- Who put pepper in my shiraz? Human diversity meets grape diversity meets pepper diversity.
- High-priced fertilizers bring guano back. No shit. Via.
- Rebsie breeds a unique red-podded pea. Gregor repeats, “You go girl.”
- Another backyard breeder bares all. Mass crosses, mass selection.
- Eye in the sky informs on crop performance. No comment (yet) from Larry and Sergei.
- Understanding the US Farm Bill. Questions?
- Things to do with Phormium tenax.
- Popular as a pomegranate? Via.
The keyhole to self sufficiency
Luigi’s nibble of the keyhole gardens of Lesotho resonated with me for a couple of reasons. First, it showed that at least some people are not sitting about waiting for the rest of the world to solve the food crisis for them. More than that, though, it set me to thinking about this type of garden.
The BBC, with its customary ahistoricity, seems to think keyhole gardens are utterly novel and “home-grown” in Lesotho. Actually, they have a long history. I first came across them in a demonstration garden by Horticulture Therapy (now known as Thrive). They are round beds, raised to make it easy for people in a wheelchair to tend to the plants, and sized so that one can reach the middle of the bed either from outside the circle or from inside the slot that gives the garden its name. To be honest, I’m not sure who invented them. Permaculture practitioners often take credit for popularising the concept, but I’m sure I’ve seen earlier designs, including lung-like ones in which branching paths end in alveoli that allow access to the entire bed.
The point about keyhole type designs (whether raised for wheelchair users or not) is that they eliminate the need to tread on the soil, which is bad because it can lead to compaction and all the evils that brings. Keyholes, however, are just one manifestation of no-dig gardening. ((Which I am not going to link to because there are so many sites, I don’t want to single out any one of them.)) The shape of the bed is immaterial; what matters is that you don’t step on it and that you don’t destroy the soil structure by turning it upside down once or twice a year. And no-dig of this sort is just one manifestation of very intensive horticulture. ((To which I will definitely link: John Jeavons and Mel Bartholomew are the gurus, although there are others.)) And the weird part about no-dig, intensive horticulture is that it seems to be the child of affluence and self-sufficiency.
The poor, who need more than ever to be self-sufficient, have not generally been treated to these techniques.
It isn’t glamorous and it isn’t high tech, but it can deliver far more food than any other method. Not the calories of starchy staples, perhaps, although potatoes and other roots and tubers certainly do well in no-dig beds, but a wonderfully nutritious and satisfying diversity of fruit and vegetables. Furthermore, as the Lesotho example shows, there’s often a surplus to sell nearby.
One problem, I suspect, is that precisely because it isn’t high-tech and glamorous, intensive no-dig horticulture requires cadres of trainers. The system also needs to be tailored to people’s preferences and local conditions. I expect that the best way to propagate it would be to have demonstration villages that could train trainers and send them out into their world to spread the news. Wait a minute! Isn’t that something that Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages could be doing? ((What do you mean they don’t work?)) But I digress.
It seems to me, sitting here at the back of the Hall of Flags in the belly of the FAO beast, that widespread adoption of intensive, no-dig horticulture wherever poor people have access to at least a little land could do an enormous amount of good. There are opportunities for entrepreneurship and empowerment, and a prospect of real improvement. I just have no idea how to get something like that rolling.
The snatches I’m hearing from the statements and discussions (and I’m not privy to much corridor conversation) are all about high-yielding seeds and fertilizers (made from expensive oil) and irrigation. That package may have done as much good as it can.
Would it hurt to devote a small percentage of the millions being pledged to a different approach? Come to that, would anybody who is as appalled as I am about the same-old same-old being peddled as a solution care to bankroll something different?
