@農자료창고

단편적인 이야기뿐이지만, 토종 작물을 바탕으로 한 생물다양성을 이용해 사람들의 생활을 돕고 자연환경도 지키려 한다는 내용이 흥미롭다.우리에게도 필요한 이야기 아닌가? 특히 생물다양성 데이터베이스를 보강하려 한다는 이야기는 현재 씨드림에서 하려는 일과 겹치기도 한다.

2014년 멕시코시티 중심가의 몬산토에 항의하는 시위인 "Dia Nacional del Maiz" (National Corn Day)에서 옥수수 자루를 쥐고 있는 농부

"생물다양성이 거기 있다. 그걸 선발하고 활용하기만 하면 된다."

멕시코의 고대 문명은 옥수수, 토마토, 고추 같은 작물을 스패인 정복자들이 건너오기 전 수천 년 동안 재배했다. 그리고 주요 생태학자는 현재 그러한 토종 식물들이 지속가능한 식량 생산의 열쇠가 될 수 있다고 한다.  

25년 전 멕시코의 선도적인 생물다양성의 지식과 활용을 위한 국가위원회(CONABIO)의 설립을 도운 José Sarukhán Kermez 씨는 토종 작물의 유전적 다양성을 분석하고, 세계의 식량 대부분을 재배하는 가족농을 지원하는 것이산업형 농업의 대안을 제시한다고 이야기한다. 

"우린 이러한 (작물들)의 유전적 특성을 크게 조작할 필요가 없다... 생물다양성이 거기 있기 때문이다. 수천 년 동안 그 일을 해온 사람들의 지식을 가지고 그걸 선발하고 활용하기만 하면 된다."고 전화 인터뷰로 CONABIO의 코디네이터 Sarukhán 씨가 전한다. 

멕시코 국립대학(UNAM)의 명예교수이자 옛 총장이었던 그는 최근 "환경 부문의 노벨상"이라 불리는 환경 성과에 대한 타일러상(Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement)을 받았다. 

토착민 집단이 지닌 지식을 활용하는 것이 "절대적으로 필수이다"라고 Sarukhán 씨는 톰슨 로이터 재단에 이야기한다.

지역의 요리사부터 소농까지 다양한 사람들과 협력해야 한다. 특히 전통문화가 강한 멕시코 남부의 와하까와 치아빠쓰의 토착 농민이 중요하다고 그는 말한다. 

"그들은 대학도 다니지 않았고, 학위도 없다. 하지만 그들은 이런 일을 어떻게 할지 잘 알고 있다." 예를 들어, 그들은 다른 지역의 동료들과 씨앗을 교환하면서 새로운 지식을 발견하고 받아들인다.  

CONABIO는 3000만 달러 이상의 가치가 있는 토종 작물에 대한 연구를 가속화하기 위하여 지구환경기금에서 5년짜리 프로젝트에 약 500만 달러의 지원을 받길 바라고 있다. 

목표는 국가의 농업정책에 영향을 줄 수 있도록 생물다양성 국가위원회의 생물다양성에 관한 방대한 온라인 데이터베이스를 보강하는 일이라고 Sarukhán 씨는 말한다. 

토종 작물의 유전적 적응성에 관한 CONABIO의 정보는 기후변화에 의하여 더 습하거나 건조한 환경에 대한 저항성을 가진 새로운 품종을 개발하려는 과학자들이 이용할 수 있을 것이라고 한다. 

기후에 적응력 있는 토종 작물의 잠재력을 강조하면서, Sarukhán 씨는 멕시코 전역에서, 해안부터 해발 3000미터에 이르기까지 약 60가지의 옥수수를 재배하고 있는데, 몇 가지 품종만 상업적으로 판매된다고 이야기한다. 

숲 보호

멕시코의 매우 다양한 생태계와 생물다양성이 위협을 받고 있기에, 생태학자는 전국의 광활한 숲을 유지하도록 사람들을 장려하기 위해 보조금을 주기보다는 지역의 소득을 높이는 계획에 더 초점을 맞춰야 한다고 촉구했다. 

와하까 숲에서 유기농 커피를 재배하는 일이나 치아빠쓰의 생태관광 같은 프로젝트는 지역사회에 적당한 수입과 환경 보호의 동기를 제공하는 데 도움이 된다고 한다.  

농촌과 토착민 공동체는 멕시코 전체 숲과 자연생태계의 60-70%를 소유하고 있다고 강조한다.

"그것이 그들이 소유한 유산이다. 그들은 생계를 위한 다른 어떤 것도 가지고있지 않다."고 설명한다. "숲의 소유자들을 위해 소득을 높이면서 지속가능한관리를 결합시킬 방법이 있다." 

http://news.trust.org/item/20170613173534-rvw1z

국제 밀옥수수연구소 종자은행에 보관중이라는 멕시코의 토종 옥수수들.

작물화가 서서히 진행되면서 짧고 뭉툭한 형태에서 오늘날 우리가 좋아하는 긴 자루와 즙 많은 알갱이를 지닌 옥수수가 되었다.

미국은 옥수수의 나라이다. 그러나 4천 년 전에는 멕시코에서 미국 남서부로 들어와 퍼진 외래종이었다. 새로운 연구에서 이 작물이 여행한 경로를 조사하고, 지금과 같은 모습을 갖추게 된 유전적 변화를 재구성했다.

그 결과는 “유전학에 대한 우리의 지식과 이해에 정말로 중요한 진전이며, 옥수수의 진화사이다”라고 이 연구에 참여하지는 않았지만 고대 아리조나 주의 초기 농업을 연구하는 뉴멕시코 대학의 고고학자 Bruce Huckell 씨는 이야기한다.

