아메리카 대륙, 특히 미국에서는 옥수수가 작물의 왕처럼 여겨졌다. 

그래서일까? 유전자변형 작물로 가장 처음 상용화된 것이 아마 옥수수이지?

상대적으로 밀은 여왕으로 취급되는 점이 무척 재미있다. 





728x90

'농담 > 씨앗-작물' 카테고리의 다른 글

잎 표면 세포의 다양성  (0) 2019.01.25
<일본 재래 벼 품종군의 맛 평가>   (0) 2019.01.25
바나나 꽃  (0) 2019.01.23
식물 육종의 역사  (0) 2019.01.23
매운 토마토를 개발한다  (0) 2019.01.10
이 옥수수는 북아메리카 대륙에 살고 있는 포니족이 재배하던 토종 옥수수라고 합니다. 이름은 옥수수알에 나타나는 무늬에서 알 수 있듯이, '독수리 옥수수'랍니다. 한국의 토종 씨앗들 같은 이름을 가지고 있지요.

포니족은 1870년대, 스탈린의 소련이 고려인들을 강제로 이주시켰듯이 미국 정부에 의해 자신들이 살던 고향에서 오클라호마로 강제 이주를 당하게 되었답니다. 그러면서 이 독수리 옥수수 씨앗을 들고 갔다고 하네요. 고려인들이 굶어가면서도 볍씨를 들고 갔듯이 말이지요.

허나 새로운 땅에서는 이전처럼 농사가 쉽지 않았다고 합니다. 그래서 많은 품종들이 사라졌는데 그 와중에도 살아남아 계속 보전되고 있는 것이 바로 이 옥수수라고 합니다.

동서고금을 막론하고 토종 씨앗의 역사는 유사한 모습을 보여주네요.





아래는 이 옥수수를 보전한 분입니다.






728x90

미국의 오하이오주가 지금은 옥수수와 대두로 뒤덮인 농업지대가 되었지만, 아주 오랜 옛날 이곳에 살던 원주민들은 섬프위드와 명아주, 메이그라스, 명아자여뀌 같은 걸 주로 먹고 보리를 아주 조금 이용했다는 고고학의 이야기. 그러니까 지금은 잡초로 취급되는 것들이 주식이었단다. 옥수수는 멕시코에서 작물화된 이후 서기 900년 이후에나 들어왔다고 한다.


http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170820/archaeology-ancient-seeds-pollen-show-ohios-lost-crops



섬프위드



메이그라스



명아주



명아자여뀌


728x90

'농담 > 농-문화' 카테고리의 다른 글

일본의 논 아트  (0) 2017.09.06
농사와 두개골의 변화  (0) 2017.08.26
인류는 왜 농사를 짓기 시작했는가?  (0) 2017.07.02
텃밭정원이 아니라 뜰밭!  (0) 2017.06.27
심각한 미국 농민들의 자살률 문제  (0) 2017.06.21


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.

ENLARGE

Man standing in foreground of a mountain landscape holds a cane in one hand and a root in the other

Courtesy Nancy Turner, University of Victoria
In British Columbia, Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) holds “xukwem” (riceroot), a traditional food of the first inhabitants of Canada’s northwest coast.

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:

* Three centuries ago, corn-farming Indians in today’s New York State were out-producing European wheat farmers

* The lack of plows in the Americas was not a hindrance but rather helped sustain soil fertility

* Stable, sophisticated food-gathering systems in parts of the Great Plains succumbed not to careless farmers but were drowned by dams on the big rivers

* Natives in British Columbia used a sophisticated permaculture to harvest the same plants year after year

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.

ENLARGE

Row of bright green lettuce between  dark brown dirt and tall grass.

Lettuce grows in soil containingpowdered charcoal. This traditional technology improves soil fertility and yield, and helped the Amazon basin support a large population before 1492.

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.

ENLARGE

Green bush with red berries; rocks visible on ground in bottom right.

Photo: ulalume
Salmonberry was a traditional food along the Northwest Coast, where people also tended and ate red huckleberry, high bush cranberry and crabapple.

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.”

Springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii)

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.”

ENLARGE

Map of rivers and completed tributary reservoirs of the Missouri River Basin, western U.S.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers1
The Pick-Sloan Program, enacted in 1944, built a series of large dams and reservoirs on the Missouri River and its tributaries.

