charting the changes in fish stock compositions in the North Sea over thousands of years. Other people use contemporary accounts from eye-witnesses, while still others use scientific methods like pollen analysis, which can go back far beyond written accounts.” Milner-Gulland says, adding that “the important issues involve recognizing and accounting for sources of bias in the records that you use.”
And that goes for the knowledge of farmers too.
Strawberry fields video
Our friend Michael Hermann sent a link to a German TV item about strawberries. ((Unfortunately, I can’t see a way to embed the video here directly. , and I cannot be sure that the link will survive, in that form. If you click, and reach a video about something else entirely, please let me know and I’ll see if I can fix it. Luckily Luigi was able to find a permalink, which should now work properly.)) It packs an enormous amount of information into just 3 1/2 minutes, from a strawberry genebank and breeders to a master patissier who uses them to adorn a French tart.