옥수수의 야생종은 멕시코 중부의 온습한 환경에서 자라는 풀의 일종인 테오신테teosinte이다. 이곳에서 6천~1만 년 전의 어느 때 처음으로 작물화되었다. 약 4천 년 전, 옥수수가 지금의 미국 남서부에 모습을 나타내기 시작했다. 과학자들은 그러한 여행이 어떻게 이루어졌는지 두 가지 가설을 세웠다. 하나는 태평양 연안으로 확산되었다는 것이고, 다른 하나는 미국 남서부에서 재배되기 전 먼저 멕시코 중부의 더 춥고 건조한 고원지대로 이동했을 것이라는 가정이다.

이것이 바로 옥수수의 조상이라 하는 테오신테의 모습이다. 열매는 보잘 것 없고, 잎과 줄기만 무성하다.

옥수수가 여행한 경로를 파악하기 위해 코펜하겐 대학에서 원시 게놈학을 연구하는 M. Thomas Gilbert 씨와 동료들이 멕시코와 미국 남서부에서 가져온 고대의 옥수수 자루 32개의 DNA를 비교했다. 그들은 가장 오래된 미국 남서부의 옥수수 샘플 —3천 년 전의 것— 이 해안을 따라 자란 품종보다 멕시코 고원지대의 옥수수와 유전적으로 더 유사하다는 사실을 발견하여, Nature Plants에 발표했다. 

그러나 더 최근에 가까운 샘플에서는 해안의 품종과 더 많은 유전자를 공유하는 것을 발견했다. 그것은 옥수수가 “처음에는 고원의 길을 갔다”는 것을 제시한다고 Gilbert 씨는 말한다. 그러나 아직 작물화의 초기 단계였던 그 작물은 아마 고도가 높거나 건조한 미국 남서부에서는 번성하지 못했을 것이다. 몇 백 년이 지나면서 농민들이 “시간을 들여 그것을 개선하기 위해 다른 곳의 품종과 교잡시켰다”고 그는 말한다.

연구팀은 현대의 옥수수가 향한 진화를 재구성할 수 있었다. 농민들이 육종으로 옥수수에서 없애버린 첫 번째 특성은 야생 식물들이 보통 씨앗을 퍼뜨리기 위해 탁 튀어 나가는 탈립성이었다. 어떤 작물의 씨앗을 받아서 이듬해에 심으려고 한다면 “매우 매우 짜증나는 특성이다”라고 Gilbert 씨는 말한다. 그러고 나서 몇 백 년에 걸쳐, 농민들은 미국 남서부의 건조한 환경에서도 번성할 수 있도록 가뭄 저항성 옥수수를 육종했다. 마지막으로 불과 1천 년 전에 맛을 향상시키고, 영양성분을 개선하며, 또르띠야와 타말리 같은 음식을 만들기 쉽도록 가공하기 더 편한 알이 달리게 육종했다. “우리가 식료품점에 가면 볼 수 있는 옥수수처럼 된 것은 정말 얼마 되지 않은 일이다.”라고 Gilbert 씨는 말한다.

이 연구는 “옥수수의 확산에 대한 우리의 이해가 이전에 생각하던 것보다 훨씬 더 복잡함을 보여준다”고 멕시코 남서부와 북부의 초기 농업을 연구하는 텍사스 대학의 고고학자 Robert Hard 씨는 말한다. 그러나 이 그림을 완성하려면 더 많은 고고학 자료가 필요하다. “우리에겐 미국 남서부와 멕시코의 옥수수 원산지 사이의 지역인 멕시코 북부의 광대한 땅에 관한 자료는 거의 없다”고 Hard 씨는 강조한다. 이는 “우리의 이해에는 커다란 빈틈이 있다"는 것을 뜻한다.

원문: http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/01/how-corn-became-corn

멕시코의 다산의 여신 Mayahuel. 그녀의 상징은 용설란인데, 용설란은 보통 10~12개의 새끼를 치는 왕성한 번식력을 자랑하기에 그렇다. 

옳다구나! 이 여신은 데킬라의 상징이기도 하다.

멕시코 하면 용설란, 용설란 하면 데낄라! 이 광대한 용설란 밭을 보라.

디오니소스는 포두주나 마시지. 마야우엘은 데낄라를 마신다. 만세!

When we were researching stories for Mexico, several people mentioned that we had to speak with Amado from Itanoni Restaurant, he is the “corn guru” they said.   His restaurant serves only the most traditional of Mexican foods, showcasing the various organic corns, harvest by local Oaxacan farmers in their purest form.  But beyond the taste of history and tradition, Amado brings a poetic truth about the power of this ancient grain. 

An Act of Resistance from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

“Agroecology does not mean going back to the Stone Age; on the contrary, it is based on high-level scientific concepts,” says one of the interviewees in Crops of the Future – How agroecology can feed the world, the last film by the French researcher Marie-Monique Robin, who visited the country in late November and presented the film together with her last book (which carries the same name) before an audience of more than 500 people.

In contrast to the denunciation tone of her previous films—such as The World According to Monsanto (2008) and Our Daily Poison (2010)—Crops of the Future shows different agroecological experiences (in America, Asia, and Europe) which serve as examples that the industrialization process in agriculture—which is based on monoculture, the use of pesticides, and transgenic seeds (which have high social, ecologic, and health costs—could be reverted.

For instance, the movie shows the milpa method used by some farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico, which is based on sowing corn with beans (a leguminous plant that captures the air’s nitrogen and feeds the corn) and squash (whose leaves allow to keep the ground’s moisture). They complement each other.

멕시코의 밀파 농법

It is a very productive system. There is a study carried out by University of California, Berkeley—United States—, that states that when comparing the two different growing methods, the production of one hectare in a milpa is similar to that obtained in 1.7 hectares in which the crops are divided,” says Robin. Said argument denies one of the statements usually heard from the people concerned with this business: monoculture’s performance is superior to the one obtained with an agroecological method.

