Some Vavilov updates [non-centers of food domestication]

The food hearth theory of  Nikolai Vavilov is obviously outdated. In searching for later insights I stumbled on the Dictionary of cultivated plants and their centres of diversity (1975) by a student of Vavilov, PM Zhukovsky together with AC Seven. The book lists domesticated plants (for food as well as fodder, industrial and medicinal uses) using a centers of origin list expanded on that suggested by Vavilov. The differences can be seen above, for South America three centers are contracted into one, the Chinese center incorporates Japan, the Ethiopian center has disappeared in a vast African one and Australian, North-American and Euro-Siberian centers are added.

The entire Vavilovian system came under criticism from JR Harlan who in Agricultural Origins: Centers and Noncenters (1971) argues for three separate origins of agriculture and three non-centers (spanning 5000 to 10.000 km) where domestication took places in dispersed areas. Resulting in the map below. Note that the three temperate climate centers (Mexico, Near East China) are all matched by a tropical non center, and that the three centers are all thought to have independently developed writing. Very Neat.

Who grows what? new web page

Map your recipe can tell you where some of the ingredients were first domesticated, but it won't tell you where they are grown today. Using data from the FAO I have added the top 3 producing countries for those crops for which data was available. A link will point you to this new webpage that shows on a map all producers given by the FAO for a number of crops. 

The reason for adding/making this is partly to show another face of a globalized food market, but I was even more interested in the geographical spread of crops. Why do we eat potatoes in the West instead of taro or cassava? Maybe climate is to blame.

Maps of Vavilov's food hearths

Three maps freed with a little screen-shot magic from a Google Books preview of Vavilov's 'Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants'. Posted earlier were the later agricultural origin maps by Carl Sauer, now we can compare.

Click to enlarge.

Carl Sauer's maps on agricultural origins

Carl Sauer, cultural geographer, author of the brilliant New Spanish Main on the Spanish landnam of America after Columbus, also wrote one the origin and spread of food crops and domesticated animals. Vavilov suggested a number of centres of origin, the so-called hearths. Sauer preferred to talk about Centres of Dispersal. Sauer came later but Vavilov is still the better known name. I have no clue what the current scientific validity is of both theories but it is certain helps that Sauer's Agricultural Origins And Dispersals (1952) is available on Archive.

Great maps, click to enlarge.    

De-domesticated plants

 "Looking for Ways to Beat the Weeds" is a recent article in the NYT by Carl Zimmer that looks at the way agricultural plants can evolve weediness. 

Scientists have documented three different ways that plants evolve into weeds. Many species, such as barnyardgrass, evolved from wild ancestors. Biologists have found that certain traits make it easier for wild species to become weeds. They already grow fast, for example, and make lots of seeds. 

Parasitic plants are especially well-suited to the weedy life. They wrap around other plants and send their roots into their hosts’ tissues. Rather than making their own food, parasitic plants steal nutrients from their hosts. The parasitic weeds that invade farm fields have not evolved major differences from the ones that attack wild plants.

In other cases, weeds evolved from the union of wild plants and crops. In the 1970s, for example, wild beets in Europe released pollen that fertilized sugar beets growing on farms miles away.

Crops can even turn into weeds. “We domesticated a plant from the wild, and somehow it de-domesticated itself — which I think is pretty exciting,” Dr. Caicedo said.

Among these crops gone wild is a weed known as red rice. A key step in the domestication of rice was breeding plants that held onto their seeds when farmers harvested them. Red rice evolved fragile seeds that broke off and fell to the ground.

The name red rice comes from the russet tinge that the plant evolves as it becomes a weed. Dr. Caicedo and her colleagues suspect the color is produced from a pigment that helps the seeds go dormant — a trait that’s good for a weed but bad for a crop.

“If you’re a farmer, you want your seed to start growing when you plant it,” Dr. Caicedo explained. When weeds produce seeds, on the other hand, some sprout quickly while others go into suspended animation. Those dormant weeds create a seed bank that can sprout later, when conditions may be better for them. “It’s a fantastic trait for a weed to have. You’re hedging your bets,” Dr. Caicedo said.

These de-domesticated weeds don’t simply go back in time to regain the same DNA as their wild ancestors, scientists are finding. 

Once plants become weeds, they keep evolving. New mutations allow some of them to have more offspring than others. Foxtail, for example, evolved to crawl along the ground, where it wouldn’t be destroyed by combine blades. 

