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Ugandan fair offers farmers and politicians a chance to talk

There’s a fascinating article in yesterday’s Uganda Monitor about a trade show for the agricultural sector at Jinja. Fascinating for all sorts of reasons, one being the disconnect between what farmers want and what politicians think they want.

President Yoweri Museveni opened the show on July 22 and although his speech dwelt more on politics and complaints against FM stations, he was there to inspire farmers, and acknowledge that they contribute more to the GDP.

However, farmers wanted to hear that the President would reduce the interest rate on Bonna Bagagagawale (sic) funds to 1 percent. That rural roads would be fixed so that produce gets to the markets easily and that taxes on farm implements can be waived and that the government will set up tractor hire services in villages for farmers who cannot buy tractors to hire them.

Animal farmers wanted to hear that the government has banned export of unprocessed food so that by-products used to make animal feeds can be available.

I’m not saying that the farmers should get everything they want, but their demands certainly deserve consideration. Then there’s the question of why farmers want those things.

From Mbarara, Mr Moses Turyamanya learnt that matooke cost between Shs5,000 and Shs20,000 in urban areas. “We brought a lorry full of matooke and it sold out,” he said. “At our farms, we earn between Shs500 and Shs2,000, per bunch of matooke. Now we know that we have to market our produce to get better money.”

But the biggest discovery for Mr Turyamanya is when he learnt that matooke can be processed into food products.

He says a few years ago, Farm Africa exhibited solar driers which can dry matooke and other types of bananas.

“I secured a drier and now we are able to dry matooke and process it into powder, juice, chips and other products,” Mr Turyamanya said. “The government is planning to build a factory so that we can process food and sell to the World Food Programme.”

And there’s a lot more of interest, like a plea from Kabaka Ronald Mutebi for better demonstration farms (and, by extension, better extension services), a joint Uganda-Iran tractor company, and local seed companies. We know farmer field schools are a good thing; this kind of fair sounds like a giant farmer field school and may contain the seed of a politician field school too. If they listen.

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But is it art?

While I bring a major rant on biodiversity and the media to the boil, here’s something that won’t be part of that mix. I’m sorry I missed it.

On Saturday, Aug. 16, at 3 p.m., the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park will host artist Leah Gauthier 1 … The DeCordova Annual features Gauthier’s large installation entitled “Melon, 2008.” For this installation, Gauthier planted eight different types of heirloom melons on the Pollack Family Terrace. … This installation has grown throughout the exhibition, as the melons started as mere plantings and now have developed into mature fruit. In her Artist Talk and performance … Gauthier will harvest and prepare the melons with visitors. Taste is an essential element in this work, as is community building around food. By inviting viewers to have a unique and culinary experiences based on the richness of biodiversity, “Melon” will speak directly to the impoverishing influence of agricultural modernization. Gauthier’s work stems from the idea of social sculpture and the nourishing capacity of art as well as from a viewpoint of art as an action and not an object. … Gauthier’s work is … particularly interesting … because her installation is entirely organic. By placing agriculture in a specifically cultural context — the museum — Gauthier asks viewers to re-imagine the growing, harvesting, preparation, and consumption of food so that they may re-connect with some of humanity’s most fundamental activities.

And you know, it kinda sorta makes sense. You can try this sort of thing in a supermarket, and get quizzical looks. You can do it at a Farmers’ Market, but I suspect you would be preaching to the choir. Art lovers, though, could be a fertile audience. We’ve blogged about this sort of thing before — rice art and that bloke who used sorghum and wheat to mimic a housing development — mostly as an affectionate aside. But I wonder, maybe this really is the way to go to get the message across. After all, if a pickled shark can get everyone in a tizz, why not a frozen coconut?

Maybe I can get a Guggenheim to cultivate my garden? In any case, It’ll be fun to see how Gauthier’s Sharecropper thang works out.

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Tasteful breeding

A couple of days ago the Evil Fruit Lord complained — a little bit — about an article in a Ugandan newspaper which extolled the virtues of traditional crops and varieties over new-fangled hybrids. While not doubting the many attractive qualities of landraces and heirloom varieties, he quite rightly pointed out that there’s nothing to stop modern varieties and hybrids tasting just as good:

I get really sick of the tendency to talk about plant breeding as a process which makes crops into finicky, crappy tasting garbage in exchange for yield. You absolutely can create varieties which taste as good (or better) than traditional varieties, produce more, and resist pests. In fact, plant breeding is the only way to get to that.

Now there’s an article by Arthur Allen in Smithsonian magazine which basically says — not very surprisingly, I suppose — that both those things have happened in the tomato:

Flavor … has not been a goal of most breeding programs. While importing traits like disease resistance, smaller locules, firmness and thicker fruit into the tomato genome, breeders undoubtedly removed genes influencing taste. In the past, many leading tomato breeders were indifferent to this fact. Today, things are different. Many farmers, responding to consumer demand, are delving into the tomato’s preindustrial past to find the flavors of yesteryear.

Allen has a good word to say for the wild relatives:

The architect of the modern commercial tomato was Charles Rick, a University of California geneticist. In the early 1940s, Rick, studying the tomato’s 12 chromosomes, made it a model for plant genetics. He also reached back into the fruit’s past, making more than a dozen bioprospecting trips to Latin America to recover living wild relatives. There is scarcely a commercially produced tomato that didn’t benefit from Rick’s discoveries. The gene that makes such tomatoes easily fall off the vine, for instance, came from Solanum cheesmaniae, a species that Rick brought back from the Galapagos Islands. Resistances to worms, wilts and viruses were also found in Rick’s menagerie of wild tomatoes.

And he also plugs genebanks:

…we can take comfort in the tomato’s continuing, explosive diversity: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a library of 5,000 seed varieties, and heirloom and hybrid seed producers promote thousands more varieties in their catalogs.

Not quite sure where he got that number, as the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center seems to have about 3,500 accessions, but anyway.

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Special publication on livestock genetic resources

Livestock Science has a special issue on animal genetic resources. Or it will have, it doesn’t seem to be out yet, although some corrected proofs are available. You can get a flavour of the thing with the introduction. Here are some of the highlights:

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More on the Grand Canyon’s super-sunflower

Here’s some more information on that sunflower from Supai that I blogged about yesterday. There was a huge storm last night and I was stuck indoors with not much to do, so I tried to see if I could track down the accessions in question. They’re not for sale from Native Seed/SEARCH, though they are surely in their seed bank. So I went to GRIN, guessing that duplicates of the material had probably been deposited in the USDA system.

A quick text search on “Helianthus Supai” in GRIN’s “Accession area queries” page yielded 5 PI numbers. However, only 4 are “active.” It seems there may not be enough seed available for the fifth. Incidentally, there are also accessions of maize, devil’s horn and Cercis occidentalis from this site.

Now, I could click on each of the sunflower entries and look at the available evaluation data under “Observations” to track down the specific accession with rust resistance, but there is also another way. You can go to GRIN’s “Evaluation/characterization query” page, select sunflower, go to the descriptor list, and find the specific descriptors concerning rust resistance, one of which happens to have the code RUSTNUM3. 2

It turns out that of about 1000 sunflower accessions in the US National Plant Germplasm System for which there are rust data (out of a total of over 2500), only 8 have a RUSTNUM3 value of 100, meaning they are resistant to the fungus. And PI432512, collected by Gary Nabham in 1978 from Supai, is one of them.