In short, agroecology is a system which seeks to complement vegetation and animals, and the ground is the key. “All farmers who practice agroecology said that when they had a problem with a plant (with weeds, parasites, or plagues) they did not treat the plant, but the soil, because it meant that it had some deficiency,” explains Robin, and she stresses that contrary to what is usually believed, “agroecology is much more complicated than the agribusiness system, and the results are great because they allow the farms’ autonomy. It is also more complicated than organic agriculture, because organic monocultures are possible, and that is not agroecology, because it is not just a matter of not using agrochemicals, it is much more than that. It is a knowhow, and experts and scientists to support the producers when finding a better way to use the ground are necessary.”

Rosario, a global example of urban agriculture

As well as presenting her last book and documentary, Robin visited Rosario, because an urban agriculture program is in development there, and she is thinking of including it in her next movie: “What is happening in this town is very interesting; there is a public department created by the city council to produce healthy food in the city’s gardens, and I see that as an example of what has to be done if we want to face all the challenges the agribusiness model presents, without mentioning the planned oil and gas shortages problem, because to make transgenic soy, many chemical products made with oil and gas are used; it is a very fragile system, highly dependent on other countries,” said the documentary maker during the presentation.

아르헨티나의 도시농업

In this regard, she explained that the next documentary she is working on will deal with, among other things, urban agriculture projects and how to relocate food production. To this end she chose Rosario and Toronto (in Canada), where there is a similar experience that emerged for different reasons to the Argentinean case. “Behind this there is a challenging to the development project of unlimited growth in which GDP (gross domestic product) means consuming more, something that uses up the resources which are almost finished… We have been to San Francisco to interview an expert who said that last year we consumed a planet and a half, and that if we continued in this path, in 2030 we will need five planets, which we will not have. What does this mean? A lot of violence, a lot of poverty, a lot of war, and 2030 is in 17 years time, it is tomorrow, it is urgent.”

Because of this, she repeated that to develop a system that relocated food production, either in the country or the city, a stronger public policy is necessary. And in search for answers, during her stay in the country, she interviewed Rosario’s mayor, Monica Fein, and the province’s governor, Antonio Bonfatti: “With the mayor we didn’t talk about transgenic soy, but about climatic change,” said Robin, and she added that “the governor, who is also a physician, recognized that the soy model causes diseases, he said before the camera that it is a matter of public health, and he recognized that monoculture, in the medium or long term, risks Argentina’s food sovereignty.”

Soy’s trap and the un-wanted future

It is calculated that in 2012, 170 million hectares of transgenic crops were sowed globally; half of them were soy, 32% corn, 14% cotton, and 5% canola. In smaller areas, transgenic varieties of alfalfa, papaya, pumpkin, poplar, carnation, and sugar beet were also sowed. As regards the new features, the main were tolerance to glyphosate herbicide (soy, corn, cotton, canola, alfalfa, and sugar beet), resistance to insects (corn, cotton, and poplar), and the combination of both characteristics (corn and cotton) according to data from ArgenBio, the Argentinean council for biotechnological information and research.

“People say we won’t be able t o feed ourselves without agrochemicals, but they forget that we are not feeding ourselves with them either; there are a million people in the world who suffer from starvation, and that is a huge failure of the agribusiness model, on which billions and billions of dollars were invested, and today one every six people does not eat enough,” claims Robin and she stresses that, to a local level, she is concerned with the agribusiness system, which she considers “is a disaster” for Argentina.

유전자변형 작물에 농약을 치는 모습

The use of transgenics was approved in the country in 1996 for soy resistant to glyphosate. Since then, the area sown with genetically modified (GM) crops has not ceased to grow, and already for 2012, according to information from ArgenBio, Argentina was third in the world, with almost 24 million hectares (13 percent of global surface) of GM varieties of soy, corn, and cotton.

“I understand that soy was introduced without knowing that transgenics were bad; with all the manipulation behind, it was very difficult to know that… but today we cannot say that we do not know that transgenics are a failure. Monsanto always said that thanks to transgenics we would use less pesticides, but that is a lie; already in 2005, the use of pesticides was 10 times higher, and today, a lot more; they don’t know how to get rid of resistant weeds, and soils are ruined,” states Robin, and she stresses: “Before, the money was needed, but now we have to think in the medium and long term; what is at stake today is Argentina’s food sovereignty…if we, European consumers, continue in this path of not wanting to eat meat fed with transgenics, what will you do with all the soy? Soil recovery is possible, but it will be difficult.”

A technician for change

During the Rosario presentation, which took place in the Centro Cultural Parque España, Robin gave the floor to different participants who were in the audience. This way, some representatives from the Malvinas camp, in Córdoba—who have been fighting the setting-up of a Monsanto plant in that city for months—could express themselves, and the documentary maker publicly supported them. People responsible for Rosario’s urban agriculture program also told their experience, and everybody was very surprised with the story of a soy producer who, a few years ago, decided to join an agroecological group called Pampa Orgánica and to turn his fields to a new production model that, as Robin says, recovers tradition but working with scientists.

“He is not the son-of-a-bitch soy producer who does not want to change; I know many who want to, but to do so they need a lot of help… A producer cannot make a drastic change because in the transition he goes bankrupt, because the fields are pretty bad; you need from five to seven years of transition to have life in the field again; I have seen that in my experience,” he said before the audience, asking for help to achieve change: “The problem is that there is no support in research, after ten years of asking for help, we only have some technicians from INTA who are beginning to conduct research, but many of its own accord.”

멕시코 누에보레온(Nuevo Leon) 주에서 기원전 3500~3000년 무렵의 것으로 계산되는 수렵채집인의 씨앗, 옥수수자루, 옥수수 잎이 발견되었다. 

