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Fair deal for rooibos

Before fair trade, small-scale farmers like Hendrik lived close to the breadline as prices for rooibos were squeezed by the market. But fair trade has tripled the farmers’ income. Plus, with the extra money they now get for the tea, Hendrik and his friends can invest in their future, buying their own farming equipment and their own tea court where the raw rooibos leaves are chopped and dried.

“Hendrik” is Hendrik Hesselman, from the Cedarberg region of South Africa. He’s one of 5,000 farmers from Cedarberg who produce the world’s supply of rooibos (or redbush) tea.

Mr Hesselman is a founding member of the 50-plus strong Heiveld Cooperative, which was established in 2003 — with backing from UKaid from the Department for International Development — “to get their tea recognised as Fairtrade, and to get a fair price for it.”

There are also photos, and a video on the community’s attempts to adapt to climate change. One of the things they’re doing is evaluating different “wild types” of rooibos for tolerance of drought conditions. I can’t find any reference to ex situ conservation activities, alas.

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Forest gardens rediscovered

A salutary tale from Fred Bahnson over on the Nourishing the Planet blog. He describes how the farmers of Quintana Roo in Mexico managed to recover from disastrous advice. More than 15 years ago, government extension agents told the farmers to grow pitaya, one of the epiphytic cacti also known as dragonfruit. Unfortunately the extension agents knew only one way to grow them, on concrete and wire trellises. And that collapsed, leaving the farmers high and dry.

Bahson relates how, instead of giving up, the farmers adapted their traditional milpa system to grow pitaya, a story with a very happy ending, at least for the farmer Bahnson visited:

On his three hectares he harvests around 12 tons of dragonfruit per year. At $1/kilo, he’s earning $12,000 annually, almost double Mexico’s median annual household income of $7,297. And all that food coming from his milpa means a lower grocery bill than most city dwellers.

The “experts” have apparently returned, to learn how the farmers did it.

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Plant seeks (en) light (enment)

On a quiet Saturday afternoon, one’s thoughts are liable to coalesce around the strangest things. Hence this post. I admired, briefly, Kew’s speeded up video of a lotus blooming, and thought no more of it.

Until I came across an illuminating post over at Gardenvisit.com that happened to be about … the lotus, specifically the sacred lotus of Buddhism. And, of course, what I didn’t know was the symbolic reason for the sacred status of the lotus:

The Sacred Lotus has importance in Buddhism because it grows from murky waters and struggles to raise its pure and beautiful flower into the sunlight, with the lesson is [sic] that humans should do likewise.

Which is as interesting, in its own way, as Kew’s koan for further contemplation: that the flower opens twice, to prevent self pollination.

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Healthy Bees plan launched in UK

Defra and the Welsh Assembly Government have come up with a ten-year plan to sort out honey bees in England and Wales, to be called ‘Healthy Bees.’ The first step?

…to improve our contacts with all beekeepers so that we can ensure they take advantage of the free inspection and diagnostic services that the bee unit and its dedicated team of inspectors and scientists provide.

Hence BeeBase.

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Tracking down wild aubergines in China

Sandy Knapp is a botanist at the Natural History Museum in London. She’s currently in the field in China investigating the domestication of aubergines with Wang JinXiu from the Institute of Botany in Beijing. You can follow their exploits on her blog, which features on the museum’s NaturePlus compendium of online fora.