Tag: Harlan II

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Harlan II – Field trip

Robert Hijmans puts his money where his mouth is.

I took the train to Berkeley, less than two hours from Davis towards San Francisco. I checked in at the French hotel and dined in the restaurant across the street. We are talking about Alice Waters’ place, Chez Panisse a restaurant well known to the readers of this blog and in-flight magazines.

There is the formal restaurant downstairs (fully booked) and the café upstairs (a late table was available). I had wine made of Zinfandel grapes. ((Quintessential Napa, only recently discovered to be the Croatian variety “Crljenak Kasteljanski” — or so I learned at Harlan II.))

I took the US$29 fixed menu. It had a garden lettuce salad, spaghetti alla Norma with eggplant, tomato, basil, and ricotta salata, and a Concord grape sherbet with roasted Thompson seedless grapes and langues de chat. ((Sic. Why the mix of English, Italian and French?))

These were the variety names on today’s menu: Concord grape, Thompson seedless grapes, and Little Gems lettuce.

And these were the farm names on the menu: Cannard Farm ((As in: “Cannard Farm rocket with shaved zucchini, pine nuts, and pecorino, $9.00”)), Andante Dairy, Soul Food Farm, Marin Sun Farm, Lagier Ranches, and Frog Hollow Farm.

Terroir trumps agrobiodiversity at Alice’s place.

It is a good restaurant. It is very French. The waiter spoke of terroir as if his name were Claude Duchateu. It is very cheap for a famous restaurant. It has a local twist to it. The food is good. But is mainstream now. The menu in the Davis Best Western Palm Court was not that different.

I suppose it is fair what everybody says, that Alice created some sort of revolution. From the wasteland of the American diner to Good Food. Just like her neighbor Alfred Peet transformed mainstream American coffee from diluted sewage to the best coffee anywhere save (perhaps) Italy. But that is ancient history.

But, just for your information, Chez Panisse is passé now. Go look somewhere else. I have heard of an underground restaurant movement in New York.

Chez Panisse is sold out every night, I think. Alice can experiment. But she does not. She chooses the middle of the road. Their produce comes from “farms, ranches, and fisheries guided by principles of sustainability” but the majority of entrees (main dishes) are a fish or meat dish.

Chuck out the meat. Serve different varieties of other veggies than tomatoes (even the Andronico’s supermarket across the street sells heirlooms).  Use something locally evolved rather than merely locally grown. The native Californians used hundreds of edible plants. ((Full disclosure: After being captured and given the opportunity, Ishi, the last ‘wild’ Californian Indian, quickly switched to a doughnut diet.)) But no miner’s lettuce or acorns on the menu of the Queen of Slow Food.  Come on, Alice, surprise me!

P.S. That pasta was really good though. I will go back tomorrow to further investigate the case.

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Harlan II, day 4

From a very tired and emotional Robert Hijmans. Previously….

No domestication without relaxation. Today was excursion day at the Harlan II symposium.  All to the Napa wineries you’d think, but no, there were not enough registrants for that. ((Editor’s note: Excuse me?)) But there was a  tour of  the Charles Rick Tomato Genebank and a “Native Biodiversity and Plant/Pollinator Interactions”  tour, visiting field sites used by Claire Kremen’s group. But I had my own program. Before I get to that, which I will do in a separate post, allow me to make to parting comment on the Harlan II symposium.

On day 1, I mentioned that molecular biology rules. The increased understanding of the relatedness of populations of different crop taxa and their wild relatives is having a tremendous effect on our understanding of domestication and dispersal of agrobiodiversity. The flurry of recent papers on this subject has probably not escaped the attention of readers of this blog.

Be that as may, I should also have mentioned the explosion of archaeological data and analysis. Compared to 10 years ago, there are now many more late Pleistocene to early Holocene settlements that have been analyzed. This is providing a much more refined insight into early agriculture and domestication than was previously possible.

I do not know why there has been such an increase, all of a sudden. More people and money thrown at it, no doubt, but why now? At the same time, and perhaps not unrelated, there appears to have been an important increase in the sophistication of the methods used to study agricultural origins. Extracting charred starch particles from pot fragments or mortars. Determining minor differences in grain sizes to classify them as one type or the other. Tallies of bone sizes to determine whether the animals were hunted or farmed. And then there is the analysis of ancient DNA. And so forth. Not much Indiana Jones in it, but it is quite safe and more intellectually rewarding.

