Indigenous knowledge systems

July 14, 2014July 15, 2014

What does a bonnet gourd look like?

Tucker on 'Bonnet Gourds', 1874: "the women in the Southern States split it and made up very pretty and useful head coverings or bonnets"

— Kew Gardens Library and Archives (@Kew_LAA) July 14, 2014

This ((Letter from Joseph Tucker to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker; from Mobile, Alabama, United States of America; 5 Nov 1874; four page letter comprising four images; folios 458 – 459.)) seems to refer to Luffa, but does anyone have photos? I’d love to see what these bonnets look like, but unfortunately Google is not being very helpful. Gourds are inevitably much on my mind after my trip to PNG…

LATER: And here it is, thanks to Eve Emshwiller:

Screen Shot 2014-07-15 at 11.15.31 AM

July 14, 2014July 14, 2014

Brainfood: Landscape preferences, Livestock selection, Romanian conservation, Nordic Horseradish, Social structuring, Darjeeling tea, ZFarming, Pineywoods cattle, Cotton breeding, Neglected veggies

Public preferences for ecosystem-enhancing elements in agricultural landscapes in the Swiss lowlands. People don’t like complex agricultural landscapes as much as they should. Well, in photos anyway.
Some traditional livestock selection criteria as practiced by several indigenous communities of Southern Ethiopia. The selection methods of elders are based on characters that correlate with production and reproduction efficiency. Now there’s a shocker.
Needs and gaps in the conservation of wild plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in Romania. 4 out of 300 useful wild species may need better protection. Sounds like a pretty good score to me.
Genetic diversity in Nordic horseradish, Armoracia rusticana, as revealed by AFLP markers. Each Nordic country has pretty much its own.
How social organization shapes crop diversity: an ecological anthropology approach among Tharaka farmers of Mount Kenya. Diversity of crops and of sorghum landraces is structured socially, with neighbourhood groups being an important organizing principle.
The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations. GI has worked because marketing has convinced people that industrial plantations are also idyllic gardens, but the workers know better.
Urban agriculture of the future: an overview of sustainability aspects of food production in and on buildings. You need to work at it.
Long in the Horn: An Agricultural Anthropology of Livestock Improvement. “Livestock as landscape” in the southern US.
Usefulness and Utilization of Indian Cotton Germplasm. Need to try chemical and physical mutagenesis as well as bring in new diversity from abroad. Do I detect a slight whiff of desperation?
Potential and biodiversity conservation strategies of underutilized or indigenous vegetables in Himahal Pradesh. Improve provision of planting materials, management practices, harvesting methods, post-harvest , marketability, nutritional status and policies and legal frameworks. Really? Is that all? I suspect anyone into NUS could have told you that before you even went into the field.

July 7, 2014June 23, 2014

Brainfood: One Thai rice landrace, Adding value to coffee, Dairy cattle in Mexico, Sugarcane core, Bermudagrass salinity, Developing the Tibetan plateau, Amazon oil palm, Pollinator diversity

Natural and human-mediated selection in a landrace of Thai rice (Oryza sativa). There is selection, but that’s counteracted by exchange and diverse agronomic practices. The result is diversity, but structured.
Trademarks, Geographical Indications and Environmental Labelling to Promote Biodiversity: The Case of Agroforestry Coffee in India. Adding value locally is the only way to stop a really lucrative cash crop destroying the forest.
Characterization of dairy cattle germplasm used in Mexico with national genetic evaluations in importing and exporting countries. Bringing in diversity from another country is not always the best approach.
Phenotypic characterization of the Miami World Collection of sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) and related grasses for selecting a representative core. 300 accessions will do. That’s a bit more than 10% of the total.
Genetic variation of salinity tolerance in Chinese natural bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers.) germplasm resources. There is some. Good for all those golf courses.
The sustainable development of grassland-livestock systems on the Tibetan Plateau: problems, strategies and prospects. There are 19 things to do, and genetic resources are important across the board.
Status and prospects of oil palm in the Brazilian Amazon. On already deforested land, for biofuel. What could possibly go wrong?
Bee Species Diversity Enhances Productivity and Stability in a Perennial Crop. That would be the highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum). Can we take this for granted now?

July 1, 2014July 1, 2014

Nibbles: Dryland agroforestry, Parmigiano DOC, Killer tomatoes, Purslane salad, Breadfruit $, Community seedbanks, Kiribati under water, Landscapes

At the risk of annoying Dave Wood again, here’s something on agroforestry in Africa.
A podcast on what it takes to make parmigiano reggiano.
Speaking of Italian agricultural products, it’s not all sweetness and light.
But can you put purslane on pizza?
Funding breadfruit.
Community seed banks take off in India.
Kiribati will need some too. But in Fiji.
The Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative is on Slideshare. Not much comfort for Kiribati, I suspect.

June 30, 2014June 23, 2014

Brainfood: Landrace trifecta, Cauliflower breeding, Carp hybrids, C4 evolution, Organic food, Symbionts squared, Ozark agrobiodiversity, Using genebanks, Food security vulnerability

Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds, Everyday Practices, and Food Security in Mexico. Growing landraces in Mexico as a feminist act.
Resource-Use Patterns in Swidden Farming Communities: Implications for the Resilience of Cassava Diversity. In this bit of Brazil, all farmers have some cassava varieties, other varieties are more private, which means that diversity is reasonably well maintained if farms are lost at random. Ah, but what about if women farmers are lost?
Indigenous Knowledge on Landraces and Fonio-Based Food in Benin. 35 landraces, some of them even agronomically good. No word on whether those are the common or the private ones.
A Review on Genetic Improvement of Cauliflower. There’s a tension between hybrids and breeding for organic conditions even in cauliflower.
Growth Performance of Indian Major Carps and Their Hybrids in Polyculture in Bangladesh. Looks like hybrids are bad in carp, though.
Deep Evolutionary Comparison of Gene Expression Identifies Parallel Recruitment of Trans-Factors in Two Independent Origins of C4 Photosynthesis. Plants which diverged 140 million years ago have in the meantime evolved the same trans-factors (“protein that binds to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow [or transcription] of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA”) to come up with C4 photosynthesis. You know, this C4 rice thing just might be doable.
Organic Diets Significantly Lower Children’s Dietary Exposure to Organophosphorus Pesticides. When “conventional” food was replaced by organically grown stuff, children had lower levels of nasties in the urine. No word on what it took to convince the kids to eat their veggies.
Building the crops of tomorrow: advantages of symbiont-based approaches to improving abiotic stress tolerance. Why breed, when you can inoculate.
A single evolutionary innovation drives the deep evolution of symbiotic N2-fixation in angiosperms. It all started long ago with a cryptic mutation, which was lost and gained multiple times, but some clades are unlikely to lose it when they have gained it.
Seeds of Persistence: Agrobiodiversity in the American Mountain South. “…southern/central Appalachia is the most diverse foodshed at the varietal level in the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico studied to date.”
Separating the wheat from the chaff – a strategy to utilize plant genetic resources from ex situ genebanks. Using fancy math to mine legacy phenotypic data can yield a couple extra alleles.
Sustainability and Food & Nutrition Security: A Vulnerability Assessment Framework for the Mediterranean Region. Take each vulnerability (say to climate change, or price volatility) and break it down into exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity.