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French man saves seeds in India

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pQBfwF0TVQ

I found this in a post at the Permaculture Research Institute, USA. The video is rather good, I reckon, although there were a couple of parts where I disagreed with the subtitling. More worrying, I think, is the sub-text. Do the Indians need a foreigner to teach them to save seeds? To get them access to traditional varieties from all over, that they can then trial in their own systems. Why no mention of the fact that what Stephan Fayon is doing in India, he  could not do legally in France? Kokopelli India is an offshoot of Kokopelli Seed Foundation, which is a US  vehicle to support the aims of Association Kokopelli in France. Amazingly, Association Kokopelli has had nothing new to say about its euros 35,000 fine for “unfair trading” since the fine was levied. It’s all very odd.

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Are these seeds viable?

Picked up Brown Envelope Seeds in one of my feeds. They are based in Ireland, near Skibbereen, a name that will send shudders down the spine of anyone who has read contemporary accounts of the Irish Potato Famine. And they appear to have a range of diverse vegetable varieties that gardeners might be interested in, so I was about to add them to our list of seed sources, when I realized that the home page of the web site has not been updated since February 2008. Can anyone confirm that Brown Envelope Seeds remains active?

Later …

I did the obvious thing, and emailed Madeline McKeever directly. Her reply:

Yes, We are still here. It has just been very busy growing since February and I’m not very good at computers. I have written lots of new pages in my head while out weeding but by the time I get in in the evening it has all evaporated. … I would be delighted to be listed as one of your sources and will link back to you if you like. Thanks for the reminder to do something with the front page.

So, that’s it. At least she’s on top of email, if not the web site. Brown Envelope Seeds joins the exalted company on our sources page. Thanks Madeline.

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LEISA Magazine seeks articles on Diverse Farming Systems

From Karen Hampson, Editor, LEISA Magazine.

LEISA Magazine on Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture has the theme of “Diverse farming systems.” We are seeking articles about initiatives that explicitly recognise the value of diverse landscapes, diverse ways of life, diverse crops and agricultural systems and which stand up against policies and developments that undermine an independent family farmers’ way of life.

We are looking for short articles (800-2400 words) based around experience and learning.  All articles received by us have to go through a selection process, so if you prefer you could send us some initial information and we can then discuss which aspects to highlight in an article. We can accept articles written in English, Portuguese, French or Spanish. We provide full editorial support and a fee of 75 euro is available to authors. The full Call for Articles, outlining the theme in more detail, and the Guidelines for Authors, can be found on our website, or by contacting me. Please submit articles to Karen Hampson at k.hampson@ileia.nl by December 1st, 2008.

We have partner organizations in Brazil, Peru, India, China, Indonesia, and West Africa, all publishing regional editions of the magazine in their various languages. I can send sample copies out on request.

I am happy to answer any questions, or discuss ideas for articles.

Please feel free to circulate this around your networks.  I look forward to hearing from you!

Karen

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Harlan II – Field trip

Robert Hijmans puts his money where his mouth is.

I took the train to Berkeley, less than two hours from Davis towards San Francisco. I checked in at the French hotel and dined in the restaurant across the street. We are talking about Alice Waters’ place, Chez Panisse a restaurant well known to the readers of this blog and in-flight magazines.

There is the formal restaurant downstairs (fully booked) and the café upstairs (a late table was available). I had wine made of Zinfandel grapes. 1

I took the US$29 fixed menu. It had a garden lettuce salad, spaghetti alla Norma with eggplant, tomato, basil, and ricotta salata, and a Concord grape sherbet with roasted Thompson seedless grapes and langues de chat. 2

These were the variety names on today’s menu: Concord grape, Thompson seedless grapes, and Little Gems lettuce.

And these were the farm names on the menu: Cannard Farm 3, Andante Dairy, Soul Food Farm, Marin Sun Farm, Lagier Ranches, and Frog Hollow Farm.

Terroir trumps agrobiodiversity at Alice’s place.

