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Amadumbe: new readers start here

Flickr photo by Skymonger
Flickr photo by Skymonger
Ah, but the power of the intertubes. Bob has raised an old thread from the dead by providing more information about Luigi’s Nibble that “Amadumbe being sold to supermarkets in South Africa“. Some readers may not notice good stuff in the comments (one reason we like to feature a comment from time to time) and so we’re elevating Bob’s latest comment to a post.

I am currently based in New Zealand and have access to Taro in a few varieties , via the Pacific Island communities, one of which is the wild version, which has notably black stems. This is not true of Madumbi, which also has a flower very similar to the Arum. I would be very keen to grow the South African variety as it is a very different flavour to the common Pacific Taro which as previously noted is very bland. Here is a link to a picture of the flower …

I did some more Googling, and found out a bit more about the project and its originater; depending on the story that’s either “Dr James Hartzell, a self-proclaimed ‘white boy from New York’,” or Professor Thembinkosi Modi, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Agricultural Sciences. (Modi won a TWAS (Third World Academy of Science) Young Scientist Award in 2007.) Whatever, the end result was an organic cooperative of growers sending the amadumbe (or amadumbi) to a supermarket chain. Everything seemed rosy, with farmers reporting higher incomes that they were using to improve their lives, buying better houses, medical care, and education for their children. Except that there seems to have been a worm in the amadumbe: free-riders. Who were they?

Members who were male, poorly educated, partially certified, aware of loopholes in the grading system, and who did not trust the buyer.

The authors of the paper quoted above make specific recommendations to deal with the problem, but I cannot discover whether anything came of them. I’m also no aroid taxonomist, and frankly I’m not sure how informative the flower photo is, 1 but there you have it. Now, maybe other people can chime in with more information.

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BBC’s Farm Swap is online

That BBC radio documentary about farmers trying to learn from each other is out at last.

In Farm Swap, Mike Gallagher meets two farmers who are working outside their own countries.

They are both prepared to experience a new environment but for very different reasons.

You can listen online or download a podcast.

In part one Pedro, an idealistic young Ecuadorian farmer, visits Hawaii…

During his 4 month visit to Hawaii, Pedro visits a coffee plantation and learns how to encourage sustainable agriculture.

But as well as discovering new farming techniques and sharing experiences to take back to Ecuador, what can Pedro teach Hawaiian farmers in return?

As I said before, I think farmer-to-farmer exchanges are potentially a great way to learn. I’ll be tuning in.

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Chile pepper domestication investigated

I haven’t read the paper on Capsicum annuum domestication by Seung-Chul Kim and colleagues in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Botany, but the EurekAlert piece on it is definitely intriguing. I was particularly struck by the finding that genetic differentiation between geographically distant populations is higher for the cultivated than for the wild species. That may be because people don’t move pepper seeds nearly as far as birds. Also, it seems this particular pepper should be included in the lengthening list of crops that were probably domesticated in more than one place. Need to get that pdf.

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Linking up livestock databases

The object of most biodiversity web sites in animal agriculture is the ‘breed’ or population, and not the individual animal within (an exception are some breed societies which present individual animal data on some of their most important breeding animals). With the linkage of CryoWEB and FABISnet, for the first time, production type databases with individual animal records are directly linked to the global breeds database network, thereby creating breeds statistics in FABISnet which are directly derived from production data. Perhaps the procedure can also be a model for other data in the biodiversity databases.

That’s from a piece on animal genetic resources databases by Elldert Groeneveld of the Institute of Farm Animal Genetic in Germany, published as article of the month in the Globaldiv Newsletter. It’s entitled Databases and Biodiversity: From Single Databases to a Global Network and you can find it on page 8. I suppose there is a similar problem in crops, where you might have evaluation data for various different lines selected from a single population. But somehow you don’t hear so much about it. Is it that the links between conservationists and users (that is, those doing the evaluation) are better developed in the livestock field?

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Featured: Madumbe

Patience partially pays; Bob answers Luigi’s year-old “what the heck is it?”

The word is Zulu, but also is also anglicized as Madumbe as in Zulu the “A” is almost silent. The plant is a Taro species grown in Natal and Eastern Cape in South Africa and looks more like the common Arum than the tropical Taro, the corm looks like the Arum corm. Just boiled it is delicious, unlike the Taro which is rather bland.

What we really want (obviously) is a binomial. Anyone?