- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.
Nibbles: Cassava value addition, African food project, ITPGRFA, Filipino bananas, Plant Cuttings, Seed schools, Refugee gardens, Fisheries double, Cherry blossoms
- Projects I should probably know about but had never heard of, no. 37: Cassava: Adding Value for Africa (C:AVA).
- Projects I should probably know about but had never heard of, no. 38: African Food Tradition rEvisited by Research (AFTER). Mopane left unvisited, though, alas.
- More from the ITPGRFA Secretary Down Under.
- From genebank to farmers: bananas in the Philippines.
- Things are looking up: there’s a new Plant Cuttings out.
- We should all go back to seed school. Hey, just tell me where.
- Family gardens for refugees. And for urban folk in Ethiopia.
- Learning from the past in order not to repeat it, Vol. 88: Sustainble fisheries. Repeating it anyway, Vol. 565543 coming all too soon. No, wait, here it is…
- It’s that time of year again, isn’t it. Spring. Bah, humbug.
Nibbles: Ancient sauce, Easter eggs, REDD and biodiversity
- Ancient fish sauce recreated.
- Easter egg symbolism deconstructed.
- Monitoring biodiversity in REDD projects. Including CWR?
A diversity of nibbles
Got held up with sickness and overwork, so rather than nibbling, which takes work, 1 how about a kinda narrative thang?
Starting off with a piece from Agriculture for Impact asking does planting trees compete with planting food?. “It depends,” natch. Richer farmers tend to do well in the particular scheme, which was based on payments for carbon sequestration. The one comment on the post – Planting trees is more profitable than planting food crops – puts in a nutshell the difficulties of improving local food security. Can you buy as much nutrition as you could grow on the same land? Is sequestering carbon considered in the USDA’s new Economic Research Report Rural Wealth Creation: Concepts, Strategies, and Measures? I’ve no idea. Also, on prices and wealth, Marcelino Fuentes calls the do-gooders for their volte-face on high food prices. Surely they’re good for poor farmers? Not any more. and how I remember the squirming when this very topic came up at the FAO in 2008.
In the wake of The Economist’s encomium to Svalbard, the Western Farm Press links that fine safety backup seed bank to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, calling it “the oldest global seed bank”. Pavlovsk is still under threat, which Svalbard presumably is not, so point taken. But c’mon, people, it is not a seed bank.
And speaking of seeds, Garden Organic in the UK has a new guide to exotica, serving the needs of communities new to the English Midlands who want to grow the stuff they’ve always eaten. I’d have thought they already knew how, but maybe the real point is to harvest that knowledge.
All those communities moving around the place have been known to muddy the linguistic waters around the things they eat; your rocket is my arugula, and neither of us knows what rughetta might be. There’s long been an on-again off-again project at Melbourne University, to compile a multilingual, multi script plant name database, which is useful if you have specific questions. Now comes something that might be altogether more provocative of interesting work: on open data standard for food. I’m not geeky enough to know exactly how it will be useful – for example in citizen science, or global surveys – but I am geeky enough to believe that it will indeed be useful.
Non-traditional, non-indigenous knowledge is important
When I first came to Rome, I grew potfuls of Lantana (probably L. camara, but not sure precisely what species). Sure, it’s an invasive, noxious weed, but nobody’s perfect, and I liked the succession of flowers and that strange, almost catty scent of the crushed leaves. And in the autumn, I noticed a strange thing. Unlike all the other plant pots, there was nary a single weed growing beneath the Lantanas. That was an observation odd enough to make me check, and discover that Lantana is allelopathic; it makes life hard for anything growing underneath it.
An article by Professor Anil Gupta reminded me of this. The article was partly about Auta Gravetas, a Ugandan farmer who noticed that sweet potatoes at the edge of a field bordered by Lantana had fewer pests than plants near the centre of the plot. He experimented with putting lantana leaves between layers of dried slices of sweet potato, which extended their shelf-life by six weeks or more, an important consideration for very poor farmers. In 2000, this discovery won Auta Gravetas 2 first prize in a competition organised by IFAD. As Gupta observes:
The weed became a resource. … Neither lantana camara was indigenous nor had the knowledge been transferred by one generation to another over centuries. The way of knowing was traditional — by observing an odd phenomenon, discriminating, abstracting, hypothesising, testing and developing a robust rule or technology.
There’s probably a lot more that Lantana could be used for; given its anti-microbial (and other) properties. Gupta has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about this story, and writes about it often. But the point is well taken. Farmers can innovate in unexpected ways, and it requires all parties to be alert to the possibilities if those innovations are to be spread. And quite by coincidence, I’m sure, BBC News Africa reports today on a Cameroonian innovator and entrepreneur who also transformed his local food system.