- 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. 1
Henri is an organic farmer in the south of France. In 1997 he was carrying out research into farming practice in the Gare 2 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. 3 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.
Nibbles: Pluots, Village chickens, Axolotl, Artisanal fishing, Fruit and climate change, Stamps, Hornless cattle, Artemisin for malaria, Aquatic agroecosystems characterization, Speciation and ploidy
- What’s the difference between pluots and plumcots? By the guy who wrote the book.
- ACIAR publication on village chickens, and another. Thanks, DAD-Net.
- Modeling the axolotl, the edible Mexican salamander, before it’s too late.
- Artisanal fishing data. Via.
- USDA looking to expand its fruit collection to cope with climate change. NOt the only ones, I imagine.
- Danes stamp on allotments. No, wait. Allotments on Danish stamps.
- Aussies find genetic marker for hornless cattle that will jump on barbie by themselves.
- Breeding better Artemisia annua.
- The diversity of farmer-managed aquatic systems in SE Asia.
- 15% of angiosperm speciation events are accompanied by ploidy increase. Much more in domesticated species, I bet.
Nibbles: Gardening, Maple syrup, Farming and conservation, Late blight, Urban guerrilla, Bizarre produce, Russian food, Aquaculture, Heirloom apples, Turkish medicinal plants, Bee-eating hornets
- NY Botanical Garden launches summer Edible Garden celebration.
- Thingy for getting more syrup out of maples invented.
- Farmer floods his fields on purpose.
- Insights into tomato late-blight resistance. Do try and keep up!
- A very English guerrilla gardener.
- Pictures of weird fruits and vegetables.
- Russian starters. Uhm, I spot a trend.
- The future of aquaculture: giant robotic roaming cages.
- Saving California’s Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.
- “Zeytinburnu Medicinal Plant Garden, opened in 2005, is Turkey’s first and only medicinal plant garden.”
- Something else has it in for bees: Chinese hornets.
Bolivians going back to their roots
I blogged a couple years ago about what might be called the “1491 controversy,” which hinges on whether you think the Amazon and adjacent areas were densely populated and closely managed before Columbus arrived, or an unproductive, largely pristine wilderness. One of the areas in question is the basin of the Beni River in Bolivia. Whatever your stand on the 1491 debate, it is undeniable that the Beni is a heavily modified landscape.
Shallow floodwaters cover much of the low-lying lands in the Llanos de Moxos during part of the rainy season. The rest of the year, dry conditions prevail and water is scarce. The alternation between seasonal flooding and seasonal drought, combined with poor soil conditions and lack of drainage, make farming in these areas difficult. The ancient inhabitants of the area created an agricultural landscape to solve these problems and make the area highly productive. They constructed a system of raised fields, or large planting surfaces of earth elevated above the seasonally flooded savannas and wetlands. Experiments have shown that the raised fields improve soil conditions and provide localized drainage and the means for water management, nutrient production, and organic recycling.
Well, Bolivian researchers are now suggesting that farmers return to these “camellones,” or raised fields, to harness the seasonal flooding, rather than succumbing to its depredatioons. Oxfam is supporting the project. The BBC was there.
If, as predicted by many experts, the cycles of El Niño/La Niña are going to increase in intensity and frequency, then the project has the capacity to help poor families cope better with the extreme weather events and unpredictable rainfall that are to come.
It would also allow them to cut down on fertilizers, and dabble in aquaculture. There is some scepticism, which has to do with the necessary investment in time and effort. But early results show gains in productivity, apparently, although it’s unclear from the BBC article what exactly is being compared. Anyway, there is much optimism.
This process could be repeated in various parts of the world with similar conditions to the Beni like parts of Bangladesh, India and China.
In the words of local farmer Maira Salas: “We are only just now learning how our ancestors lived and survived.” Well, yes, but with a difference. Some of the crops that are been grown in the camellones are exotic, which is fine, of course. But will there also be a revival of neglected traditional indigenous crops?