One — or at least part of one — of the great agrobiodiversity-themed art works of the ancient world is back. Apart from “Fowling in the marshes,” reproduced below, Nebamun’s painted tomb includes representations of a garden pool, wine-making, and food offerings.
Photograph: The British Museum
Livestock bring books, ice cream
Donkeys are being used to cart books around the Ethiopian countryside as part of a literacy campaign.
The donkeys are not just a gimmick – in rural Ethiopia and provincial towns like Awassa, horse-drawn buggies and donkey carts are a normal form of transport.
But the project also tries to teach the children about respect for animals.
Donkeys here are generally despised and often ill-treated, but these two working donkeys wear the colourful embroidered trappings usually reserved for riding horses.
Northern Kenya, in contrast, has camel libraries. Speaking of camels, we’ve just missed the Pushkar Camel Fair. But I wonder if we’re too late for the camel ice cream.
Hemp honoured
The International Year of the Potato gives way to the International Year of Natural Fibres. That include hemp?
(Not much) agrobiodiversity on display in Nairobi museum
The main building of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi has had a facelift, courtesy of the EU. Pretty good job on the outside, but the new exhibits were a bit of a disappointment.
There’s a big hall about Kenya’s animals, of course, and another series of displays about its cultures, arranged by life-stages (birth, youth, adolescence, initiation: you get the picture), though this includes very little about agriculture:
But there’s nothing at all on the country’s ecosystems and protected areas, and nothing on its plants, at least inside the building (apart from a display of an herbarium specimen in the small hall describing the museum’s history). There is a little botanic garden dedicated to medicinal plants (arranged by family, the wisdom of which is debatable), but this misses the opportunity of describing the Amaranthus on display as not just a medicinal but also a nutritious traditional leafy green (see my next post):
However, the entrance hall does have a terrific display of cucurbit diversity:
These bottle gourds are used by the Maasai and other pastoralists to store water, milk, blood, and mixtures thereof. Here’s a close-up:
Colonial farming brought to life
Slate reporter does stint as historical re-enactor at the living museum that is the Claude Moore Colonial Farm in Virginia — and waxes lyrical about some of her colleagues:
I was particularly entertained by the turkeys. These were not the tasteless, denatured modern grotesques bred to be so short-legged and heavy-breasted that they can no longer mate, but a heritage breed, Black Spanish.