Indigenous knowledge systems

January 28, 2010January 28, 2010

Maize god appears on radio

Jeremy has just contacted me from London saying that today’s artifact on the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects series is none other than a Mayan statue of (one of?) the maize god, Hun Hunahpu. ((We’ve blogged about the female version before, who is called Chicomecoatl.))

In Mayan mythology, the maize god was decapitated at harvest time but reborn again at the beginning of a new growing season.

You can read all about it, and listen to the programme, online. I’m sure this will not be the last agrobiodiversity-themed object to be featured on the programme.

January 28, 2010January 28, 2010

Nibbles: Globalizing locavorism, Pollinator relations, Fisheries, Pea wild relative, Haitian coffee, Niche modeling, Slow Food, Chayote, Grass vs corn, Shade chocolate, American organic

“…eleven models of regional food aggregation and distribution that are successful in linking local farmers with regional food chains.” Via.
Hell hath no fury like a fig tree scorned.
Tracking monkfish, saving monkfish.
The history of the wild relative of the pea.
Can coffee help rebuild Haiti?
“Integrating bioclimate with population models to improve forecasts of species extinctions under climate change.”
“The commoditization of products and taste: Slow Food and the conservation of agrobiodiversity.”
CIAT promotes chayote in Vietnam. Why? Well, it’s not about the crop or the country. I suppose it’s about farmers and markets. But is there a diversity angle?
How old is feeding corn (maize) to cows? Older than some people think, apparently.
Shade-grown cacao sows seeds of its own demise.
Waiting for the results of the USDA organic survey…

January 27, 2010

“If your garden is affected, where else can you get your food from?”

Where indeed.

Via.

January 27, 2010January 23, 2015

Nibbles: GIPB, NPGS, Dogs for conservation, Harare gardens, Goat milk value added, Equator Prize, Humanitarian relief, Peruvian maize, Pseudo-cereals, Katine, Vavilov goes web 2.0, Travel, Haggis ban, African road datasets, Dyes, Adaptation pix, Baltic, AnGR, Jatropha

GIPB revamps its website. Knowledge Resource Centre is ver. 4.0, no less.
US National Plant Germplasm System explained to Canadians. Why? They have their own!
Armadillo sniffing dogs.
More urban farming in Zimbabwe.
Interesting stuff you can make with goat milk.
Who do you like for Equator Prize 2010? Avatar? No, wait, that’s something else. Well, actually…
Nutrition for humanitarian workers.
Large-eared white maize is ‘cultural heritage’ of Peru. So that’s all good then.
Minor cereals and a gluten-free diet.
Wanna talk to Katine? Ask about what the project is doing with/about agrobiodiversity, of course!
Nikolay tweets!
Agricultural and other assorted musings along the Mekong. Can’t help thinking that if you somehow aggregated all similar observations and geo-referenced them you’d come up with a pretty interesting picture of agriculture worldwide.
A blow for Scottish agrobiodiversity and cuisine.
Digitizing Africa’s roads.
Natural dyes 101.
IUCN photos of climate change adaptation. Includes agriculture! Well, sort of.
Nordic agricultural scientists to discuss climate change adaptation. Grow bananas?
Breeding Strategies for Sustainable Management of Animal Genetic Resources from FAO. Via.
ATREE questions Jatropha.

January 25, 2010January 25, 2010

Photographs of Old Hawaii and its taros see light of day

John Cho — he of the leaf blight-tolerant hybrids — has just posted some wonderful archive photographs of old Hawaiian taro culture to his Facebook page. He kindly agreed to us featuring one of them.

Here’s the backstory.

The images are from photographs archived in the State Archives that I selected and had them scanned by a third party. Sure would have been nice and less costly if the Archives digitized all the images that they have and allow the public to download them. But that is not the case and I had to hire a professional photographer contracted by the Archives to photograph then scan black and white negative images of taro photos that I had selected from the collection. I had planned to eventually put together a taro publication summarizing taro production and culture in Old Hawaii but have not quite gotten off the ground as yet. I decided to at least share some of the images on Facebook for the public to see and hopefully some day I would get off my duff and put the publication together. I also have several scans of taro culture from the Bishop Museum but require their permission to post their images on Facebook.