아직 이와 관련된 고고학적 유적은 발견되지 않은 상태인데, 이 증거물들이 유목하는 수렵채집인의 것이 아닌가 추정하고 있다.

멕시코에서는 1950~1960년대 타마울리파스와 오악사카, 푸에블라 주의 동굴에서 발굴된 기원전 7000~3000년 전의 세 작물(옥수수, 호박, 콩)이 가장 오래된 주요한 작물로 등록되어 있다. 

바위의 은신처에서 발견된 옥수수 속과 깍지들.

옥수수와 관련된 증거만이 아니라 바위의 은신처에서는 벽화도 발견되었다니 당시의 생활상과 관련된 상징들도 읽어낼 수 있을 것으로 전망된다. 

누에보레온 엘모로(El Morro)에서 발견된 초기 농업의 증거인 옥수수자루. 이것이 무려 5000년도 더 된 것이라니 놀랍다. 17~18cm 정도이니까 한뼘이 채 되지 않는 크기.

포장된 옥수수 껍질.

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.de/2013/11/proto-agricultural-activity-found-in.html#.UqjlGWRdWhE

Planting season — old style

As farmers north of the equator get ready to plant their seeds, we’ve started wondering about agriculture before Columbus. Conventional wisdom says Native Americans were mostly hunters and gatherers. When they did farm, their slash-and-burn techniques exhausted the soil, forcing them to clear new fields.

Although Native Americans domesticated corn, tomatoes and potatoes, their farms were generally unproductive, and most of their plant food came from gathering tubers, greens, berries and shoots.

But as we learned at a series of talks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this picture needs editing:

The provision of permaculture

Until the 1960s, the government of Canada enforced assimilation of First Nation children at boarding schools that banned ancestral languages and practices. The goal was to homogenize Canada’s population, but suppressing culture also squelched knowledge of the traditional methods for raising and gathering food.

When the police boats arrived in British Columbia in the 1930s, to take children to boarding schools, Adam Dick (tribal name Kwaxsistalla) escaped, and went to live in secluded locations with his grandparents for about a decade.

Dick, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl) tribe, has become a link to a vanishing past. “His people have learned from him, they all benefit from his teaching,” says Nancy Turner, in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada).

Turner, who has spent a career studying indigenous agriculture, says knowing what to look for is key to understanding native agriculture on the coast of British Columbia. “They used perennial cultivation. ‘Keep it living’ was part of their philosophy, and it shows the way they value other life. A lot of perennial plants were being cultivated, but outsiders saw this as random plucking.”

People in the First Nations of British Columbia ate 35 species of roots, 25 greens, berries, even the inner bark of some trees, Turner says.

Overall, coastal people used 250 species of plants for food, tea, fuel, construction, fiber, canoes, dye and glue, Turner says.

When the natives harvested bark and wood from a living tree, they took what they needed without killing the tree. “They believed trees have sentient life, and called these ‘begged from’ trees,” Turner says. “‘We have come to beg a piece of you today.’”

“Gardens” in the water

The same attitude of “stewardship and caring” also applied to aquatic food, Turner says, especially the all-important salmon. “The salmon streams were carefully tended, and even cleaned. If the stream changed course, Adam and the others were taught by the elders to transplant [salmon] eggs to the new stream channel.”

Similarly, she says, people moved rocks to “create the most productive clam beds on the coast.”

Courtesy Nancy Turner.

Small plots of springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), about to blossom in British Columbia produced “immense quantities” of roots that were “regarded as indispensable to good health,” says Turner. In this permaculture, the harvesters replanted segments of the roots for another crop.

This was more like farming and harvesting than hunting-and-gathering, Turner insists. But the colonists, more interested in survival and profit than the people they were displacing, “were blind to these practices. They had in mind Mr. McGregor’s garden, with a fence and rows you can harvest. They looked at these things, but they did not see them.”

Restoring the foods

Most cultures give a central role to the production, preparation and consumption of food. What happens when the land that grew traditional foods is drowned by dams?

That’s the conundrum facing Linda Different Cloud Jones, an activist and student from the Lakota Sioux Nation. “The loss of biodiversity is the greatest challenge on traditional lands,” she told an audience in March at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and the loss of one culturally important species has significant impact.”

The Lakota people “are stereotyped as the people of the plains,” says Jones, “but we are also people of the river, or were a people of the river, until, in the 1950s and ’60s, when dams built in the Pick-Sloan project changed the way of life for the Lakota forever.”

Standing Rock, the Lakota reservation, is sandwiched between the Dakotas, and borders the Missouri River. “Overnight, hundreds of thousands of acres of native land was underwater,” said Jones. “All the plant and animal species in the riparian cottonwood forest were gone.”

The underground seedpods of the hog peanut (AKA mouse bean), were collected by prairie voles. These small mammals, which the Lakota called “mice,” cached the big seeds underground.

Lakota women found the caches with a stick and removed the seeds, Jones said, but “They always left a gift, dry berries, animal fat or corn. They would sing, ‘You have helped sustain my children during this coming winter, and we will not let your children go hungry.’ Their song echoed from the trees, and it seriously breaks my heart that my young children will never see that.”

A sustainable yield?

The song revealed that “an entire world view and behavior went along with this one plant species,” Jones said, and both suffered when dams flooded the forest. “We haven’t eaten these for 50 or 60 years. With the death of this one plant was the death of a little piece of our culture.”

The hog peanut was part of a larger cycle, Jones says. In spring, “We would tap box elder maples for syrup, then collect biscuit root, wild strawberries, currants, juneberries, cattail shoots, and acorns in December. Nothing was ripe at exactly the same time. When the plants are no longer there, the cycle is broken.”

Jones, a Ph.D. student at Montana State University, is attempting to grow the hog peanut as a form of “ecocultural restoration.” “Research for the sake of research was not what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to change the world for my people, to make their lives better.”

