- Juliana Santilli guest-blogs on the book Agrobiodiversity and the Law over at Agrobiodiversity Grapevine.
- ICARDA tells communities how to set up a sheep breeding programme.
- While an Indian institute breeds pigs, with Canadian help.
- Another Indian institute does the same for mushrooms, with no help.
- And yet another sequences the coconut genome.
- While BGI sequences a whole bunch of CIAT cassava stuff. Only yesterday they were doing rice. Yeah, but only 50, and you gotta keep those sequencers going, don’t you? Would be nice to know how much the CGIAR is paying BGI annually. Do they get frequent flyer miles? Have they negotiated a corporate rate?
- A Kazakhstan apple tree grows on the East River. A forest, actually. If it had been in England, it might eventually feature here. Ok, ok, our quest for connections is occasionally overdone. Made you look, though.
- Ah, kimchi! Ah, fish empanadas! So much interesting food, only one stomach lining…
- Danny tells us about Ireland’s CWR database. In other news, Ireland has CWR. Oh, and then he goes crazy on the Biodiversity for Nutrition mailing list. Did he get his goat is what I want to know.
- AoB on in vitro peach palms. Why read the paper, when AoB abstracts the abstract?
- Bifurcated Carrots on seed saving in Canada. Video goodness galore.
- And while we’re talking cinema, here’s news of a movie on a year in the life of four Kenyan farmers.
- From Kenyan farmers to First Farmers. The Womb of Nations. I like that. And more. Agricultural hearths. I like that too.
- Four days of discussion about land tenure. May not be enough, actually.
- “…70 per cent of the peppermint sold in the US is descended from a mutant in a neutron-irradiated source.” Good to know.
- I missed International Mountains Day. Again.
- That EU-funded taro mega-project from a PNG perspective.
- What I like about this Worldwatch series on neglected plants is that they’re not factsheets. Yet.
Ox-cart racing in the Punjab
This wonderfully evocative piece on ox-cart racing in Pakistan was originally posted to DAD-Net by Dr M. Sajjad Khan, professor in the Department of Animal Breeding & Genetics at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan. It is reprinted here, along with a photograph of the event, by kind permission of the author. Our thanks to him, and our best wishes for his work.
I thought to share a very learning experience of organizing (more correctly, witnessing) an ox-race competition. The competition was organized in connection with University’s golden jubilee celebrations this year at one of the sub-campuses of the University (Toba Tek Singh), some 90 km from Faisalabad and 200 km from Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. This was part of the Technology Transfer Day and Kissan Mela. I had seen a few ox-related competitions before, including fast ploughing, load pulling, circular speeding, speed threshing, ox-walk etc etc. This was ox-cart racing.
Some 60 ox-pairs (with cart behind), driven by an experienced rider, competed in 10 heats and a final. There were no written rules but everybody understood them. Judges did not have any special uniform but their decisions were final. No grass on the ground. No pistol and no flag at the starting point, just a call by the starter (who has been doing this since his teenage years). No lines except the finish line (marked by white lime powder and redrawn just before the final, the eleventh race). No police to control the mob of thousands (all volunteers plus few boy scouts that we had added).
The high ground near the finish line had by this time been covered with tents and chairs for a few of us and for guests (who cannot sit on feet for hours). The ground was some 1540 feet long. The roar of mob indicated that the race had started. Each race lasted for less than a minute, and ended with thousands of people running after the participants. Then one could only hear the loud voice of drums and see the storm of dust moving and settling. The oxen were covered with decorated clothes again. The Rs bills are thrown into the air repeatedly and many dance around the winners. The festivity would continue for about half an hour with the last fifteen minutes also used for reorganizing things for the next heat. Villages were competing with villages, casts with casts, localities with localities, and there were some individual clashes as well. Some of the heats were a photo-finish and a video camera did help to resolve which foot (not nose) touched the white line first.
Two indigenous breeds were generally represented: Hissar (mainly) and Dhann (which is the main breed in such competitions held in northern Punjab). Some were crosses between nondescript Desi and Dhanni. I did chat with at least a few who had been competing for decades. I recall that when I was doing the State of the World report for Pakistan, I thought breeds historically used for ploughing might fade out soon, but now my feeling is that it will take a lot longer than I had thought. People are taking care of some of the indigenous breeds very differently. Most of the bulls had a price tag of a million Rs. Judging for beauty was a challenge but I found many experienced hands helping me to go through it honorably without a feud.
I am really exposed to a new world yet again (after the goat show). Yes, we should encourage these activities and help people to have improved and humane utilization of indigenous resources. At the University, we are likely to develop an ox-cart race track in near future and it will be fun to be part of such festivities.
The photos of the event will be posted on the project website soon.
Nibbles: Bees and climate change, Native American seeds and health, Sustainable harvesting and cultivation, Tree death, Grass and C, Vegetables, Fishmeal, Big Milk
Today: Connections Edition, in which we pick low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, and join up the dots.
- The return of a US bumblebee. Is it due to climate change?
- “These foods have meaning” for a Native American tribe (and for Africans for that matter). So will they be able to check out their seeds? And sequence the hell out of them, like rice?
- If you want to harvest palm heart sustainably in the Colombian Andes, only take 10% of any population a year. Is cultivation an option?
- Trees are dying in the Sahel. And yet boffins don’t know how to kill them. No word on what the grass is doing.
- Vegetables and nutrition: the theory and the practice. Of course, a lot of them are grown in cities.
- Why is so much fish made into fishmeal rather than eaten? Location, location, location. Of markets, that is. Kind of like for milk.
Nibbles: Brand new tool, Baseline, Orange cassava, Food non-crisis, ILRI on the frontline, WorldFish
In recognition of the fact that I’ve spent the past week at CIMMYT up to my ears in the CGIAR, an all-CGIAR edition!
- CCAFS unleashes hell. Well, Climate Analogues anyway. No, wait…
- How does CCAFS measure impact anayway? Well, by documenting progress in adaptation relative to a baseline, of course. What I want to know is how the baseline captures within-crop diversity.
- Meanwhile, HarvestPlus is having another impact of its own. Well, I guess we’ll really have to wait for the health studies to be sure, but anyway.
- And speaking of impact, IFPRI now says that surveys show that the food crisis was not really a crisis for the poor, where simulations say it was. Now what?
- ILRI remembers the visit of Angela Merkel, and, probably unrelatedly, discovers the joys of fermentation.
- WorldFish got a brand new website. Does Climate Analogues work for fish?
Nibbles: Evergreen Agriculture, Traditional Knowledge
- Blogposts from Durban I: Evergreen Agriculture for all
- Blogposts from Durban II: Meteorologists, traditional and modern.
- And the quote of the day, yesterday: “There is no word in English for the Irish word that translates, roughly, as ubuntu.”