Globalization creates forests [in some places]

Quoting from an interview between the Yale environmental website e360 and Susanna Hecht on the positive effect globalization has on the regrowth of forests in El Salvador:

With globalization and structural adjustment programs, things like corn and other basic staples were coming in at import prices that were below the cost of their production in El Salvador. That meant if you were going to sell your corn, you would be selling it at a loss. So peasant agriculture soon collapsed, allowing reforestation.

Another thing about globalization is that for niche commodities it’s quite good. Those are crops that get a premium. What it meant in the case of El Salvador is that things like cashews and coffee and artisanal products made from wood had a vigorous market compared to the crummy returns you got for corn and the milpa crops [Subsistence crops such as beans and squash.] There was a shift to higher value crops, many of them arboreal.

More than half the households receive remittances from various countries, mostly from family members in the Los Angeles area. People work at jobs here in the U.S. and send money back. If you are getting remittances, you live a lot better — it basically doubles your income. Instead of having to produce corn with low yields on, say, steep slopes, you could buy the corn for the tortillas and not have to go into these forest areas. The result was a lot of land abandonment. The land was allowed to go into successional activities or forest-based economies rather than being used for producing basically corn.

The global market is against agriculture and the farmers themselves receive so much money from relatives abroad that they can retire from farming anyway! This is happening in Europe as well as noted earlier. But a secondary forest is not the same as a primal forest and lots of people are worried that Hecht's work in the wrong hands can give a rational for the deforestation of old growth forests. Earlier we quoted David Quammen warning that the invasion of weedy species and the decline of local biodiversity creates unwanted international uniformity. Hecht responds to this in a way that with a bit of effort could still be interpreted as dismissing concerns over deforestation be positively addressing the biodiversity of second growth forests. I wonder if the second growth forests of El Salvador can be understood as novel ecosystems. 

I am always surprised how controversial this is. I think it’s partly because some conservationists don’t count secondary forest as real forest. They see forests as ahistorical and apolitical, and the forests just aren’t. It was pounded into people in Bio 101 that human interaction with forests is destructive. But there has been extensive human influence even in places like the Amazon. What my work there taught me is that these places weren’t empty, and that if you only look at the ecological side, you don’t see the social side of forests. The conservationists really don’t like this.

What helped me to see forests in degraded areas was being around people messing in the forest. So I was primed to see the El Salvador forests and not to disparage them. To me there is almost no primary forest; it’s all secondary forests. All landscapes will have to be working landscapes. If we have lots of people with forests, we should be thrilled. And we should be really thrilled when the forest comes back because we have a narrative that it doesn’t come back.

There has been a recognition that inhabited environments can have major conservation value. Even though the reforested areas are fragmented, they are quite diverse in terms of landscape. They end up actually having a rather interesting impact at regional levels — they scale up rather better than one might imagine. Even those hedgerows can provide something like 40 to 50 percent of the biodiversity that you get in a riparian system in El Salvador. And hedgerows, land demarcations, woodlots, gardens and domestic forests of various kinds all end up supporting biodiversity in ways that are kind of surprising. For instance, the bird diversity of El Salvador is about equal to that of Belize, which has a fraction of the population and far less fragmented forests.

The image comes from Hecht's paper 'Globalization and Forest Resurgence: Changes in Forest Cover in El Salvador'

The Amazon as a cryptoforest megapolis

The Amazonian Indian techniques of swiddening is not just a bit of slashing and a bit of burning. Swiddens have a long use and shifting use that are meant to change the landscape for a long time. From a 1986 article by Leslie Sponsel (PDF-link) comes this resume.

The major source of carbohydrates is cultivation of the variety called slash-and-burn, shifting, or swidden. Like other agroecosystems, swiddens are anthropogenic, created and maintained by humans through the manipulation of limiting factors and with the input of energy and nutrients. Also, swidden takes advantage of environmental conditions and processes in the early stage of succession. The slash opens section of forest to allow penetration of sunlight for photosynthesis of the new plant community. The burn returns nutrients to the soil, although substantial amounts are lost to the atmosphere as volatiles and particles as well as to leaching. As the crops grow and are harvested, nutrients are removed from the agroecosystem until productivity declines after two or three years. Another factor is competition as wild plants take root and compete for nutrients and light, part of the natural process of succession. Often tree crops are also planted which encourages succession and eventually the return of the forest.