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.”

ENLARGE

Man bends and looks through thick stand of small plants

Hog peanuts make seeds both above and below ground. The Lakota Sioux people ate their seeds until a dam on the Missouri River flooded the forest and extirpated the plant.

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.

ENLARGE


Photo: Musgrave Research Farm, Aurora N.Y., courtesy Jane Mt. Pleasant, Cornell University.
Native Americans grew many variations of the “three sisters” — a mound with squash, maize and beans. Beans climb the maize and add nitrogen to the soil; squash blocks sunlight, retarding weeds and keeping soil from parching. Maize produces a lot of carbohydrate calories, and forms a complete protein when combined with beans.

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:

* Much indigenous agriculture was permanent cropping

* Maize farmers in east-central North America produced three to five times as much grain per acre as European wheat farmers

* Indigenous cropping was often sustainable and since it did not deplete the soil, farmers did not need to create new fields by burning forest

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.









Courtesy Jane Mt. Pleasant

Native Americans grew corn on mounds to keep the roots dry during wet springs in the Northeastern United States.

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.

ENLARGE


Based on table from The Paradox of Plows and Productivity3.
In experiments replicating agriculture from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, Iroquois corn out-produced of European wheat. one bushel of shelled corn weighs 56 pounds; 1 pound per acre is 1.12 kg/hectare; error bars indicate ranges in the data.

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.

ENLARGE

Rows of corn on hillside in foreground and mountains and valleys in distance

Photo: Universidad la Molina, Peru, Universidad la Molina
Maize (called “corn” in the United States) can tolerate a wide range of tropical and temperate climates.

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.”

ENLARGE


Courtesy Eve Emshwiller, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A woman in Peru’s highlands harvests oca, the white tubers in her hand.

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.”

– David J. Tenenbaum


728x90

홍수 농법, 천 년을 사막에서 살아남은 방법

 

 

 

관개에서 홍수로

 

미국 아리조나주부터 멕시코의 소노라주에는 일본의 혼슈本州가 쏙 들어가 버릴 만큼 광대한 소로라 사막Sonoran Desert이 펼쳐져 있다. 코요테와 방울뱀, 붉은머리 독수리, 미국 독도마뱀 등이 서식하는데, 한낮의 기온이 40℃에 달하고 평균 강수량은 150~350㎜밖에 안 된다. 하지만 이런 가혹한 사막에서 세리족Seri, 피마족Pima, 파파고족Papago(콩의 사람들) 등의 선주민은 천 년이나 살아왔다. 게다가 파파고족은 풍족한 생활을 영위하여 누구나 먹을 만한 식량을 생산하고, 일이 끝나면 여가나 놀이, 대화를 즐길 여유가 있었다. 그 비밀은 도저히 농업이 행해질 수 없는 사막지대에서 그것을 가능케 하는 ‘농법’을 개발한 데에 있다.

 

소로라 사막.

 

 

그들은 홍수 농법, 홍수 수확, 마른 골짜기 농법, ‘악친akchin’ 농법 등 불리는 이름은 다양하지만, 강가나 마른 골짜기의 하류에서 ‘홍수 범람원 관개’라고도 할 수 있는 농법을 완성했다. 홍수 농법이란 일시적으로 넘친 홍수를 활용하고자 손으로 만든 운하나 계단밭, 구덩이, 웅덩이를 통해 범람원의 지형을 바꾸어 농업에 활용할 수 있도록 만든 농법이다. 사막이라 해도 1년에 3~15회는 비가 내린다. 특히 5~6번은 식물이 자랄 만큼 많이 온다.

 

예를 들면 7월의 어느 날, 사막의 강바닥을 거세게 쓸며 물이 내려온다. 그때 하천에는 물이 흐르는데 그것은 일시적인 것으로, 곧바로 땅속으로 침투되든지 연못이 된다. 파파고족은 이 물을 활용했다. 먼저 물의 속도를 미루나무, 버드나무, 덤불숲이 늦춘다. 이러한 나무의 일부도 일부러 심은 것이다. 그리고는 드넓은 평탄한 대지 위에 진흙이 모인다. 폭풍우는 고지대에서 콩과 식물의 질소를 함유한 기름진 흙, 설치동물의 배설물, 기타 분해된 바위 부스러기를 실어온다. 그래서 이 홍수 뒤에 남은 진흙에다 씨앗을 뿌리고, 다시 대지가 단단해지기 전에 수확을 한다다. 어느 파파고족의 사회는 100가족으로 구성되었는데, 240㎞의 유역으로부터 폭풍우가 실어온 물, 유기물, 양분을 활용하여 355㏊의 농장을 유지했다.

