Category: Markets

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Frankincense and disharmonic energy fields

One of the more amazing travel experiences I had when I was working in the Middle East was to drive from Muscat through most of Oman to Salalah, the capital of the province of Dhofar, in the south of the country. You drive on and on for ten and more hours through desert, mile after mile of barren sand and rock. Then you go over a slight rise, and suddenly drop down an escarpment into a lush landscape of thickly forested slopes: the crescent-shaped mountains of Dhofar block the rain-laden clouds of the monsoon for months.

The leaward lip of that escarpment is the home of the frankincense tree, Boswellia sacra, the start of famous trade routes to the Mediterranean and India. And such pleasant recollections were prompted by an article in the NY Times on how frankincense “has the ability to generate this really powerful force field that has been shown to be able to neutralize and transmute what we call disharmonic energy fields.” Right. Let’s hope that New Yorkers’ demand for such force fields doesn’t lead to overexploitation.

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The Abbadia di Fiastra

So I guess you’ll have gathered the family and I were on holiday in the Marche region last week. One of the cooler places we visited was the Abbadia di Fiastra (that’s its cloister above). This is a romanesque abbey nestled in the middle of an ancient wood, which is now a protected area. Cistercian monks built the place in the 12th Century, reclaimed some of the land for agriculture by changing the course of the river Entogge, and also made use of the nearby forest, of course.  You can still buy natural products made on the abbey’s land in the little shop in the visitors’ centre.

There’s an interesting Museum of Peasant Culture at the abbey. Actually it mainly consists of old farm machinery and utensils. This was one of the more interesting exhibit, a seminatrice, or seed sower.

I talked to my friend the farmer about it. He remembers when tractors first came into the region, in the sixties. He remembers sowing and harvesting using machines such as this, pulled by horses or cows. He had heard of the museum, but didn’t think much of the idea.

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Sorghum woes in Somaliland

Another farmer speaks:

Worried about the infertility of my farm, the other day, I was sitting alone trying to find explanation as to why my farm was productive in the olden days producing 100 sacks of 50kg each of sorghum in one go and why it is sterile today producing less than 5 sacks a year no matter how hard I may work?

Read the whole lot.

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Nibbles: Vine, Food, Soil, Malnutrition squared, Coca