Millions of people made a living for thousands of years in the New World, she says. “Everyone always thought that when European people colonized the Americas, they were coming into a pristine place, but we were managing the landscape for thousands of years.”

Iroquois corn

Corn is an indisputable triumph of Native American agriculture. The plant, domesticated thousands of years ago in Mexico and Central America, was a staple of the American diet and is now the largest crop in the world (global production in 2009 was 819 million metric tons).

Although natives also invented the highly productive “three sisters” companion-cropping technique, their agricultural prowess has been underestimated, says Jane Mt. Pleasant, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

Although the Native Americans had transformed a weed into the phenomenally productive crop maize, “There are claims by scholars, archeologists, geographers and historians that native agriculture was predominantly shifting cultivation… largely marginal, not too productive,” Mt. Pleasant says.

In “shifting cultivation” (a politically correct locution for “slash and burn”), farmers move to new plots as they exhaust their soil. According to this logic, native farmers in North America “sowed the seeds of their own destruction through environmental degradation,” says Mt. Pleasant, who directs the American Indian Program at Cornell.

But Mt. Pleasant says this is bunk. Rather, she contends that:

The soil should be the starting point for understanding agriculture, says Mt. Pleasant. While many soils on the Eastern Seaboard are not great, large parts of upstate New York had good soil that still supports productive farms.

About 300 years ago, the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of five (later six) tribes, lived in the area, and evidence for their farm productivity comes, ironically, from armies that sought to destroy them. “The quantity of corn which we found in store in this place, and destroyed by fire is incredible,” wrote the governor of New France in 1687.²

The French attacked the Iroquois, who were allied with France’s great enemy, Great Britain.

Slash ‘n burn, or sustainable agriculture?

Then in 1779, a soldier sent by General George Washington reported that his unit had destroyed at least 200 acres of Iroquois corn and beans that was “the best I ever saw.”

“This was not backyard gardening, not primitive farming,” Mt. Pleasant says. “They were dynamic, producing farmers on really good soils.”

In modern tests of corn varieties believed to resemble those grown by the Senecas, one of the Iroquois tribes, Mt. Pleasant got yields of 2,500 to 3,000 pounds per acre (45 to 54 bushels per acre or 2,800 to 3,400 kilograms per hectare).

This was far above the 500 kilograms per hectare of wheat grown in Europe.

Turner calculated that the Iroquois could support roughly three times as many people on an acre as contemporaneous Europeans could with their wheat crops.

Part of the advantage, she says, comes from maize’s inherent productivity. But observers have long wondered how this production could have occurred with neither plow nor draft animals, usually deemed the hallmarks of agricultural progress.

Plows, however, are now viewed as mixed blessing by many soil scientists. Although they prepare a good seedbed and bury weeds, they expose soil to the air, which encourages oxidation of humus, the organic content that supports essential microorganisms.

Although, after plowing, the humus briefly releases a burst of nitrogen, the depletion of organic matter and increased erosion continue for decades.

And thus on balance, Mt. Pleasant says the lack of the plow was an advantage, because planting with hand tools saves soil organic matter.

“If you are not tilling, and start with good soil, you are not going to lose fertility,” Mt. Pleasant says. “The system is stable as long as the crop yields are moderate and there is no plowing.”

But without plowing, there was no need for slash and burn.

Overall, Mt. Pleasant says, the new data provide a “quite different” perspective on agriculture. “Who were the primitive farmers? This is sustainable agriculture at its highest level.”

Rethinking agriculture

This type of revelation changes our view of the origin of agriculture, says Eve Emshwiller, an assistant professor of botany at UW-Madison who organized the seminar on native agriculture and who studies oca, a root crop grown in the Andes. “We have always talked about hunter-gatherers as if one day they were gathering food and noticed a plant growing from seed and thought, ‘We could gather seeds and start farming,’ as if this brilliant idea happened all of a sudden.”

Aside from historical curiosity, why worry about how native Americans grew their crops? one reason is the growing interest in sustainable agriculture, says Emshwiller. As agriculture faces the challenge of feeding more people without further damaging soil and water, older traditions could contribute.

Looking at other ways to grow and gather food will broaden our perspective, Emshwiller says. “There were a lot of people who were not considered agriculturalists, who were [supposedly] just gathering from the wild. But if you really understand what they were doing, there is not a sharp line between gathering and farming. There is a huge continuum of ways that people manage resources and get more from them.”

Note: Following is a paper I wrote years ago, when I first became interested in the history, evolution, and eventual Spanish-inflicted decline of Aztec Chinampa agriculture. The essay draws from much of the past and present research devoted to understanding these systems. It is the first part of a two part paper. The second part concerns the raised – bed / canal systems of Los Llanos de Moxo, Bolivia.

By Spencer Woodard

“And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Tenochtitlan, we were amazed…Indeed, some of our soldiers asked if it was not all a dream” (Spanish chronicler, Bernal Diaz del Castillo)

“There is little doubt that the chinampas just south of Mexico City represent the most sophisticated version of Mesoamerican swamp agriculture. The complexes are extensive and most are strictly rectilinear, oriented roughly in accord with the sacred direction of Teotihuacan. The hydrology of the system has always had to be closely managed in order to prevent flooding, as well as to introduce sufficient fresh water to maintain levels and a slight flow in the canals. Production is year round and finely tuned. All in all, this is an engaging garden landscape or, rather, it was until mechanized commercial cultivation and suburbanization led to the obliteration of many chinampas” (Siemens 1980).

Adaptive systems involve careful planning, implementation and organization but offer the most logical approach to effective biodiversity conservation within food and resource producing systems. The raised-bed hydrological agricultural systems of antiquity offer an example of adaptive land management.

