- Taking in the Atmosphere of the Forest is good for you.
- The Paris herbarium sorts itself out. ‘Bout time too.
- Some scientists are … keeping seeds on ice for future generations, but one Arizona seed farm is cultivating them in the desert sun.
- At last. Ford Denison blasts the vertical farm nuts. So we don’t have to.
- Fill ‘er up — with watermelon juice?
A Japanese banana in northern Italy
An advert in a local gardening magazine for something called Freddi Banana, supposedly a cold-tolerant banana “developed” in the northern Italian region of Alto Adige, led me down some interesting online byways. In one place it is a cross between a Japanese and a Nepalese variety, in another its origin is given as Ryukyu Islands, Japan. That’s the chain stretching from Taiwan to Japan. I found the whole thing hard to believe, but a little research revealed that there is indeed a Musa species in the Ryukyu Islands. This is Musa basjoo, and it is the most cold-hardy of bananas. Various cultivars are available commercially.
Musa basjoo is commonly referred to as the Japanese Fibre Banana and it’s native place is given as the Ryukyu (Liu Kiu) Islands. However, Musa basjoo is not the Japanese Fibre Banana. Musa basjoo is not from the Liu Kiu Islands and not from Japan, it is a Chinese species.
So what is the Japanese Fibre Banana, I hear you ask?
The true identity of the Japanese Fibre Banana became known only in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in WWII when the Ryukyu Islands came under the control of the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR). USCAR brought to Okinawa Egbert H. Walker, a staff member of the Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution who was in charge of the Serviceman’s Collecting Program (SCP) in which US forces members were encouraged to collect and submit botanical and other specimens. But Walker was no desk-bound administrator of the SCP. He was an accomplished field botanist and developed a thorough knowledge of the Ryukyu flora. His work, during which he personally collected over 7,000 plant specimens on Okinawa and neighbouring islands, culminated in his Flora of Okinawa (Walker 1976). Walker made no mention of M. basjoo in this work but did include the ito-basho, Musa liukiuensis, after the treatment of which he commented:
“Seeds from plants [of Musa liukiuensis] in Oku [village in northern Okinawa] were grown in Kingston, Jamaica by the Banana Breeding Scheme of the Banana Board. The seed, seedlings and flowers were reported in 1973 to be identical with those of Musa balbisiana Colla.”
Called ito basho, or “thread banana,” the Japanese Fibre Banana is very important in Ryukyu tradition, much like abacá, a different fibre-producing Musa species, is in the Philippines.
In the old days, bolts of plain-colored, striped and kasuri (ikat) basho-fu were woven in numerous locations across the Ryukyu islands and were used as tribute payments to the Okinawan royalty. In those days, basho-fu was worn by everyone from kings to commoners. Nowadays, however, basho-fu is a luxury cloth that is made only in the village of Kijoka, on the island of Okinawa.
Vegetables in Africa, traditional and otherwise
The FARA Secretariat blog linked to a couple of items which are sort of related, if you look hard enough. One is about Prof. Mary Abukutsa-Onyango’s work studying (in particular the nutritional properties) and promoting traditional leafy greens in Kenya, which has just won her a fellowships from African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD). You can read or listen to a podcast about it. The other piece is about the African Drylands Commodity Atlas. The connection is that there is actually a section on vegetables in the atlas, along with coffee, cotton, sugar, timber, livestock products etc. Alas, it’s things like cabbages, tomatoes and onions, destined for Europe.
In the rush to export to Europe, African domestic and regional vegetable markets have often been overlooked. Local, district and national markets provide the first outlet and are the primary clients for increased vegetable production.
Still a lot of promotion to be done on those traditional greens, despite the potential for intra-regional trade. Come to think of it, a third of yesterday’s FARA blog posts may also be relevant to African indigenous vegetables. This year’s Economic Report on Africa is focused on “Developing African Agriculture through Regional Value Chains.” Can we hope for a joined-up analysis of all this from FARA?
Nibbles: Agroforestry, Korean fruit, Sami knowledge, Date palm, Havana
- World Agroforestry Congress has a blog. Welcome to the blogosphere!
- Evil Fruit Lord does Korea. Korea still reeling.
- Sámi herders have lots of words for reindeer pastures. No, wait…
- UAE boffins fingerprinting their dates. Why, what have they done?
- Yet more on Cuban urban/organic agriculture from the BBC.
Selling touselle
In 1482, in the month of December, King Louis XI was taken ill at Tours, and had Touzelle [wheat] brought from the diocese of Nismes, so that bread could be made for him. The prince, extremely weak in mind and body, and struck with the fear of death beyond all expression, believed that of all the corners of his kingdom, the diocese of Nismes produced the wheat most likely to bring him to health.
That’s Léon Ménard in his Histoire de Nîmes of 1755. The passage is quoted in a short post in what alas seems now to be a dormant blog about artisanal breadmaking. I got there because I was intrigued by this statement in a box in a GRAIN article by Hélène Zaharia (of Réseau Semences Paysannes) called Bread of life. ((This is a companion piece to breadmaker Andrew Whitley’s The bread we eat, published in 2007.))
Henri is an organic farmer in the south of France. In 1997 he was carrying out research into farming practice in the Gare ((Is this a misprint? I think it should read “Gard.”)) region when he discovered Touselle wheat. It is an early wheat, without whiskers, with a soft grain, very suitable for bread-making. It was once cultivated quite widely in Languedoc and Provence and was appreciated for its good yields, even when it was grown on poor soil in a difficult, dry environment. But by the time Henri became interested in it, it had been widely abandoned in favour of modern varieties.
Henri decided to try it out for himself and obtained a few seeds of four of the 13 varieties of Touselle held in the Department of Genetic Resources at INRA in Clermont-Ferrand.
It turns out that “Henri” (for some reason, no surname is provided in the GRAIN article) is Henri Ferté, and what intrigued me particularly about this passage is that he is a farmer who obtained germplasm directly from a genebank, in this case the Conservatoire de Ressources Génétiques, INRA Clermont-Ferrand. ((“[L]’une des premières collections européennes.”)) This doesn’t happen as much as it could, or should. Or at least I don’t know of that many examples. Henri knew about the genebank because he has “un diplôme d’agro en poche,” as Zaharia says in another, more recent, article (which I cannot find online, but is entitled “Gard: La relance des blés méditerranéens.”). How do less academically qualified farmers find out about what’s in genebanks? It would be great to do a review of such direct use of national genebanks, and why there isn’t more of it. Maybe there is one out there already? Not all users are breeders — we sometimes forget that.
Anyway, Henri seems to have been fairly successful in bringing back touselle, King Louis XI’s miraculous wheat. This was apparently still around — in a number of distinct forms — at the end of the 19th century, but later largely disappeared: “…by 2004 Touselle was being grown experimentally on a fairly large number of peasant farms in the south of France.” A Union for the Promotion of Touselle was established in 2005. It doesn’t look to me like their website has been very active in the intervening years, but that’s no doubt because niche wheat farmers in the south of France have better things to do than mess around on the internet.