Category: History

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Using photos to share knowledge about agrobiodiversity

ResourceShelf reported on a Library of Congress blog post on the photographs in the US Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collection, the most popular among which are now available in a Flickr group under the heading FSA/OWI Favorites. That led me to some wonderful colour photos from the 30s and 40s from the same source. One of them particularly caught my eye. Not because it’s particularly well framed or for its dramatic subject matter. It’s just a pretty standard shot of some harvested oats fields in southeastern Georgia taken in May 1939. But someone — a Mr Raymond Crippen, actually, who sounds as if he has first-hand experience of wartime Georgian oat fields — has taken the trouble to annotate different parts of the image:

The most common grains in shocks were wheat, oats, barley. Farmers hated working with the barley. The “beards” stuck to sweaty arms, found their way down shirts – and they caused great itching.

This strikes me as a great way of documenting and sharing indigenous knowledge of agricultural practices and biodiversity. Has it ever been tried in a more formal way?

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The symbolism of plants

With the forthcoming 12 monthly articles we want to give a certain insight into how former generations and cultures, having far less access to rational and experimental scientific knowledge than modern scientists, tried to explain and interpret their observations in the plant kingdom.

That’s from Riklef Kandeler and Wolfram Ullrich’s introduction to their series on “Symbolism of plants: examples of European-Mediterranean culture presented with biology and history of art” in the Journal of Experimental Botany. ((This seems to be something of a tradition. There was a similar monthly series on plant culture in 2002 by Nicholas H. Battey.)) It started last January, and each month brings a new plant. June’s installment has just come out. It’s on lilies. No crops, really, though some of the plants treated are used as food (e.g. Crocus). The focus is on plants which carry with them the heaviest symbolic baggage. You can set up an alert with the journal to tell you when the next in the series will come out.

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Bedbugs redux

Caveman Forecaster is a blog about “the art and science of time series analysis and forecasting.” There was a post about a month ago about bedbugs that really piqued my interest. It seems that bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) were virtually eradicated in the US fifty years ago, but are making a comeback. That has even led to the organization of a National Bedbug Summit, which took place last month. The post was mostly about using Google search data to monitor and predict the seasonal outbreaks and longer-term trends. But it got me looking into the reasons for the resurgence, and wikipedia has a reasonable summary of that, with plenty of references. Basically, genetic diversity studies suggest that there was never complete eradication, but that the pesticide-resistant populations moved to alternate hosts, “have slowly been propagating in poultry facilities, and have made their way back to human hosts via the poultry workers.” So here’s another example of a human pest which can also hang out with agrobiodiversity, and jump back and forth.

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VIR at war

I’m going to have to take back what I said about English Russia. Just a couple of days after it featured old photos of Russian agriculture, today there’s more of agrobiodiversity interest. Sergei Larenkov mashes up images of modern St Petersburg with photos taken during the siege. Below is one of St Isaac’s Square. There are several others. It was a cabbage patch during the war. The building in the middle is — and was — part of the Vavilov Institute.

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Compare it with the picture I took recently.