Chinampa describes a system, or network, of raised fields on low man-made islands in the middle of lakes, marshes and floodplains. Currently, the most intact, refined examples of chinampa agriculture can be found in the Xochimilco/Chaleco lake basins in the central valley of Mexico. Looking further, we find that similar land management techniques have been employed throughout the Americas. Another one of the more impressive and extensive examples can be found in Los Llanos de Moxos, in the Beni region of Bolivia. In the following pages, I will explore the importance of these sites as working examples of sustainable human living systems.

The examples of traditional raised-bed agricultural fields, such as those in Mexico and Bolivia, are widely regarded as the most productive and ecologically sustainable forms of agriculture in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica (Chapin 1988).  “In a very real sense, chinampa agriculture has represented a self-contained and self-sustaining system that has operated for centuries as one of the most intensive and productive ever devised by man” (Chapin: 9).  It has been generally concluded that the level of technology reached in agriculture during this time was rarely equaled anywhere else in the world at the time. The use of human labor, hydraulic technological sophistication and administrative complexity were correspondingly high (Parsons, 1991; Torres-Lima et al. 1994).

In light of the current human-induced pandemic of global destruction, the theory and practice behind chinampa hydrological agricultural systems may become increasingly important for the conservation of agro-biodiversity and as a means for humans to adapt agricultural production to cope with volatile changes in global climates and weather patterns. The dwindling chinampero culture represents one of the few remaining groups of humans on earth who hold the knowledge and technique to build, cultivate, and maintain this highly restorative, productive and sustainable agriculture technology.

There exists a common misconception, that the Aztecs invented chinampa technology, in fact they did not. Although it has been widely recognized that societies of the late Aztec period developed the most sophisticated models, it is now clear that Chinampas were employed long before by lowland Maya. The chinampas of Chaleco and Xochimilco were inherited by the Aztecs through the expansion of the empire and domination of the regional indigenous population, the Xochimilicans. Indeed, archeological evidence suggests that throughout Mesoamerican prehistory raised-bed agricultural system use has been extensive and widespread, adapted to a diverse variety of climates and landscapes. (Leon-Portilla, 1992; Torres-Lima et al. 1994).

The Xochimilcas established themselves at the foot of the Cuauhtzin Hills of Mt. Ajusco on a peninsula that juts into Lake Xochimilo. All of their structures were made out of materials derived from the lake. As their numbers expanded the Xochimilcans began to create land on top of the lake basin wetlands by building up rectangles of vegetation (tulle reeds) layered with, organic matter and mud, excavated from the lake bottom. The resulting raised platform and water canal network functioned perfectly with gravity providing for adaptation to a wide range of weather patterns. Eventually thousands of artificial interconnected islands were constructed. It is thought that the city of Chaleco was originally settled by Chelmeca Indians, who practiced the same chinampa building techniques. The two cities resisted Aztec domination for over two hundred years. Finally, around the middle of the fifteenth century they submitted to Aztec rule. Despite the change in government, the two cities remained intact, expanding throughout the duration (Torres-Lima et al. 1994)

There is little doubt among experts that the human population residing within the valley of Mexico had easily topped one and a half million by the time of the Conquest. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan is thought to have supported a population of up to  three – hundred thousand people, which would have been around five times the size of King Henry’s London at the time. The immediate suburbs of Tenochtitlan are thought to have contained another 200,000 humans and, in addition, well over a million resided in the greater surrounding area including the greater 3,000 square mile central valley of Mexico. It is widely surmised that the majority of food stuffs consumed by this population came largely from the extensive, 1,200 square kilometer chinampa raised-bed and canals network built as inter-communal hydrological and agricultural infrastructure (Redclift 1987; Chapin 1988: 10; Outerbridge 1987; Garavaglia 1992: 572-573).

Descriptions of the Capital by the first Spanish conquistador/chroniclers baffle the mind for we can only barely comprehend such a human living environment:

It was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spanish gawped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. Boats flitted like butterflies around the three grand causeways that linked Tenochitlan to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains across the lake and into the city. Even more astounding than the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens – none existed in Europe (Mann 2006)

The first hand account of Francisco Lopez de Gomara (1553) describes the Aztec capital as a city…

…built on water, exactly like Venice. The whole body of the city is in water. The wide and pleasant streets are of three kinds. Some consist entirely of water with a great many bridges, others are completely solid, and a third type combines solid and water, with people walking on the dry half and using boats on the other half… Almost all houses have two doors: one leading to the pavement and the other to the water on which they travel by boat.

It has been estimated that 10,000 hectares of chinampa fields, under intensive cultivation, would have been sufficient to supply at least half a million people with basic food staples (Torres-Lima et al. 1994: 39). The Chalco/Xochimilco site is situated in an endorphaic lake basin at an altitude of over 2,240 meters and surrounded by a high mountain range whose highest peak reaches 5,452 meters. Within this region there is evidence that over twelve thousand hectares, or 120 km sq. of land, was reclaimed in the shallow areas of the lakebed and transformed into a chinampa network yielding around 9000 agriculturally viable hectares, all within an ingeniously irrigated and navigable hydrological aqua/agricultural system (Armillas 1971; Arco & Abrams; Torres-Lima et al. 1994).

Because the productivity of chinampa fields increased with the physical expansion of the system Tenochtitlan deliberately made the commitment to large-scale wetland reclamation so as to secure a subsistence base through this highly productive and accessible agricultural method, which had potential for expansion as long as there was space available (Arco & Abrams; Parsons 1991).

