There’s a National Agricultural Science Museum on ICAR’s the Indian Agricultural Research Institute’s Pusa Campus ((In a separate post I’ll explain why it’s called the Pusa Campus.)) and I spent an enjoyable hour or so wandering around it during my recent visit to Delhi. One floor takes the visitor on a whirlwind tour of agriculture on the subcontinent from the Neolithic to the Green Revolution. Then you go down some stairs for exhibits on the current state of Indian agriculture. The displays and eye-catching, informative and well-arranged. My only complaint would be about the lack of explicit references to the importance of agrobiodiversity, its conservation and use, for sustainable agriculture, apart from a poster on the Green Revolution. But then the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources has its own museum.
Taking photographs was not allowed, so I can’t show you the wonderful diorama of a Mughal garden, and other great exhibits. I do hope the museum goes online sometime. Best I can do at the moment is this scan of the brochure that is handed out as you leave (click to enlarge). Continue reading ““Barley-wheat” explained”
Volume 31 of Plant Breeding Reviews is dedicated to Anthony H.D. Brown, the distinguished Australian conservation geneticist. Tony has been making fundamental contributions to the theory of crop genetic resources conservation through his work on sampling strategies, core collections and on farm conservation for forty years. But he has also worked tirelessly in the field, as the following little snippet makes clear:
If you happened to be one of the few vehicles driving the remote dirt Peninsula ‘‘highway’’ in Cape York, north Queensland, in July of 1983, you may have seen three collectors (Ted Hymowitz from Illinois and Jim Grace and Tony from CSIRO) sprawled on the lawn outside the Lakeland pub below the billboard saying ‘‘Ice Cold Beer.’’ This was no early knock off; they actually were sampling rare, tiny Glycine tomentella plants. The billboard had nothing to do with site selection; a collector must check all habitats. The roadside pub, a lone building in the rural landscape, was a haven for the thirsty traveler, and it surrounds a haven for wild plants that grazing animals would otherwise decimate. Thus, sampling strategies for germplasm collection adapt to reality.
You can read the full dedication courtesy of Google Preview. Well worth it. You get to know one of the giants of the field, and there’s a refresher course in the history of crop genetic resources and agrobiodiversity conservation thrown in for good measure.
While Luigi was getting excited about giant parsley, frequent tipster Dirk Enneking sent word of giant peaches, a much tastier quarry. The great plant explorer Frank Nicholas Meyer traveled widely in the east and sent many collections back to the USDA, his employer. ((Among his many finds is the famous Meyer Lemon, recently reborn as a foodies’ favourite.)) He wrote a wonderful account of his Agricultural Explorations in the Fruit and Nut Orchards of China, published in March 1911 (and, gloriously, available thanks to Google.) Meyer describes the diversity of Chinese peaches, singling one out for special praise.
The best of them all is the “Fei Tau,” or Fei peach, Feitcheng being the name of the village where the orchards are located. These peaches grow to a large size, often weighing over 1 lb apiece, and are of a soft, pale-yellowish colour externally, with a slight blush on one side. The meat is white except near the stone, where it is slightly red. The fruit is a clingstone, with a very large, pointed stone. The skin is very downy. The fruit ripens in the early and middle part of October and has an excellent flavor, being sweet and aromatic. It possesses extraordinary keeping and shipping qualities, keeping until February if wrapped in soft tissue paper. Its shipping qualities are such that it is carried in baskets, slung on poles across the shoulders of coolies, from Feitcheng to Peking, a journey of eight days on foot. So famous is this peach, that it is sent every year as a tribute or present to the imperial court at Peking; and even right on the spot where this fruit grows the most perfect specimens retail at from 10 to 15 cents in Mexican money, a price which is about two-thirds of the average daily wages of the Chinese field laborer.
I want to try one of those! How many of the varieties Meyer mentioned are still available in China?
Two men seated in an orchard of Fei Tau peaches (you can see some of the huge fruits in the branches; click to enlarge). Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Whether you think Meyer’s comment says more about low wages than high prices, the fact impressed Meyer enough to note it. But why were they using “Mexican money”? Meyer describes lots more peach diversity.
Some of these peaches are blood red and when cut through look more like a beet root than anything else. One variety in Shansi is even called the “Rho Tau,” or beef peach, so much does it resemble meat.
He also mentions flat peaches, red and white, which by the sound of it resemble the ephemeral “Saturn” peaches that briefly show up in the fruit-shops of Rome and can perfume a large room with their scent.
Meyer points out that the Chinese genetic diversity had, and in 1911 still has, a lot to offer growers in the US, and that, after all, was his job, to plunder the resources of another sovereign state and bring them back to improve US agriculture. But has anyone calculated the contribution of Chinese peaches like the ones Meyer noted to peaches in the US and elsewhere? It would be a fascinating and tasty case study.
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.”
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.
“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…