Swiddens are not necessarily abandoned; instead, they often phase into another type of agroecosystem known as agroforestry. Tree crops mark the transition from swidden to forest, but this is not a sharp boundary in either space or time. While agroforestry is a new research frontier for Western science, it is an ancient practice among indigenes. The Bora exploit up to 135 plant species in their garden fallows. The Kayapos till harvest plants and hunt in their gardens after 40 years. They even plant species to attract game. Swiddens are adaptive for subsistence economy as long as the population density is relatively low, ample land is available for active and future gardens, and fallow area and time are sufficient for forest recovery. Geertz, among others, argued that swiddens are adaptive another sense--intercropping imitates the diversity and structure of the forest. However, swiddens do not always mimic the forest in the way Geertz suggested. In Amazonia they range from polycrops to monocrops (including polyvarieties) and are adaptive in other ways. Agroecosystems generally provide a morer eliable supply of foods than do wild plants and thereby allow greater size and sedentariness of the human population. Many anthropologists have linked this in turn with greater cultural complexity, although this position has many critics. Recently Moran argued that there is a tension between farming and foraging because the latter requires mobility which works against acquiring adequate ethnoagronomic knowledge of soils for efficient productivity of swiddens. However, the Kayapo practice a form nomadic agriculture in which on treks six to eight months long they visit old gardens and plant new ones and in other ways experiment with domestication and cultivation. Furthermore, Posey argues that there continuum from wild to semidomesticated to domesticated plants which developed over millenia of experimentation by mobile indigenes.

Did I read that right!? "The Bora exploit up to 135 plant species in their garden fallows." Can you even name that many species? Here is the PDF of the source for this (and the images used here). Also don't miss that little sentence that argues that to be a good nomadic forager you need qualities that you can only acquire by being a stay-home peasant.

The implication of all this is that the Amazonian rainforest is not a pristine natural landscape but one gigantic man-made fallow. The argument continues by stating that the pure hunting-garthering lifestyle in the Amazon is only possible because of the presence of (often ancient) fallows. One good overview for all this is Laura Rival's 'Domestication as a Historical and Symbolic Process: Wild Gardens and Cultivated Forests in the Ecuadorian Amazon' (PDF-link). The following paragraph discusses the Huaoroni view and use of the forest (also see) and the way they try to see everything in its historic context.

Lévi-Strauss noted, more than forty years ago, that in South America “there are many intermediate stages between the utilization of plants in their wild state and their true cultivation,” and that “farming always accompanies, and is never a substitute for, the exploitation of wild resources.” This remark applies particularly well to the Huaorani context, where numerous plant species are encouraged to grow outside of cultivated areas as people engage in numerous daily actions (planting, selecting, transplanting, protecting, using, and discarding) that have a direct or indirect effect on the distribution of species, be they fully domesticated or not. Huaorani people daily consume a great number of cultigens that are not planted in gardens. They see in their forested land the historical record of the activities of past generations. They are quite explicit about the inseparability of people and the forest, which they describe as a succession of fallows. Most of the western part of Huaorani land is said to be ahuene—that is, secondary forest. Only in the Yasuni, they tell me, are there pristine forests, omere, with really high and old trees. Secondary forests are further divided into huiyencore (four-to-ten-year-old clearings characterized by the frequency of balsa trees), huyenco (ten-to-twenty-year-old clearings), huiñeme (twenty-to-forty-year-old clearings characterized by the high incidence of adult palms), and durani ahuè (forty-to-a-hundred-year-old clearings, remarkable for their big trees). Before the arrival of missions, huiñeme forests were the preferred sites to establish main residences. However, all types of forest were—and still are—continuously visited and lived in for longer or shorter stays. Cultivars are found—discovered—throughout the forest. This further indicates an evident strategy of resource dispersion within specific regions. Fish-poison vines are found along the creeks where people fish, semiwild fruit trees near hunting camps, and numerous useful palms (such as Astrocaryum chambira; in Huaorani, oönempa) along trails. The regional groups (huaomoni) are constantly moving through their vast and relatively stable territories. Hilltop longhouses are regularly left for hunting and foraging trips, during which forest-management activities take place. Wherever a Huaorani finds herself in the forest, she chances upon needed plants. Informants are vague as to whether these strategic and handy resources were planted by someone, or just happened to grow there. What matters to them is that their occurrence can be related either to individuals known for using a particular area regularly or to a house-group who lived in the area, sometime in the past. For instance, when young Huaorani unexpectedly discover useful plants in a part of the forest they are not familiar with, they often attribute them, with noticeable pleasure, to the activities of past people. If they decide that these cultigens were left by dead forebears—usually great-grandparents—they may see the plants as an invitation to move permanently and legitimately into this part of the forest, and to create a new longhouse. When no certain link with past or present human activity is established, the wide occurrence of cultigens is linked to animal activity. For example, semiwild manioc is said to “belong” to the tapir.

Earlier links include:

Amazonian Gardening 

Anthropogenic Forest Islands and Fallows

Written on the land (geoglyphs & others)

Weeds, heresy and the great foraging revival

The greater plantain, but the Algonquin called it the White Man's Foot or the Englishman's foot because it appeared everywhere the Europeans went.

