Category: Vegetables

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Vegetable seed kits for Thailand; more details

We are very pleased that the World Vegetable Center has responded to our concerns about the vegetable seed kits that the Center has been distributing in the wake of the floods in Thailand. Thanks to Maureen Mecozzi for this contribution.

We appreciate and share your concern regarding seed distribution in the wake of disasters. To clarify the role of AVRDC–The World Vegetable Center in providing seed to Thailand:

The floods in Thailand affected agricultural areas, and the military is facilitating the relief operations on behalf of the Royal Project. The Project’s patron, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, requested seed from the Ministry of Agriculture, which was unable to supply as much as was needed. Kasetsart University will launch an overall development program that will include home gardens, but it also lacked seed in sufficient quantities for distribution.

KU and the ministry approached AVRDC–The World Vegetable Center to help supply seed for these initiatives.

AVRDC’s disaster relief seed kits include hardy, fast-growing vegetable varieties with low input requirements that can provide much-needed nutrition to disaster survivors. Crops in AVRDC’s disaster relief kits are carefully selected to suit local agroecologies and food preferences. The kits include cultivation and food preparation instructions in local languages.

Each kit provides enough seed for one household to grow vegetables on 100 m2 of land to provide a balanced supply of protein and micronutrients during the initial months after a disaster.

Please note:

  • Seed for the disaster relief kits was produced in Thailand.
  • Crops selected for the kits are locally adapted, open-pollinated varieties (farmers can save their own seed to plant in following seasons).
  • The crops are well-known in Thailand and palatable to Thai tastes and preferences.
  • The crops are nutritious and quick-growing.
  • Seed was properly pre-treated and stored to ensure high germination rates.

The Center’s disaster seed kits are not designed to supplant the local seed supply system. Food production systems can be severely disrupted or destroyed altogether in the wake of a disaster; supplying seed kits helps survivors in agricultural areas bridge the gap until local seed systems recover.

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Vegetable starter kits for Thailand

A short piece in AVRDC’s latest monthly newsletter tells the story of how that institute is producing thousands of “vegetable seed kits” with support from the government of Taiwan and handing them over to a university and the army in Thailand for distribution to people affected by flooding and landslides in a couple of different regions of that country.

It’s an interesting idea, but as usual the article left me wanting to know more. Like how were the varieties of mungbean, okra and kangkong chosen? In fact, how were the crops chosen? And did all the thousands of kits have the same varieties? And, more fundamentally, how did AVRDC know that vegetable seeds were needed in the first place? Seed provision in the wake of disasters is a complicated business.

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Private cabbages go public in North Carolina

Of course the obligatory conspiracy theories have surfaced, but Monsanto’s gift of its extensive cabbage germplasm collection to North Carolina’s State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute seems genuine enough.

“Monsanto is pleased to contribute cabbage germplasm to N.C. State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute at the N.C. Research Campus,” said Consuelo Madere, Monsanto’s Global Vegetable and Asia Commercial lead. “We sell cabbage seed under our Seminis brand in several world areas,” she said, “and we are delighted that the Institute will be working at NCRC to develop cabbage varieties well suited to the local production needs in North Carolina. It’s a great example of public and private efforts coming together at the campus.”

That might suggest that Monsanto would look askance at the material getting too far beyond North Carolina, but Dr Allan Brown, the breeder with the Plants for Human Health Institute who will be managing the collection, assures me there are no strings attached with regard to availability. He has a long job ahead checking on the viability of all the accessions, and regenerating and multiplying the material as needed, but he sees no impediment to it eventually being widely available, though he cannot put a date on that.

That’s good news for cabbage breeders around the world. If I were a proper reporter I would ask Monsanto why they didn’t make the donation to the USDA’s Northeast Regional PI Station at Geneva, New York, which manages plenty of cabbages, and which would then very willingly have made the material available to NCSU, and everyone else to boot. Maybe I will anyway.

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Brainfood: Biotechnology, Pollinators, Mulberries, Rice blast, Locavores, Roselle, Cassava, Protected areas, Traditional vegetables, Vitis, European diversity

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Religion, diet and nutrition

We tend not to set too much store by religion around these parts, so a letter in response  1 to The Economist’s recent pieces on nutrition piqued our interest. It read, in part:

In the March issue of their magazine, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints reported on a food initiative which has taught many members to garden, even in small, urban spaces, and with whatever containers they can find. Started in 2009, these people have gone on to teach others in their communities how to increase their nutritional intake—and self-reliance—with just seeds, soil and sunlight.

Let me Google that for you. Better yet, having Googled it, let me fillet out the article in question and make it available all on its own. Turns out that not only are Mormons keen on urban and container gardening for diversity and nutrition, they’ve been so for quite a while. A former US secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, was President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and set out a very familiar vision of how to prepare for the Days of Tribulation:

Get together with others and seek permission to use a vacant lot for a garden, or rent a plot of ground and grow your gardens. Some elders quorums have done this as a quorum, and all who have participated have reaped the benefits of a vegetable and fruit harvest and the blessings of cooperation and family involvement. Many families have dug up lawn space for gardens.

That sounds like a modern manifesto to me. Of course, there’s an appeal to authority too:

President Brigham Young said, “If you are without bread, how much wisdom can you boast, and of what real utility are your talents, if you cannot procure for yourselves and save against a day of scarcity those substances designed to sustain your natural lives?”

One to ponder. Meanwhile, I wonder whether those members of the Mormon faith who heeded their presidents’ advice saw any impact on their nutrition?