- On my signal, unleash the potential of small farmers and food producers worldwide. Has a return ring to it.
- More than anyone could reasonably want to know about wild banana relatives in Thailand.
- Big stinky flower with its own webcam. Must be a wild relative of something.
- Better in many ways to catch a diversity of fish species than to focus on one.
- Could probably do with some guidelines for access to fisheries, though, right?
- International Seed Treaty secretariat knocks ‘em dead down under. “THREE-quarters of the world’s crop biodiversity has been irrevocably lost since 1900.”
- Of course it has. Did Dr Bhatti visit this place during his tour of Oz, I wonder? If not, maybe he’ll visit Mexico next and see this place. And speaking of Mexico…
- Mexico sneezes, US grain exports catch a cold?
- World record potato harvest in Bihar; there’s a lot that’s fishy about this story.
- “Khat cultivation in Ethiopia fuels economy, reduces deforestation.” And makes people sick, but who’s counting.
- Ah but here’s a possible alternative. Now, if only CIFOR and ILRI would talk together about this.
Non-traditional, non-indigenous knowledge is important
When I first came to Rome, I grew potfuls of Lantana (probably L. camara, but not sure precisely what species). Sure, it’s an invasive, noxious weed, but nobody’s perfect, and I liked the succession of flowers and that strange, almost catty scent of the crushed leaves. And in the autumn, I noticed a strange thing. Unlike all the other plant pots, there was nary a single weed growing beneath the Lantanas. That was an observation odd enough to make me check, and discover that Lantana is allelopathic; it makes life hard for anything growing underneath it.
An article by Professor Anil Gupta reminded me of this. The article was partly about Auta Gravetas, a Ugandan farmer who noticed that sweet potatoes at the edge of a field bordered by Lantana had fewer pests than plants near the centre of the plot. He experimented with putting lantana leaves between layers of dried slices of sweet potato, which extended their shelf-life by six weeks or more, an important consideration for very poor farmers. In 2000, this discovery won Auta Gravetas ((Strangely, this contemporary report calls him Avta Deogratias, which might make him easier to find in future.)) first prize in a competition organised by IFAD. As Gupta observes:
The weed became a resource. … Neither lantana camara was indigenous nor had the knowledge been transferred by one generation to another over centuries. The way of knowing was traditional — by observing an odd phenomenon, discriminating, abstracting, hypothesising, testing and developing a robust rule or technology.
There’s probably a lot more that Lantana could be used for; given its anti-microbial (and other) properties. Gupta has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about this story, and writes about it often. But the point is well taken. Farmers can innovate in unexpected ways, and it requires all parties to be alert to the possibilities if those innovations are to be spread. And quite by coincidence, I’m sure, BBC News Africa reports today on a Cameroonian innovator and entrepreneur who also transformed his local food system.
Nibbles: African seeds, African needs, Egyptian seed preservation, Archaeocandy, Conservation, Seed swap site, Water buffalo genome, Anti-striga films, Entomophagy, Black sigatoka, Pavlovsk, Cannabis genome
- Gates just gave AGRA $56 million to make new seed varieties available. PASS still not collecting the diversity it hopes to displace.
- Hang on though. Africa needs a “Green renaissance, not revolution”.
- Saving seeds the ancient Egyptian way.
- Eating sweets the ancient Papuan (and others) way.
- Odd to hear an agrobiodiversity dude talking about silver bullets – even with a question mark.
- SeedZoo site offers a space to give and to receive “traditional and indigenous food plants from around the world”.
- Today’s forthcoming genome of agricultural interest: water buffalo.
- Farmer to farmer films – gender sensitive, natch – “fight against striga”.
- Assessing the Potential of Insects as Food and Feed in assuring Food Security, from the FAO document repository.
- Much sound, less light, on black Sigatoka disease, from the BBC (natch).
- Vaviblog rounds up the latest skinny on Pavlovsk.
- And speaking of Vavilov, the latest genome to be sequenced has a VIR connection.
Nibbles: Underutilized foods, Overutilised food components, Potato microplants, Maize archaeology, More potatoes, Ag innovation
- Crops for the Future has news of a symposium to promote underutilized food resources in May.
- Or you could go to a report on fibre, an overused resource. I love how they blame the Limeys for all that’s wrong with nutrition.
- Potato Professionals hear the good news about in situ conservation using disease-free microplants.
- The archaeology of maize among the Mississippians.
- The archaeology of Mike Jackson among the Andean roots and tubers.
- Thomson Reuters Foundation has a big package on agricultural innovation. And many more topics you can trust.
Nibbles: Forests and agriculture, Seed collecting, Banana book, Fermentation, Cucumber history, Myrrh, Farm systems, Dog genetics, Chocolate wars
- Seven forest myths exposed. And more on the work debunking one of them. Yeah I know we already Nibbled it, get over it.
- And you know what, here’s another one we already Nibbled, on collecting seeds in Central Asia. But I just read it again in the hardcopy version and it’s really cool and I like seeing people I know in funny shorts. Incidentally, the dead tree version has a link to Vaviblog that is unaccountably missing online.
- Will no one buy me this fabulous banana book? (Not if you keep being rude to your reader. Ed.)
- Second installment of that we-farm-because-we-like-beer thing. I’m not sure about the theory, but I like the way this guy writes. Yes, it’s a little look at me, look at me. But sometimes you need that.
- Tales of the cucumber. Does anyone remember if we blogged about this paper?
- More to myrrh than meets the eye. And more than most folk need to know.
- Oxford boffins say a pox on both your houses: “environmentally friendly” farms better than conventional and organic.
- National Geographic tackles the dog. Amazingly, all the photos are of, ahem, dogs.
- What’s with all this stuff about cacao lately? Has someone sequenced another variety or something?