 

 

올씨를 선발

 

건조 지대에서 행해진 농업의 대부분은 지하수에 의존한다. 하지만 파파고족의 전통농업을 활용한 식량 생산 전략은 완전히 다르다. 그들은 아주 조금, 또 불규칙하게 얻을 수 있는 물을 이용하고자 빨리 자라는 옥수수, 호박, 콩 등의 작물을 선발했다. 불안정한 강우가 갑자기 내를 이루면, 다시 흙이 마를 때까지 2~3개월의 짧은 생육 기간에 빨리 자라는 품종이 있어야 한다. 옥수수는 50일 만에 자라고, 더위와 가뭄에 강한 덩굴강낭콩(tepary bean)도 파파고족에 의해 가장 중요한 단백질과 미네랄원이 되었다.

 

사와로 선인장.

 

 

또 파파고족은 4~9월까지는 사와로 선인장(Saguaro)과 가시배선인장의 열매나 야생 풀을 모았다. 코요테 호박(coyote gourd), 사막 아마란스, 악마의 발톱(devil’s claw) 등 半건조 상태에 알맞은 다양한 다즙 식물이나 선인장, 여러해살이풀 등을 찾아서 보호하고 수확하는 것으로 야생의 식물상도 조정해 왔다. 그리고 부족한 단백질은 큰뿔야생양, 뮬사슴, 페커리, 토끼를 잡아먹었다.

 

코요테 호박.

 

악마의 발톱.

 

 

사막의 연대 경제

 

파파고족의 관개 밭은 대개 1~1.6㏊이며, 작은 밭이 불규칙하게 분포되어 있었다. 이것도 홍수의 불규칙한 공간 분포에 대응한 것이다. 파파고족은 농가를 집약하거나, 단 1종류의 식물 자원에만 힘을 쏟거나, 단 한곳의 밭에서 많은 생산을 올리려고 하지 않았다. 모자란 수분으로도 수확량을 올릴 수 있는 씨앗은 구하더라도 토지는 구하지 않았다. 사막에서는 토지보다도 물이 한정인자이기에 이 전략에는 의미가 있다.

그렇지만 단 한 사람만의 힘으로는 홍수의 급류를 막을 수 없었다. 파파고족은 홍수의 물을 유도하기 위하여 공동의 노력을 필요로 했다. 1895년 이 체계에 주목한 백인 W. J. 맥기McGee는 어떠한 인간이나 생물이건 사막에서는 그것 없이는 살아갈 수 없는 이러한 체계를 ‘연대의 경제’라 부르며 칭찬했다. 그리고 파파고족은 사막의 생태계와 수리학, 농학에 대한 상세한 지식을 가지고 있었는데, 그것은 자연을 기술적으로 정복하려는 과학이 아닌 오히려 더욱 조심스럽게 자연과 접하고, 또 안전하게 번영할 수 있는 자급의 달성을 목적으로 하고 있었다.

지금 파파고족의 농법은 다시 평가를 받고 있다. 예를 들면 각 식물의 단백질 종류와 종자에 따른 수확량은 근대적인 관개로 재배하는 작물보다 파파고족의 홍수 농법의 그것이 더 많았다. 현재 전통적인 파파고족의 홍수 농업은 절멸한 상태다. 하지만 미국인이 파파고족의 전통적인 삶의 방식을 엉망진창으로 파괴하기 전까지는 훌륭한 성과를 올려왔다.

 

 

 

인용문헌

 (1) Worster, Donald, 1985. "Rivers of Empire: Water, and Aridity and the Growth of the American West, Pantheon Books, New York, pp. 33-35.

 (2) Miguel A Altieri and Parviz Koohafkan, Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders and Traditional Farming Communities, Third World Network, 2008.

728x90

+ Recent posts