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Farmer takes a shot at agri-intellectuals

Blake Hurst is a farmer in Missouri, and something of an anti-Pollan:

…we have to farm “industrially” to feed the world, and by using those “industrial” tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

The argument is made very engagingly, with hard numbers as well as telling anecdotes, and a real passion for farming:

Young turkeys aren’t smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outside in a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown.

But sadly, as ever, the debate is framed as either/or, black or white, organic or industrial, no grey allowed, no nuance:

I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

And yet Mr Hurst admits to some organic-like practices, such as rotations and the use of manure, on his unashamedly “industrial” family farm. I can’t help thinking, not for the first time, what a step forward it would be if we tried not to think in mutually exclusive dichotomies all the time. Anyway, read the whole thing at The American.

LATER: USDA explores the unexplored potential of biotech crops in an organic setting. Talk about shades of grey.

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Iris in Japan and Tuscany

We went to the Hirishoge exhibition here in Rome some time ago, and very impressive it was too, but I don’t remember seeing this particular woodcut.

iris

I’ve in fact only just come across it, on Flickr, where there is this fascinating commentary:

In the village of Horikiri in suburban Edo, gardeners grew a year-round variety of flowers and were particularly famous for the iris shown here, “hanashobu,” well suited to this swampy land. In this print Hiroshige has shown three, almost-life-size, detailed specimens of the nineteenth-century hanashobu hybrids and in the distance, sightseers from Edo are admiring the blossoms. In the 1870’s the cultivation of hanashobu had begun to spread rapidly in Europe and America and the developed into a booming export market for the gardeners of Horikiri. The Horikiri plantations began to wane in the 1920’s and eventually turned over to wartime food production. After the war, one of them was revived and is now a public park, particularly popular in May when the flowers are in bloom.

Continue reading “Iris in Japan and Tuscany”

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Multiple origins of agriculture debated

The point is that agriculture, like modern human behaviour, was not a one time great invention, but the product of social and environmental circumstances to which human groups with the same cognitive potential responded in parallel ways. The question in both cases is: what were the common denominators of those circumstances?

That’s from a post over at The Archaeobotanist which starts by talking about “modern human behaviour” rather than agriculture, but sees parallel processes at play in the origin of both. So, in the same way that “the cognitive architecture for modern behaviour was around but the innovations that we regard as ‘modern’ emerged when social and environmental circumstances demanded,” and this happened in different places at different times, so likewise the “cognitive architecture” for agriculture was widespread and there were therefore many “centres in which societies converged on agriculture,” with the concomitant “behavioural changes towards manipulation of the environment in favour of the reproduction of a few food species,” triggered by particular “social and environmental circumstances.”

Fair enough, but how is this new? There’s a comment on the post in which Paul Gepts makes this very point

…I am somewhat surprised that the issue of parallel inventions of agriculture is still an issue. The concept of centers of origin/domestication has been around for a century, thanks to Vavilov, Harlan, et al. … I must be missing something here, because for some time agriculture has been considered an example of multiple, independent inventions.

I’m looking forward to following this heavyweight exchange.