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How would you promote agricultural biodiversity?

Here’s the scenario: the civic authorities have decided to install a home garden somewhere in the centre of the city. This is in a country with a very conservative attitude to its food culture, where tradition runs deep (although not as deep as to recognize that several staples of the cuisine arrived as interlopers from other lands, roughly 500 years ago.) And because your organization is based in that same city, and has a reputation for knowing about agricultural biodiversity and home gardens, the authorities have asked you to contribute in some way.

You don’t exactly know why the civic authorities are constructing the garden, although you suspect it has something to do with being seen to be green, to care about food and about diversity. And you don’t know what they want, either, or what kind of experience they are planning to offer the visiting public. A gawp at vegetables in the ground rather than in plastic? Surely not. The country hasn’t lost its agrarian roots that completely. Edumacashun? Yeah, but what is the message? You also don’t know what they want. Advice? Expertise? Something to give to visitors?

So you decide to offer them plants that might be found in a home garden far away, specifically, the nutritious African leafy vegetables that you’ve been promoting for better health, incomes and environmental sustainability. But you fear that the civic authorities might not be too keen. You fear they are likely to say something like: “Why should we plant your strange African vegetables in a garden here? What’s the point?”

What one, killer argument would you offer to persuade them?

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Manihot esculenta, I presume?

A blog post from Kew’s archivists on the Zambesi Expedition of 1858-1864 led me to Dr Livingstone’s papers, among which I stumbled on this wonderful letter to Joseph D. Hooker:

Hadley Green Barnet 11th July 1857

My Dear Dr Hooker

I beg to return you my hearty thanks for your note and the trouble you have been at in deciphering the mere fragments submitted to you. Your willingness to examine anything botanical will certainly make me more anxious to secure something for you in Africa more worthy of your time. We get meal of a kind of millet in Londa which I think is the lesser bird seed. It grows on a high stalk in this way. The seeds are small & a {slight tinge} of slate colour on the outer scale. What is the botanical name for it? It is so extensively cultiv-{ated} in Africa I think you must know. The Holcus Sorghum is the most general article in use. We speak of it as Caffre corn. Is that correct?

There are two kinds of Manioc. One sweet the other bitter & poisonous they are both mentioned in a work by Daniel on the West Coast but I have not that work nearer at hand than Linyanti so I beg to trouble you to tell me the proper names of the two species of Manioc, the Jatropha Manihot and –

As I am boring with questions. Have you the proper names for the melons which form such an important article of support on the Kalahari Desert and of one there which has the flavour of an apple. What is the name of the Palm which when the leaves are broken off gives the idea of it being triangular The ends of the leaf stalks stick on and give it the appearance referred to. A fruit mentioned at the end of Bowdich’s work with by the name Masuka was found by me in very large quantities. It is good. As it seems know can I have the proper name. Now please just attend or not to these questions as it is convenient – though I send them it is not because I think I have any claim on your time or attention – I am only putting you in the way of doing an act of charity to yours &c David Livingstone

Now, how to find the reply?

And with that, dear reader, I take my leave of you for about three weeks, which I will spend not too far, relatively speaking, from where Stanley found Livingstone. In fact, I should already be there…

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Loafing on Lammas Day

Surprise! Today is Lammas Day, traditionally marked (at least in some traditions) with a celebration of the first harvest and the baking of Lammas loaves from the newly-milled flour of the year. I was doing a bit of reading around the subject for another blog post somewhere else, and came across the video above, shot in Tenerife. It’s clearly a fine celebration of agricultural biodiversity, and you don’t need much Spanish to understand that, as one blogger put it, “it looked more like an excuse to have a frolic in the hay to us than the most efficient way for threshing wheat”. 1

These celebrations are, I think, as much about sustaining today’s communities as celebrating yesterday’s, and it is interesting how fascinating people find them. When was the last time you thought about travelling to have a big knees-up and watch a giant combine rumbling across the prairies?

Do they have the same “first loaf” tradition in Tenerife and elsewhere? Nobody seems to care enough to pint it out. And why does a simple search for Lammas turn up such woo-woo goofiness wherever one looks? People just don’t seem able to accept a harvest festival for what it is. A focus for a campaign!

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Bringing back the Iraqi marshes

We blogged over a year ago about the re-flooding of the Iraqi marshes, but fairly briefly, and it’s great to see a long piece about this restoration process in Der Spiegel today. The slideshow which accompanies the article provides the best visual summary I’ve seen of what happened to the marshes — and their inhabitants, with their crops and livestock. I’ve put the “before” and “after” shots side-by-side below:

The Iraqi marshes before and after they were drained by Saddam Hussein's regime.

Apart from its inherent interest, the Der Spiegel article also gives me the excuse to mention that a detailed map of the world’s river systems has just been made available, by Bernhard Lehner at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. Is anyone keeping track of the proliferation of such global geographic dataset? Google? ESRI? The CGIAR’s Spatial Information Conundrum? Anyone?