Farmers save seeds shock

A farm in Massachusetts, US, has launched its own seed bank. Red Gate Farm Seed Bank aims to:

  • provide community access to quality, local seeds.
  • preserve local, heritage and heirloom seed varieties.
  • promote seed saving.
  • develop and distribute seeds that are optimum for our unique New England soils and climate.
  • collect the social histories of our local seeds.

And very worthy that is too. You can do that sort of thing in nasty quasi-dictatorial America. In freedom-loving, liberal ol’ Yurp it would be illegal.

via Grist, which adds that “with a climate on the fritz, indigenous seeds will likely play an increasingly important role in sustaining local agriculture”. Except, of course, that it won’t be indigenous seeds that will support local agriculture. It’ll be agricultural biodiversity from far away, adapted to a different climate.

The growing fields

From a comment here I found my way to mandevu.net and the latest post there on how farmers in Cambodia cope with unexpected conditions, complete with video. What happened was that the floods came early to the village. That destroyed most of the rice crop. So how did the villagers cope? Well, in many ways, all of which involve the careful management of rice agricultural biodiversity. But I’m not going to steal mandevu’s thunder. Go there and see for yourself.

By the way, mandevu notes he has three readers. Well, we have five or six. And I’m happy to try and send a couple his way for first hand reports from the field. We’d do that for anyone with as much interesting material. Just point it out.

Tangled Bank

The latest Tangled Bank, no 91, is up. The timing of our update on the Indian fruit genebank, published this very morning and our submission to that edition of Tangled Bank, is purely coincidental. I was happy to see Larry Moran’s debunking of the Darwin Awards, not merely because it shows again that if something is too good to be true, it is often untrue, but also because Larry has finally figured out how to submit his posts. He claims that “the people who run this carnival don’t make it easy”. I’ve no idea how he could possibly have formed that idea, but I’m glad he’s over it.

I mention that because while there are many interesting posts, there aren’t that many about our pet topic. The complexities of multiple uses of forest lands gets a good outing at Biotunes, but that’s about as far as it goes.

The benefits of living with lions

A press release discusses the trade-off between lions and livestock around the Waza National Park in Cameroon. The people who live closest to the park enjoy the best access to grazing and water. But they also suffer the most depredations. Counterintuitively (at least at first glance) trying to chase the lions away increases predation. The authors ((L. Van Bommel, M. D. Bij de Vaate, W. F. De Boer, H. H. De Iongh (2007) Factors affecting livestock predation by lions in Cameroon. African Journal of Ecology 45 (4), 490–498. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2028.2007.00759.x)) suggest that the activity scatters the herd, making it easier for the lions to pick off one of the animals. Staying cool when your flock is under attack is probably hard to do. But it would be easy, I would have thought, to at least take advantage of the disaster and eat the victim, if you can chase away the lion after the kill. But no. “We can’t eat the meat, as Muslim traditions require animals to be killed by a Muslim,” one of the villagers told the researchers. Yay God!

Fruit genebank follow-up

We’ve been trying to keep an eye on the threat to the fruit tree genebank built up by the Horticulture and Agroforestry Research Programme (HARP) in Jharkhand State, India, with limited success.

A quick recap: State parliamentarians plan to force HARP off its land and bulldoze the field genebank of more than 5000 trees, to build themselves fancy bungalows.

The Indian press has mostly been concerned with the whiff of corruption. A couple of days after the original report, the chief Minister of Jharkhand was busy denying that any decision had been taken over the land; the Indian Express quoted documents that suggested otherwise. A week later, the paper had more documents, claiming that the HARP land was worth about 25,000 times more than some previous land that had been earmarked for the bungalows but rejected by the parliamentarians. The research station was more or less ignored, save for a claim by Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, in a letter to Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda, that scientists had been threatened, an incident Pawar described as “very sad” and “objectionable”.

Then came a bombshell, a leaked email from Cary Fowler, the Executive Secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to the Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, HARP’s parent organisation, who serves on the Board of the Trust. ((Extensive investigations have failed to uncover any evidence that the leak emanated from the Trust.)) According to the Indian Express, Fowler asked informally whether “something can be done”.

And this, for us, is the nub of the matter.

Politicians enriching themselves by taking advantage of their position is business as usual, and a matter for the local electorate. And believing that fancy bungalows are more valuable than a collection of tropical fruit diversity is further confirmation that these politicians are nothing out of the ordinary.

As far as I’m concerned, they can have their land and their bungalows. That’s between them, their voters and the local constabulary.

What I want to know is: what are the plans for the collection? It takes time to graft trees and to strike cuttings, if, indeed, those are feasible options. It takes time to find new land. Is there time? Or, as the headlines insinuate, are the bulldozers already moving in on the land? ((There seems to be one local blogger who might be able to dig up answers, but no way of contacting him. So if you see this, Ashok K.Jha or Mithila Darpan, get in touch with us.))