As a result of massive depopulation after the arrival of the Europeans, due to disease, slavery, massacre, missionization, resettlement and war, the vast majority of indigenous inhabitants who had previously played a central role in the structure, composition and day-to-day management of the landscape were eliminated. The Spanish are reported to have been single-handedly responsible for the destruction of these vast and impressive landscapes. In one especially destructive incident, stones were stolen from the massive Nezahuacoyotl dike so that the Spanish could erect their obscene and comparatively rudimentary and inferior colonial cities upon and around the ruins of Tenochtitlan, a site we know today as Mexico City. After the Spanish invasion and the destruction inflicted upon the chinampa systems at Tenochitlan, the spring fed lakes of Xochimilco and Chaleco were steadily depleted. By the end of the 17^th century the Indigenous population of the valley of Mexico had plummeted from 1.5-2 million just before the conquest to 70,000 not much more than a hundred years later (Outerbridge 1987; Redclift 1987; Chapin 1988; Barra 1996).

The Tenango and Tlalmanalco rivers, which for millennia had supported the fresh water supply to Lake Chaleco, were diverted and springs were tapped, leaving the lake dry by 1900. Without the time tested and highly effective chinampa network in place, devastating floods would periodically haunt the city. Lacking the experience and adaptive capacity of the Aztecs who had logically and effectively controlled the water for thousands of years, the Spanish tried to get rid of it altogether, digging huge ditches and draining the vast lakes which would ultimately worsen the problem and lead to wind storms of noxious ground salts from the saline lake bottoms, which persists today as Mexico city’s worse natural scourge (Torres-Lima et al. Chapin 1988; 1994; Mann 2006).

The incessant expansion of contemporary Mexico City has not acted kindly upon thechinamperia. At the beginning of the nineteen hundreds the Porfista government decided upon what they thought would be a viable solution to the ever-present problem of insufficient supply of potable water supply. The city would pump water from Xochimilco’s large springs, which for centuries had generated water supply for the chinamperia. Nativas spring, the largest at Xochimilco, would be pumped at two cubic meters a second and the city’s ravenous thirst would be quenched. The project was executed within eight years in which time Mexico City had grown thus demanding more. Additional pumps had to be installed, increasingly bigger and more powerful, until all major springs to Xochimilco were tapped and the lake began to dry up. All of the smaller, peripheral chinampas suffered from the dwindling availability of water due to their slightly higher elevations, canals dried up making irrigation difficult, if not impossible, and the productivity of soil plummeted the surviving generation of chinamperos were forced to sell their property to housing developers and the like. When the outcry of displaced populations and destroyed agriculture technologies were heard by the Mexican government it was agreed that the pumping would be reduced by a little bit and that the city would grant Xochimilicans with the city’s semi-treated black-water sewage. Eventually the city began to suck straight from the groundwater surrounding and directly supplying the chinamperia causing it to sink, “like a dry sponge, the subsoil is compacting and the chinampas are sinking” (Outerbridge 1987: 80-82). By 1988 half of the chinampa’s remaining 2,300 hectares were actively farmed, the rest had been destroyed; consumed by the encroaching sprawl of the great metropolis. Today only two hundred hectares remain and not all of them are in production. What does remain is largely put to use for somewhat disheartening purposes: a place where tourists come to be polled about in the canals underneath the canopy of a brightly painted boat; a place where underpaid laborers are put to work toiling in the fields to grow ornamental flowers to satiate the whimsical desires of wealthy, ornamental flower-buying people; and, finally, as a place for the city to dump its trash and human waste (Outerbridge 1987: 82-83; Torres-Lima 1994).

~

The word “chinampa” is thought to have been derived from the Nauhatl words chinamitl, meaning “reed basket,” and pan, meaning “upon.” The etymology aptly describes the basic idea of chinampa construction, which was traditionally executed by way of piling bed-clay and mud from the lakes, aquatic plants, dry-crop silage, manure and silted muck upon one another in precise layers between paralleled reed fences anchored in the lake bottom. The material used in constructing the raised platforms is excavated so as to create narrow canals which divide elevated areas. The result was a highly ornate, intricate and accessible system.

The historically sustainable components of the chinampa agriculture, as summarized from conclusions drawn by Torres-Lima et al. (1994), are as follows: 1) by conserving renewable resources and reducing environmental impacts, the farmers efficiently managed the lake habitat for agricultural purposes; 2) through recycling practices, they maintained nutrient flow and wastes cycles; 3) by conserving a high degree of biodiversity in time and space, they efficiently used the resource base, increased biological interdependence between crops and pests, and  reduced crop failure; 4) to intensify the production and increase sustainable levels of productivity, the farmers relied on regional resources, efficient use of labor, and high technological complexity; 5) by using social and economic factors in decision-making, diversification of crops and maximization of returns were part of the development of self-sufficiency and economic viability of the chinampa system (Torres-Lima et al. 1994: 39).

The southern lake chinampa system of Mexico used an enormous numbers of intricate drainage canals, or zanjas, as well as the chinampa fields and canals. The fields and drainage canals, when aligned and cross-sectioned, form small islands, typically long and narrow ranging in lengths between six and nine meters (Wilken et al. 1969: 223; Armillas 1971: 653; Arco & Abrams 2006). The general layout of fields and canals consisted of long fingers of solid ground, which alternated with navigable waterways, resulting in a tight, intricate configuration. The raised platforms were typically narrow and rectangular in shape. It has been reported that beds traditionally measured 2 to 4 m wide and 20 to 40 m long, surrounded on three or four sides by canals (Torres-Lima et al. 1994: 38-49). Armillas (1971) reports dimensions of 2.5-10 meters wide and up to 100 meters long. The raised portions were usually built by alternating layers of mud scraped from the lake or surrounding swamps and thick mats of decaying vegetation over shallow lake bottoms or in marshy zones. Platforms rose up to a height of 0.5-0.7 meters above the water level, the sides reinforced with posts interwoven with branches. Willow trees were traditionally planted along the edges providing anchor and structural support. The depth of the canals varied, ranging from one to one-and-a-third meters (Armillas 1971; Torres-Lima et al. 1994).