Most insights about agricultural origins still come from the Levant. While other areas are much less explored, they are also moving along. For many places and periods, we now have a good idea about what plants and animals were eaten. That is why we now know that there was a long transition from cultivation to domestication. This is why Dorian Fuller was able to show us graphs with changes in crop characteristics over time for multiple crops (wheat, barley, rice).

The origins of agriculture and the domestication process that took place about 10,000 yrs ago are fascinating and fundamental to the understanding of the history of humans. But domestication has never stopped, and will not stop, despite EU regulations. There are many other stories, from other regions, from other (not cereal) crops that have been much less explored.

Jared Diamond is convinced that no more crops or animals of major importance will be domesticated. He says that crop and animal domestication happened where there were species predisposed to be domesticated. We found them millennia ago. That is why agriculture originated where it did, and this is one of the reasons why some places are richer than others.

I wonder whether we can be more imaginative about what domestication could do to some wild plant or animal. We now know what it takes and can engage it what Melinda Zeder calls “directed domestication”. Perhaps something for an X-Prize.  A hundred million dollars for anyone who can develop a crop that is now insignificant (say less than 10,000 ha) to an area of at least 10 million ha. I agree that it is hard to image that  this will happen with staple food crops, but it is bound to happen with an energy crop.

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“The maize equivalent of the grey wolf”

Not content with bringing you Our Man Hijmans’ dynamite written dispatches from Harlan II, today, The Spoken Word. David Williams, coordinator of the CGIAR’s System-wide Genetic Resources Programme, appeared on Insight, a daily in-depth interview programme hosted by radio station KXJZ in Sacramento, California. David talked about domestication, genetic modification, the history of collecting, the importance of crop wild relatives and much else besides.

Listen to it here. (About 12 minutes.)

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Harlan II, day 3

Robert Hijmans’ third dispatch from Davis. Previous one here. Keep ’em coming, Robert!

Day 3 of the Harlan II symposium had another cornucopia of fine presentations. Farmed fish, genetic chips, fruits for the poor, improving desert crops, ecosystems services research, transgenic goats, selling diversity to the rich to name a few topics. One subject shared by several talks was on-going and future domestication. ((Domestication in the not very strict sense of using more of relatively little exploited biological resources.)) From conservation to innovation.

Dennis Hedgecock described the big wave of domestication in our time: aquaculture. Within a decade or so, there will be more fish produced on farms than caught in the oceans. The ocean catch won’t increase much any more (or worse); we have reached the limits. And how wild is caught fish anyway? Fish stocks in the ocean are increasingly being replenished with small fish from hatcheries. The majority of Japanese fish descends from hatchery fish. Whether this is good or bad for the genetic diversity of the fish depends how it is done. Guess how it is done.

Overfishing of oceans and the subsequent shift to farming is strikingly similar to the domestication pathways of some land animals that were also hunted before they were domesticated (discussed yesterday by Melinda Zeder). So what is all this fish farming about? Shrimp, salmon, tilapia? No. Number 1 is the Pacific Oyster and 60% of fish farming is carp production in China.

The breeders are at it too. They have developed a tetraploid Pacific Oyster. Crossing it with the normal diploids creates infertile, but larger, triploid offspring. They are not being commercially produced yet, but here aquaculture mimicks plant domestication.

Roger Leakey described a project of further or re-domestication of tree crops. Going into villages in West Africa, Leakey and colleagues asked farmers what trees they valued and would like to have more of. They then looked at the variation in the species, selected some with good fruits, and helped find a place for them in the farming system, e.g. as shade crop in cacao. Seems like fairly simple work, if labour intensive.

In some places the result was stunning, with very poor farmers earning an extra US$700 per year from a few trees in their field. Diversity can improve livelihoods of poor farmers. We will need to revise the agronomy curricula to make it happen on a large scale.

Meanwhile, in India, good old pigeonpea is being renewed. Landraces are perennial bushy plants. But Laxmipathi Gowda and collaborators at ICRISAT have produced many other types: short duration; determinate; daylength insensitive; and even hybrids. And in California there might be renewed attempts to use jojoba, now for bio-energy. Stephen Kaffka talked about some of the difficulties of domesticating a highly heterozygous, variable, and slow growing shrub. So far there is no evidence that we can use our new molecular biology prowess to reduce the domestication process from 1000(0) years to 10.

Food trends start in California, said Karen Caplan. Perhaps she is right. Perhaps most societies will go through an agrobiodiversity bottleneck when they urbanize; but then bounce back when they get rich enough. In a respectable farmers’ market here in Northern California there will — in the right season — always be a stand with only tomatoes, and a least twenty varieties of them. The weirder the shape the better, as long as they taste good. Guess what I had for dinner in my Best Western hotel. T-bone steak? No, a heirloom tomato salad.