Alfred W.Crosby's 'Ecological Imperialism, the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 ' (Cambridge University Press, 1986) reads as if Jared Diamond's uncle Fester is on a roll. 

Crosby explains how weeds from the old world prepared the ground of the new world for European colonisers and were critical to the success of European expansion. 

"Weeds" is not a scientific word. It refers not to plants of any specific species or genus or any category recognized by scientific taxonomy, but to whatever plants spring up where humans do not want them. More often than not they are plants that evolved originally to fill the minor role of colonizing bare ground after fires, landslides, floods, and such and that found themselves wonderfully preadapted to spread across the expanses stripped clean by the Neolithic farmer's plow or sickle. Already tolerant of direct sunlight and disturbed soil, they added tolerance of sandal, boot, and hoof. Always ready to spring up fast in the wake of disasters, they easily evolved to survive and sprout again in the wake of the tug, tear, and chomp of grazing livestock. The farmer calls them the bane of his life, and they are, but they also provide livestock with feed and help combat erosion.

The Neolithic farmer simplified his ecosystem to produce quantities of plants that would grow rapidly on bare ground and would survive grazing animals, and he got exactly what he tried for, but some of them he cursed: tufted vetch, ryegrass, cleavers, thistles, coriander, and others.

Those plants with a talent for finding and settling on disturbed grounds rose to the challenge when agriculture first emerged. Evolving with agriculture these plants found better and better ways to use the opportunities provided by agriculture's annual cycle of soil disturbance (the decimation following the plough and the harvest). When seafaring began these plants had become especially well adapted to conquer other lands, easily outcompeting local plants that lacked previous experience with agricultures impact on the land.

In other words: agriculture not just created the possibility to think of a plant as a weed, it also created conditions for plants to acquire the persistent characteristics of weeds. Crosby goes on to cite from the Proverbs in the Old Testament:

I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding;

And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and weeds had covered its face, and its stone wall was broken down.

Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction.

Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:

So shall your poverty come like a robber; and your want like an armed man.

There you got the agricultural obsession with strive, purity and ecocide in the language of King James: the damnation of weed as a moral wrong.

The marginal is central [Andean Farming]

Andean potato harvest

The best chapter in Wendell Berry's 'The Unsettling of America', an agro-isolationist tract well worth your time, is the one where he discusses farming in the Andes. The Andes has the steepest mountains in the world and farms in Uchucmarca in North Peru cover 4 different climatic zones (tropical, middle,high and higher mountain zones). The risk of Erosion is always looming if it weren't for the deep knowledge of the farmer and the diversity of his crops. Berry bases the chapter on an unnamed paper by Stephen Brush that I haven't been able to find but do read this (PDF) if you are interested. Here is the key segment and it deal with the nature, use and understanding of marginal lands:   

The sophistication and durability of Andean agriculture,"he writes, is not fully appreciated until one has understood the way it utilizes -- indeed, depends upon -- its margins. The fifty potato varieties used in Uchucmarca are not a stable quantity, but rather a sort of genetic vocabulary in a state of continues revision. Professor Brush says that ‘new varieties are constantly being created through crosspollination between cultivated, wild and semidomesticated (weedy) species. . . . These wild and semidomesticated species thrive in the hedgerow around fields, and birds and insects living there assist cross-pollination.' Thus, if an Andean farmer loses a crop because of an extremity of the weather or an infestation of insects or disease, he may find a plant of a new variety that has survived the calamity and produced in spite of it. If he finds such a plant, he may add it to his collection of domesticated varieties or substitute it for the one that has failed.

This Andean agriculture, then, does not push its margins back to land unsuitable for farming, as ours does, but incorporates them into the very structure of the farm. The hedgerows are marginal areas, little thoroughfares of wilderness closely crisscrossing the farmland, and in them agriculture is constantly renewing itself in direct response to what threatens it. This network of wilderness treading through the fields serves the Andean farmer as a college of agriculture and experiment station. And at least in one respect it serves him better: whatever is discovered there has already been tested in the circumstances of the farm itself, and its worth or worthlessness proven. 

This integration of Andean farming with its margins may serve us in another way. It offers an example of a sort of reconciliation by which we might escape the endless swinging between center and margins, rigidity and revolt, that has dominated our culture for so long. The remedy is to accommodate the margin within the form, to allow the wilderness or nature to thrive in domesticity, to accommodate diversity within unity.

I glean, you glean, we glean

Two days ago I learned a new word: gleaning:

Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they have been commercially harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. Some ancient cultures promoted gleaning as an early form of a welfare system.

