Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

September 12, 2008September 12, 2008

Feasting it up in the Neolithic

A Guardian article on the evidence for large-scale feasting at Stonehenge, and in particular on the long-range movement of cattle to the site, reminded me that I had wanted to link to a more general paper about the phenomenon of Neolithic feasting. I have only had access to the abstract so far, but the paper seems to argue that feasting and agriculture went hand in hand, and that in fact the practice may have led to the domestication of cattle. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there, at first sight, but I’ll wait for the full text before commenting on that at any greater length. In any case, it seems that barbecues go back much further than the Neolithic.

Actually, I may as well put another marker down. Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, my source for the feasting paper, also recently had a post about crop domestication. Again, I don’t have the full text yet, and will discuss this more fully when I do. But it seems the paper argues that there is a tension in the data on crop domestication between archaeology, which shows that the process was slow, stop-start and dispersed geographically, and the genetics, “suggesting that domestication (sic) plants are monophyletic, the result of a single domestication event in a definite place.” Well, I don’t think the genetics is saying that at all for many crops, but, be that as it may, the paper apparently presents a simulation model which shows that “multiple-origin crops are actually more likely to result in monophyly than single-origin ones.”

September 12, 2008September 12, 2008

Malanga comes through Ike

Cuba has not been lucky this hurricane season. The latest storm to hit is Ike. Damage to agriculture has been extensive, but there is a glimmer of good news:

In Cienfuegos, plantain and sweet potato are affected, as well as vegetables and citrus such as grapefruit and orange. The one crop that hasn’t been affected is malanga – a tuber kind of like potato.

Malanga is Xanthosoma, and Cuban researchers have had a great interest in the crop.

As Grahame Jackson says in his Xanthosoma Yahoo Group post, “diversity of local food crops is so important in countries where there are threats from natural disasters, hurricanes, torrential monsoons, droughts.” Indeed. And we do have some idea of where the threats are going to be concentrated, and therefore where agrobiodiversity will be most needed.

September 10, 2008September 9, 2008

Exploring a Belgian genebank

I’m jealous of Luigi’s ability to work and play almost simultaneously. ((Not that there’s any real difference. For either of us.)) He visits a market in Sarajevo and within hours his words and pictures are gracing this page. I visit a genebank in Belgium and it is more than a fortnight before I manage to pull anything together. But no more whining. On with the show.

I was privileged to get a guided tour of the International Transit Centre in Leuven, home of Bioversity’s International Musa collection, which is supported in part by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. There are good reasons for it to be in Belgium, but it is still a glorious sight to see banana plants scraping the roof of a 5-metre tall greenhouse.

That’s Rony Swennen in the picture, doing his tour guide schtick in the main greenhouse. He runs the show. One of the things that’s hard to understand, coming from a purely cultivated view of the banana, is the role that some species play in the wild. They can be really opportunistic colonisers.

Just in front of Rony was a specimen of Musa velutina, with pinky-red skinned fruit. And beneath it, a veritable carpet of seedlings. M. velutina is a pioneer species that often spreads rapidly into newly cleared areas and can choke riverbanks and the like.

It isn’t all bananas in the greenhouse. There is also Taro, and a few other tropical crops that are normally propagated vegetatively. Leuven has been named a Global Centre of Excellence in Cryopreservation. The researchers have perfected the protocols for preserving banana cells in liquid nitrogen, and now they tweak them for many other crops and train scientists from other countries to do the delicate work of cryopreservation.

Cryopreservation has many benefits over keeping plants in tissue-culture, the standard genebank technique for clonal crops. It’s cheap and efficient, once the capital costs are accounted for. But both methods can obscure problems. Frozen material, just like stuff in tissue culture, occasionally suffers a mutation in its DNA. So from time to time samples are grown out to check that they haven’t changed dramatically. The plant on the left has, and the batch from which it came will be discarded. The rate of such off-types is about 7%. That’s low. But the genebank has multiple samples of each accession, to be sure, to be sure.

So there you have it. A quick romp through what I did on my recent travels. More later.

September 10, 2008

Happy 2001

I’m OK with the idea of there being a diversity of calendars around the world. New Year, after all, should fall at some reasonably meaningful time, like right after the winter solstice, or around one of the equinoxes. Or, as in Ethiopia, around the end of the main rains.

Today.

To celebrate, the Ethiopian Institute of Biodiversity Conservation has a long article celebrating and explaining Enkukatash. That word means Gift of Jewels. The article explains a few of them.

September 9, 2008September 9, 2008

Exploring a Sarajevo market

I spent an interesting hour or so with Elcio exploring an open-air fruit and vegetable market in central Sarajevo last week. I think it is the very same market which was tragically attacked during the war with much loss of life. No sign of that now, thankfully, except for a memorial to the victims.

You can see some pictures of the fruit and vegetable diversity on display on my Flickr page. Here I just want to point out two curiosities. Or at least they were to me. Here’s the first.

This lady is selling necklaces of dried, perhaps immature but certainly small, okra fruits, called bamia in Bosnian (and indeed in Arabic for that matter). They are soaked in water and vinegar for a few minutes, then added to fried onions and meat to make a local stew. Or that’s what a lady buying some told us. I bought some and will try it. I’d never heard of okra being used in this dried form.

The second thing that came as a surprise to me was this fruit. Sorry I don’t have a decent picture of it being sold in the market.

Clearly some kind of Physalis, perhaps P. alkekengi? It was being sold a few fruits at a time, so probably for medicinal purposes (LATER: or as ornaments?) rather than food. I couldn’t communicate with the lady selling it, the only one in the market. Any ideas?