It is a good restaurant. It is very French. The waiter spoke of terroir as if his name were Claude Duchateu. It is very cheap for a famous restaurant. It has a local twist to it. The food is good. But is mainstream now. The menu in the Davis Best Western Palm Court was not that different.

I suppose it is fair what everybody says, that Alice created some sort of revolution. From the wasteland of the American diner to Good Food. Just like her neighbor Alfred Peet transformed mainstream American coffee from diluted sewage to the best coffee anywhere save (perhaps) Italy. But that is ancient history.

But, just for your information, Chez Panisse is passé now. Go look somewhere else. I have heard of an underground restaurant movement in New York.

Chez Panisse is sold out every night, I think. Alice can experiment. But she does not. She chooses the middle of the road. Their produce comes from “farms, ranches, and fisheries guided by principles of sustainability” but the majority of entrees (main dishes) are a fish or meat dish.

Chuck out the meat. Serve different varieties of other veggies than tomatoes (even the Andronico’s supermarket across the street sells heirlooms).  Use something locally evolved rather than merely locally grown. The native Californians used hundreds of edible plants. 4 But no miner’s lettuce or acorns on the menu of the Queen of Slow Food.  Come on, Alice, surprise me!

P.S. That pasta was really good though. I will go back tomorrow to further investigate the case.

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Harlan II, day 4

From a very tired and emotional Robert Hijmans. Previously….

No domestication without relaxation. Today was excursion day at the Harlan II symposium.  All to the Napa wineries you’d think, but no, there were not enough registrants for that. 5 But there was a  tour of  the Charles Rick Tomato Genebank and a “Native Biodiversity and Plant/Pollinator Interactions”  tour, visiting field sites used by Claire Kremen’s group. But I had my own program. Before I get to that, which I will do in a separate post, allow me to make to parting comment on the Harlan II symposium.

On day 1, I mentioned that molecular biology rules. The increased understanding of the relatedness of populations of different crop taxa and their wild relatives is having a tremendous effect on our understanding of domestication and dispersal of agrobiodiversity. The flurry of recent papers on this subject has probably not escaped the attention of readers of this blog.

Be that as may, I should also have mentioned the explosion of archaeological data and analysis. Compared to 10 years ago, there are now many more late Pleistocene to early Holocene settlements that have been analyzed. This is providing a much more refined insight into early agriculture and domestication than was previously possible.

I do not know why there has been such an increase, all of a sudden. More people and money thrown at it, no doubt, but why now? At the same time, and perhaps not unrelated, there appears to have been an important increase in the sophistication of the methods used to study agricultural origins. Extracting charred starch particles from pot fragments or mortars. Determining minor differences in grain sizes to classify them as one type or the other. Tallies of bone sizes to determine whether the animals were hunted or farmed. And then there is the analysis of ancient DNA. And so forth. Not much Indiana Jones in it, but it is quite safe and more intellectually rewarding.

Most insights about agricultural origins still come from the Levant. While other areas are much less explored, they are also moving along. For many places and periods, we now have a good idea about what plants and animals were eaten. That is why we now know that there was a long transition from cultivation to domestication. This is why Dorian Fuller was able to show us graphs with changes in crop characteristics over time for multiple crops (wheat, barley, rice).

The origins of agriculture and the domestication process that took place about 10,000 yrs ago are fascinating and fundamental to the understanding of the history of humans. But domestication has never stopped, and will not stop, despite EU regulations. There are many other stories, from other regions, from other (not cereal) crops that have been much less explored.

Jared Diamond is convinced that no more crops or animals of major importance will be domesticated. He says that crop and animal domestication happened where there were species predisposed to be domesticated. We found them millennia ago. That is why agriculture originated where it did, and this is one of the reasons why some places are richer than others.

I wonder whether we can be more imaginative about what domestication could do to some wild plant or animal. We now know what it takes and can engage it what Melinda Zeder calls “directed domestication”. Perhaps something for an X-Prize.  A hundred million dollars for anyone who can develop a crop that is now insignificant (say less than 10,000 ha) to an area of at least 10 million ha. I agree that it is hard to image that  this will happen with staple food crops, but it is bound to happen with an energy crop.