Gleaning as an agricultural etiquette of leftover management; how excellent, In the past gleaners must have been a common sight, why else would a painting like the one above and the below be made, perhaps gleaners were the homeless people selling their papers at the supermarket of today?? Now the word will lead you to rural US Christian poverty relieve initiatives. 


It is telling that gleaning, which is a kind of weird agricultural-foraging hybrid, has been linked with the poor for as long as anybody can remember. It is a kind of foraging; gleaners live off the land and need to move to find food, but it lacks the deep skill and know-how, it is parasitic on human labour instead of a productivity based on an intimate knowledge of the surroundings. Gleaning as the foraging of the lumpen proletariat. Now people are starting to think of gleaning as a kind of cool grassroots humanizing and reinhabitation of mechanized agricultural factory fields. 


Reader Bryan Sonderman points us to 'The Gleaners and I" a 2000 film by Agnes Verda, the first minutes are online with English subtitles, the film deals mostly with urban gleaning: (poor) people collecting left overs at market stalls and the end of the day, as something shameful that inspires rappers to write lyrics about. Again: freeganism and Food not Bombs and other initiatives are adopting gleaning (dumpster diving/skipping) as a life style project that critically reflects on our production of waste and the uneven diffusion of wealth in our society.   


What mental distances we are crossing. 

Why was the word new to me: perhaps because I had no matching concept in Dutch. After checking several online translation services, though none of them authoritative, one came up with nothing, the second with 'sprokkelen' which is clearly an insane translation and the third came up with 'aren lezen' which I never heard before but which turned out to be the thoroughly old-fashioned, biblical but proper Dutch translation. As I can't imagine anyone saying something like "Vaader, ik ga thans aren lezen in 't ginderse veld', Dutch gleaners would probably announce that they 'are going to see if there is something left in the fields of Boer Harm'. This puts 'gleaning', in Dutch, in the same category as 'serendipity' and 'foraging': words that have dictionary translations that are so far removed from daily usage as to be of no practical use. But you won't see me going all Whorfian.


Of course someone has done a G-map glean app: http://www.goglean.org/.
      

Van Gogh, 1885.

The loss of diversity is the long tail of the agricultural revolution

Diversity is in an undisputed worldwide crisis. In Europe, where we have long ago eradicated a staggering amount of it, we take biological and cultural poverty for granted, as a normal, even desirable, fact. We are conditioned to think of our mind as a single-language engine, learning another language is difficult and always far from perfect. Anthropological evidence however suggests that in a language-diverse social environment a good working knowledge (even if only passively) of 5, 6, 7 languages (and not just dialects) is routine. Scarcity of diversity, in our social and economic climate, is a downhill process of shifting baselines; quoting John Waldman:

Every generation takes the natural environment it encounters during childhood as the norm against which it measures environmental decline later in life. With each ensuing generation, environmental degradation generally increases, but each generation takes that degraded condition as the new normal. Scientists call this phenomenon “shifting baselines” or “inter-generational amnesia,” and it is part of a larger and more nebulous reality — the insidious ebbing of the ecological and social relevancy of declining and disappearing species.

The above Ethnologue statistics put a number on the linguistic impoverishment of Europe. In 'Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions' (2003) Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood add many complicating factors obscuring the picture, but the general trend is clear: by exploiting a few selected types of plants and animals agriculture created power and this power translated into linguistic monocultures.

Until the end of the Pleistocene, all people on all continents lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, at different subsequent times between about 8500 and 2500 B.C., food production based on domestication of relatively few wild plant and animal species arose independently in at most nine homelands of agriculture and herding, scattered over all inhabited continents except Australia. Because food production conferred enormous advantages to farmers compared with hunter-gatherers living outside those homelands, it triggered outward dispersals of farming populations, bearing their languages and lifestyles. Those dispersals constitute collectively the most important process in Holocene human history.

The agricultural expansions ultimately resulted from three advantages that farmers gained over hunter-gatherers. First, because of far higher food yields per area of productive land, food production can support far higher population densities than can the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Second, whereas most hunter-gatherer societies are mobile, most food-producing societies are sedentary and can thus accumulate stored food surpluses, which were a prerequisite for the development of complex technology, social stratification, centralized states, and professional armies. Third, epidemic infectious diseases of social domestic animals evolved into epidemic infectious diseases of crowded farming populations, such as smallpox and measles— diseases to which the farmers evolved or acquired some resistance, but to which unexposed hunter-gatherers had none. These advantages enabled early farmers to replace languages and societies of hunter-gatherers living in their main paths of expansion.