The latest In Our Time sent me scurrying to the online database of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Gotta love a museum whose collection you can search using the keyword “cassava accessory.” I also liked the historic photographs of the Luo, several of which include agricultural biodiversity.
Evolution strikes back
Ford Denison drew attention to this astonishing photograph of giant ragweed 1 lording it over a crop of harvest-ready maize.
Nothing unusual about that — being a giant anything gives you a licence to lord it over lowlier things. The point, of course, is that the corn crop is Round-up ready and so, of course, is the weed. More facts and figures at The International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds.
Ford also pointed to an interesting discussion on the difficulties of defining anything as slippery as farming philosophy by talking about what is and isn’t permitted.
To give the consumer a clear, black and white choice, organic marketing strategy offers a black and white world where all human-made pesticides and fertilizers, and all genetically modified crops are bad, regardless of their value to farmers or to sustainability. Even limited use is prohibited because it would blur the marketing lines.
Amen. Although let’s not forget that good old-fashioned soft soap is as human-made as anything. In the old days, I always advised beginning allotmenteers to blitz an unkempt plot with glyphosate and then get as holy as you like about being organic. Nothing is more soul-destroying than discovering couch grass or ground elder infesting the asparagus and strawberry beds. Of course, today, it might take more than glyphosate.
Nibbles: Guatemala, Burundi, Bees, LANSA, Moringa, Sorghum domestication, Coffee rust, Zambian rhinos
- The USDA is plugging its Atlas of Crop Wild Relatives in Guatemala. So we’ll plug our post about it from November 2011. And ask again: where’s Paraguay?
- The Social Life of Beans in Burundi is a tour-de-force. I can never get enough of informal seed systems, especially from people who live in them.
- And a similar sort of thing on okra. What’s gumbo without it?
- Today’s scary bee decline story. With extra buzz.
- CGIAR comes in for some stick over the insidious view and cunning logic of “Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA)”. I couldn’t possibly comment (and CG probably won’t).
- Oh boy! Global Moringa Get-togethers! In India!
- Sorghum domestication in Sudan: earlier, and less uncertain, than before.
- BBC piece on the new outbreak of coffee rust in Central America. Where are the resistant varieties?
- Head of Kew’s MSB tracks rhinos. Well, someone has to.
Heirlooms oversimplified?
Heirloom seeds are usually open-pollinated, meaning that wind or insects fertilize the seed. They’ll breed true to their parent plants, so if you harvest the seeds and replant them you will get the same variety.
Is it just me, or does this strike you as a huge over-simplification — not to say error? And there’s more — lots more — where that came from.
Fancy maps you cannot share
I love the animated maps of crop and livestock production in different countries at Show®World. But has anyone been able to embed them, or even download the images? Because I haven’t. And this screengrab is pretty lame by comparison.