Prutzman (1988) delineates the essential steps in chinampa construction.  First, chinamperos use a long pole to find an adequate base for a chinampa and when possible uses a cimiento, the remains of an old chinampa, as the foundation for a new one.  Next, strong reeds are “stuck” in the bottom to mark the base dimensions.  Then mud is excavated from around the base and piled atop the reeds and cimiento.  Mats of water vegetation are then cut and transported to the new chinampa.  These dense vegetative mats, or cesped, were primarily made from water lily and tulereeds. A nutrient-rich compost heap is created by layering mats of vegetation to form a thick cap.  Mud from the bottom of the lake is mixed with soil from an old chinampa and placed on top reaching a height of about one foot above the water level.  A porous base, rich in organic matter, is created through which water easily flows and irrigates through capillary action  Lastly, the sides secured with woven reeds, and then willow trees, Salix bomplandiana, are (traditionally) planted around the edges.

An alternative view of chinampa construction is presented by Wilken (1985) who suggests that aquatic plants have no structural role in chinampas; rather, he believes that plots are constructed by “simply extending drainage canals out into swamps or shallow lakes or back into low-lying shores” and then piling the excavated material onto spaces between the canals.  While the dredged mud inevitably contains aquatic plants, Wilken maintains that these plants are not important structural component (Wilken 1985). It would seem to me that aquatic plants would be a very important in defining structure on multiple levels. As aquatic plants decompose and turn into earth they serve to maintain overall mass of the raised bed in addition to augmenting the nutritional structure, or content, of the soil. The soil fertility of the raised bed is continuously renewed by scooping up and applying sediments and mud from the bottom of the waterway onto the raised fields, water plants cultivated on the surface of the waterways are intermittently layered with dredged material.

Benefits of the chinampa system are significantly amplified when the fields are tree-lined. once mature and fully leaved, the trees create a canopy which serves a variety of crucial functions. Trees anchor the beds, creating a boundary and infrastructure. As trees grow larger their fruit and foliage drop off onto the beds and in the water where they function as mulch, or into the water where they decompose and turn into nutrients, or they are eaten by aquaculture species such as prawns, fish, turtles, caiman, and so forth. Planting trees helps enable microclimates; trees both block the wind and hold air in and underneath the canopy which achieves a higher temperatures and humidity levels thus greatly reducing, if not eliminating, frost damage and crop failure that would other wise occur in exposed areas (Arco & Abrams 2006). “Creating channels of warmer air, the morphology of raised fields and associated canals can raise air temperatures as much as 6.3 degrees Celsius above that of dry fields.” (Crossley 1999: 280)  

Chinampas also regulate micro-climates by moving and retaining moisture through capillary action (between layers of soil and organic matter), the system promotes the cycle of nutrients between compartments. The result is living soil, with its own respiratory and circulatory functioning. Chinampas are also high in microbial organisms, both in the earth and water, which promote high yields of terrestrial and aquatic plants by continuous cropping and utilization of the diversity of niches.

Ingenious seed germination beds and seedling nurseries were employed in the chinampa system by the Aztecs, the Maya, and, most likely, Mayan predecessors. At the edge of the chinampa bed, at the water’s edge, low terraces are formed. These perpetually moist and humid environments, called “almacigas”, are filled and maintained with ultra-nutritious sludge scooped from the bottom of the chinampa canal with a customized long-handled pole basket called the “zoquimaitl”, seeds are germinated and cared for in these customized environments. “These seedbeds with their concomitant protective and growth promoting mechanisms are the real core of chinampa agriculture. Without them this type of cultivation could function no more effectively than any other kind” (Outerbridge 1987: 80).

Coe (1964) provides details of this practice: At one end of the chinampa near a canal the almaciga is made by spreading a thick layer of mud over a bed of waterweeds.  After several days, when the mud is hard enough, it is cut into little rectangular blocks called chapines.  The chinamperomakes a hole in each chapine with a finger or a stick, drops in the seed or cutting and covers it with either human or livestock manure.  For protection against the occasional winter frosts the seedbed is covered with reeds or old newspapers, however the introduction of trees along the perimeters or within the beds is an effective method to create microclimate underneath the canopy, raising the temperature and humidity, thus avoiding frosts. During dry weather the sprouting plants are watered by hand.  once the plant is ready to be transplanted a cube is cut around each small seedling which is then directly placed in its designated place, which has been preconditioned with canal mud and a thick mulch of water plants (Coe 1964).

The highly logical and strategic placement of the almaciga is superior to the conventional centralized nursery system for a few reasons: For one, as mentioned, it maintains its own moisture and humidity, even during drought it is in close proximity to a water source, reducing labor input in the wasteful, time-consuming task of irrigating a large nursery area; plants are propagated exactly where they will be transplanted, maintained and eventually harvested, this greatly cuts back on unnecessary and inefficient transportation and transplants required by a centralized nursery; in addition you are able to mass propagate without using pots, bags and plastic containers; an additional benefit is that plants are germinated in the same soil that they will be transplanted to, this results in heightened rates of growth and productivity, the plant will be better adapted to the soil type. Another point is that the nutrient content of the canal water used for irrigation is far more complete and consistent in composition than any human-fabricated organic or chemical fertilizer.

The chinampa system is not only highly productive in terms of the rate and amount of production per land area and per inputs, but also sustainable in the sense of continuous long-term, year-round productivity. Facing a variety of constraints such as hydrological and climactic factors in addition to increasing demand for food, Aztec chinamperos successfully reached an equilibrium between sustained yields and ecological and management factors (Redclift 1987; Torres-Lima et al. 1994). Interestingly, Berres (2000) reports on how chinampa canals were not simply smaller versions of the lake on which they were constructed, including similar numbers and distributions of species and habitats, chinampa canals have actually been found to be moreproductive with heightened levels of biodiversity due to the creation of a wide variety of microenvironments (Berres 2000).