Prince buys apples
Regular readers will remember last year’s flap over the UK’s National Fruit Collection, which is looked after by the Brogdale Horticultural Trust and managed by the University of Reading at Brogdale, Kent. I won’t rehearse the details again, but suffice to say there was some doubt about the collection’s future. There’s now news from the Daily Telegraph that the collection has been “saved” by the Prince of Wales:
…three separate collections of the 1,000 most important breeds have been sold to the Prince of Wales, the Co-operative supermarket group and an anonymous Scottish businessman. ((Actually, not so anonymous.)) Each will plant their saplings in different parts of the country.
There’s not much more detail than that in the article, and of course we’ll work our contacts to try to find out more, and indeed to verify the accuracy of the newspaper accounts. But there are a couple of points about this statement that are a little worrying. At the very least, the whole thing raises a lot of interesting questions.
Let me start by saying that it’s certainly a good idea to safety duplicate (or triplicate in this case) germplasm collections in different places, especially field collections, which are particularly prone to accident and mishap. ((I’m afraid I dont know if the collection is maintained in tissue culture under slow growth or cryo conditions, but one would hope so.)) But how exactly were the thousand accessions chosen? There are 2,300 apple varieties in the collection. How does one measure the “importance” of each of these? One measure might be how much they’ve been used, either directly in plantations or in breeding. But wouldn’t such varieties be the ones in least need of conservation? It would be good to know what criteria were used to make the selection.
My second worry is over the fact that the germplasm has been “sold.” For how much, exactly? And how was the amount calculated? And what does that mean about access to that material by potential users, either in the UK or overseas? ((Added later: I should have pointed out that it is not clear from the newspaper account whether a copy of the collection will remain at Brogdale.)) Apple is on Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Ex situ conserved Annex 1 material in the public domain and under the control of a Party to the Treaty, which the UK government is, is supposed to be made available to users under a “facilitated” access and benefit sharing regime. Does this privatization of part of the collection affect its status under the Treaty? If so, has the Treaty Secretariat been informed? It’s not as if the new owners won’t be trying making money out of it:
The Co-op intends to produce a “heritage apple juice” from some of the breeds by the end of this year. William Barnett, who heads up The Co-operative Farms’ 800-acre fruit-growing operation at Tillington in Herefordshire, where the apple trees are being planted, said: “Some of the apples date back to pre-Victorian times. They were originally dessert apples, but became less fashionable and failed as modern commercial varieties.”
What if someone else wants to try the same thing? Under what conditions will they have access to the material?
As I say, lots of questions. If anyone out there has the answers, we’d love to hear from you.
High-level kerfuffle
Don’t forget to check out IISD for highlights of the “High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy.” So you can find out what’s being achieved, besides bringing Rome to a standstill, that is. Jeremy is there, earning his keep, hence his silence. No doubt he’ll blog all about it when the dust settles.
It’s all interconnected
I like trying to see the world through other people’s eyes. That’s why I’ve been skimming the blog of Thomas P.M. Barnett, ever since he gave one of the greatest TedTalks I have ever watched. He looks at food as a military strategist, but one who is a leading thinker of new approaches to conflict. I wonder what you’ll think of this headline from his blog:
Urbanization yields globalization yields rising income yields more food demand yields bigger farms yields more migration to cities yields …
A really interesting and really stimulating take on one future of food production. And while we’re on the subject, how about this:
Consumption preferences for genetically heterogeneous varieties, supported by the market either directly or indirectly, are what seems to be key in biodiversity preservation.
That’s the conclusion of a post from the blog at RMAP (Resource Management in Asia-Pacific). Maylee Thavat discusses local seed systems and subsistence farmers, and how the two interact. I think there’s a fundamental issue here, and that’s the distinction between growing food that you and those you interact directly with may eat, and growing something that you sell (in order to buy food). Nor do I think it is limited to subsistence farmers. I’ve talked to industrialized farmers growing hundreds of hectares of potato varieties for the supermarkets who wouldn’t dream of eating the food they sell. They have a couple of rows of a decent variety out the back for their own use.
Maybe you’ve had similar experiences?