- Is tree cotton (Gossypium arboretum) about to enjoy a renaissance?
- What on earth is “gay” about organic labelling being equivalent in the USA and the EU?
- Is marijuana kosher for Passover? h/t DannyChamowitz.
- What does Denis Kyetere, executive director of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, foresee for the continent’s farmers?
Brainfood: Medicinal plants, Einkorn diversity, Chestnut diversity, Leeks etc, Phylogenetic diversity
- The Use of Phylogeny to Interpret Cross-Cultural Patterns in Plant Use and Guide Medicinal Plant Discovery: An Example from Pterocarpus (Leguminosae. It’s kinda like parallel evolution.
- Genetic diversity in the Red wild einkorn: T. urartu Gandilyan (Poaceae: Triticeae). Northwest Syria and South Turkey contain the most genetic diversity, and genetic similarity is not a proxy for geographic closeness.
- Castanea spp. biodiversity conservation: collection and characterization of the genetic diversity of an endangered species. Overview of a 7-year project to conserve and study sweet chestnut diversity.
- Diversity in Allium ampeloprasum: from small and wild to large and cultivated. The continuing, complex saga of onion, leek and garlic evolution. It’s about heterozygosity, rathen than ploidy.
- Phylogenetic diversity promotes ecosystem stability. How crazy is that!
Nibbles: Cannabaceae revisited, Farmer information, Sunflower genes, Urban foraging, Plant hunters, Forest gardens
- Hoping and doping: taxonomy of hops revised.
- What do farmers want? Where do they look for it? How much will they pay? IFPRI has answers.
- Van Gogh’s sunflower mutants explained.
- Gathering in the city: an annotated bibliography and review of the literature about human-plant interactions in urban ecosystems.
- Career advice: Plant Hunters.
- Coffee forest gardens improve food security.
Nibbles: Small farmers, Wild bananas, Titan arum, Fish for diversity, Tenure, Treaty, Australian genebank, Mexican genebank, Mexican drought, Potato record, Khat and fodder in Ethiopia
- 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 1 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.