Caplan discussed some of the inner workings of getting more agricultural biodiversity through the modern food-chain. Flavor is king. Ignore obstacles. Use influencers such as TV cooks and movie stars to rave about your new potato or brassica. Get it mentioned on a blog.

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Harlan II, day 2

Robert Hijmans weighs in with his second posting from the domestication front lines. Thanks, Robert. Previous post here.

Change. Obama wants it, McCain wants it, I want it, and perhaps you want it too. Farmers just do it. At least that seems to hold for many of the farmers living in the major agrobiodiverse areas. While they maintain diversity, it changes all the time. Whether deliberate or not, as time goes by farmers will never quite have the same set of varieties or genes. That was one of the main story lines of today’s presentations at the Harlan II symposium in Davis, California.

Jan Salick sampled the cassava varieties of a community in the Peruvian Amazon. In a period of 10 years most varieties were replaced, probably to get rid of virus infestation and other forms of degeneration. But people very actively exchange and spread new varieties. And while not all farmers select from spontaneous seedlings, some do. This practice seems very important in this otherwise vegetatively propagated crop; an observation also made yesterday by Doyle McKey. But how common? We seem to know little about that. There are also cases of relatively little change over 40 years, as documented by Karl Zimmerer for potatoes near Cusco, Peru.

Change in diversity is hard to measure. Yes, even current patterns are hard to measure without going the whole nine yards of molecular biology. Toby Hodgkin showed how variety names can be poor markers for genotypes. But farm level variety data from “in situ conservation” projects in several continents revealed some general patterns (see this paper) about the number and relative distribution of varieties. Whether these patterns will hold to be general I do not know, but they do provide a benchmark. That is useful. In situ conservation should be less about good intentions, and more about data and consequences.

Hodgkin and collaborators also described the importance of seed exchange networks. Millet farmers (mostly women) in Mali go to the market to exchange seed they will take home to try. If the seed are any good some genes will likely end up in their populations.

In many of these agrobiodiverse, and often marginal  — ecologically and/or economically — areas the Green Revolution has not made much of a difference. It seems to me that knowledge of these exchange processes that maintain crop diversity should not be only used to think about how to conserve  it in situ. It could be more important to think about how to make use of these networks to insert new diversity. Not as the perfect high yielding variety, but as diverse sets of reasonably adapted genotypes with interesting traits that could be incorporated into the farmer’s populations. Building on existing processes that allow for local resilience and adaptation seems to be a good strategy in the light of the rapid climate change and other changes we are witnessing and expecting to see more of in the future.

We really do not seem to know that much about what is going on. The global village is big place. But at least some are trying. Gary Nabhan is one of them. In a copious lecture he discussed some of the material in his recent book describing his efforts to follow the footsteps of Vavilov to asses change in the areas where the great man collected. ((Rumor has it that a certain Jeremy Cherfas is setting up a blog devoted to this
project.))

Nabhan found fewer apples near Alma Aty, the city of apples (and formerly of speed skating, I would add). Crops moving upslope in the Pamir mountains as its glaciers melt. In Ethiopia, wheat and barley are diminishing, giving way to a boom of the indigenous teff. The old crops of the southwestern USA are about to go extinct.

It is hard to generalize, but overall the news is not that good if you care about agrobiodiversity in the field. It does not seem to be going up in many places. Or is it?

Not too long ago, there were a million hectares of a single potato variety “mira” in southern China. Farmers had no idea that other varieties existed. I do not know what the situation is right now. But if is important to have agricultural biodiversity in the field, it will perhaps be more effective to increase it in crops and areas where diversity is low than trying to maintain it in areas where it is high.

Without understanding the context of the farming systems and the drivers and patterns of change, it is difficult to say something sensible about the fate of agrobiodiversity. I think the symposium organizers realized that. We had Bill Turner talk about  the collapse of Mayan agriculture — which was likely related to overexploitation. What used to be the home of one of the worlds most advanced cultures is today a rather empty land with few people and not much natural biodiversity either. Karl Zimmerer discussed more current land use patterns and change near Cochabamba, Bolivia. Male outmigration, leading to remittances and investments in irrigation. Fewer potatoes, more peaches…

We are moving forward in our understanding of the use of biodiversity on farms. But the world is changing much faster still. This is affecting agrobiodiversity in unprecedented ways. We need more data, we need more synthesis. We need it soon.