I’ve just come across two Flickr groups which are intensely interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective. Flickr is a photo sharing site, and I have in fact blogged about it before here, for example on how it could be used to map crop diversity. The two groups bring together photos taken in markets, with a lot of fruits and vegetables featured. As with my previous post on tomatoes, have a look at the mapping option in particular. A great time-waster, but I bet it could be used to look at geographic patterns in vegetable diversity in markets.
Nibbles: Moche, Nerica, AVRDC, Black bee
- Moche bean writing.
- “For Liberia’s subsistence farmers like Jeanet Gay, however, the Nerica may not offer such a ready solution to their annual hunger gap – indeed it may ultimately threaten their livelihoods.”
- AVRDC commits to the South Pacific.
- “The Victorians threw Apis mellifera mellifera out of hives in favour of more industrious foreign species.” Now this native British bee is coming back.
Nibbles: Adam Forbes, Squash, Native Americans, Gardens, Buffalo, Pastoralism, Primula, IPR
- Global seed searcher Adam Forbes check in.
- Filipinos greet new squashes.
- Smithsonian special feature on the American Indian. Not much agrobiodiversity, but still.
- Reviews of a couple of interesting gardening books.
- Asian Buffalo Congress 2009.
- Policies that work for pastoral environments.
- “Farmers are being encouraged to graze fewer, rarer animals, and that means the fields can sustain traditional wild flowers. It is a sweet-smelling plant and cattle and sheep love to eat it.” It is the cowslip.
- Case studies on intellectual property in agriculture and forestry.
The giant pumpkin story
Jules Janick, professor of horticulture at Purdue, wrote a wonderfully informative and entertaining brief history of giant pumpkins in last September’s Chronica Horticulturae (it starts on page 16). Regular competitions have been going on in the US since 1900, arising from state agricultural fairs.
The giant round orange phenotypes of C. maxima appear to be in a narrow gene pool out of “Atlantic Giant” (oblong phenotypes are called “Dill’s Atlantic Giant” developed by William Dill, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, Canada)… “Atlantic Giant” and related huge show pumpkins trace their origin to the cultivar “Mammoth,” recorded in the seed trade as far back as 1834…
Despite this narrow genepool, the genetic gains have been phenomenal (although of course cultural practices play a part too), as this graph of world records of pumpkin fruit weight from 1857 to 2007 shows:
The current mark stands at almost 800 kg. Seed of top specimens changes hands at huge prices (up to $850 for a single seed). Prof. Janick suggests that horticultural science has ignored this record of success.
Someone has accused academics in the agricultural arena of merely proving that the practices achieved by the best growers are correct. I suggest the academic and scientific community cooperate on this engaging problem for the delight of the public everywhere.
Competing for heirlooms
The Independent has launched the Great British Butterfly Hunt.
In the Great British Butterfly Hunt we will seek to find and report on each one of our 58 varieties (56 residents and two Continental migrants)… We will report from right across the country on every single species.
But most importantly we are inviting you, the readers, to join us, and to see how many you can observe for yourselves. As the different species emerge at different moments of the spring and summer, we will be offering extensive guidance on identification and on how to find them. Some may well be in your back garden or local park. Others, especially the rarities, may involve a journey – albeit to the most beautiful parts of Britain.
To give an edge to it all, we are introducing an element of competition, and an unusual prize.
The person or group (such as a school class) which records the most species will win a special safari in late August, conducted by The Independent in conjunction with the charity Butterfly Conservation, to find the last butterfly of the summer – the most elusive of all the British species: the brown hairstreak.
A nice idea. Would it work for heirloom fruits and vegetables, say? Or pollinator species for that matter. Jeremy says they tried it at the Henry Doubleday Research Association ten years ago without a great deal of success. Any other examples out there?