인간을 포함한 동물에게도 마찬가지이지만, 빛은 식물의 성장에 가장 중요한 요소 가운데 하나입니다. 식물, 특히 작물은 빛을 제대로 충분히 받아야지만 광합성을 통해 무럭무럭 성장할 수 있습니다. 그를 통해 그 결과물인 열매나 씨앗 등을 얻는 것이 농사입니다. 그래서 농사에서는 자신이 재배하려는 작물이 햇빛을 잘 받을 수 있도록 설계하는 작업이 중요합니다. 그러한 작업의 하나가 바로 우리가 작물의 씨앗이나 모종을 심을 때 일정하게 열과 오를 맞추는 일입니다. 일정한 간격으로 작물을 심는 건, 다른 무엇보다 작물이 햇빛을 충분히 받도록 하기 위한 의도적인 행위입니다. 물론 그를 통해 바람(공기)이 잘 통하도록 하고, 꽃가루가 잘 이동하도록 하며, 뿌리가 잘 내리도록 도울 수도 있지만요. 


넓은 농지에 한 가지 작물만 심을 때는 이런 빛 문제를 별로 고민할 필요가 없을 겁니다. 하지만 한정된 농지에 여러 가지 작물을 심으려 할 때는 서로 다른 작물들 사이의 빛 관계를 고려하지 않을 수 없습니다. 소농이나 요즘 새로 등장한 도시농부들이 자급을 목적으로 다양한 작물을 재배할 때에 해당될 겁니다. 이렇게 여러 가지 작물을 한 농지에서 함께 재배하는 것을 보통 섞어짓기(混作, mixed cropping)라고 합니다. 섞어짓기에는 다양한 방법이 있지만, 여기에서는 중앙아메리카를 중심으로 행해진 ‘세 자매(three sisters) 농법’을 이야기하려 합니다.


세 자매는 세 가지 작물을 가리키는데 옥수수와 덩굴콩, 호박이 그것입니다. 그러니까 세 자매 농법은 옥수수와 덩굴콩 및 호박을 한 밭에서 함께 기르는 농사법이라고 할 수 있습니다. 그 원리는 이러합니다. 위로 쭉쭉 자라는 옥수수를 심고, 그리고 옥수수 옆에는 그걸 지주로 삼아 감고 올라가며 자라는 덩굴콩을 심습니다. 마지막으로 옥수수 사이의 고랑에 덩굴을 뻗는 호박을 심는 것이지요. 이런 방식으로 재배하면 서로가 서로를 해치지 않고, 특히 빛을 두고 심하게 경쟁하지 않으며 성장하게 됩니다. 또한 거름이 많이 필요한 옥수수는 덩굴콩에 공생하는 뿌리혹박테리아가 양분 섭취에 도움을 주고, 지주가 필요한 덩굴콩은 옥수수와 공생하며, 호박은 고랑 부분을 장악해 여러 풀이 싹이 터 자라는 걸 억제하는 효과를 얻을 수 있다고 합니다. 


다음 그림은 호박 홑짓기, 옥수수 홑짓기, 호박과 옥수수 섞어짓기에 따라 지표면에 이르는 빛이 얼마나 감소하는지를 보여줍니다. 호박만 심었을 때보다 호박과 옥수수를 섞어짓기로 재배하면 호박에 이르는 빛의 양이 확연히 감소하긴 하지만, 이 정도의 빛으로도 호박은 충분히 성장할 수 있습니다. 호박잎이 한여름의 뜨거운 햇빛을 피하려 오그라드는 걸 안다면 오히려 옥수수가 만들어주는 그늘이 호박에게는 더 이로울 수 있겠지요. 또 호박과 옥수수가 더 많은 빛을 차단하기에 지표에서 풀의 씨앗이 싹트거나 자라기에 훨씬 안 좋은 조건을 형성한다는 사실도 짐작할 수 있습니다.


농사법에 따른 빛의 감소율. (출처: Fujiyoshi, 1997) 



이러한 원리를 다른 섞어짓기 농사법에도 적용할 수 있을 겁니다. 바로 상추 같은 잎채소에게 말이죠. 상추 역시 한여름의 뜨거운 햇빛을 싫어하는 특성이 있으니 적당히 그늘을 드리울 수 있는 다른 작물과 함께 재배하는 것도 좋은 방법이 됩니다. 식물에게 햇빛이 중요하다지만, 너무 지나치게 먹으면 독이 될 수도 있다고나 할까요? 농부들은 이를 알고 적절한 방법을 동원해 여러 가지 작물을 재배하곤 했습니다. 예전부터 알려진 섞어짓기의 방법은 참으로 무궁무진하게 다양합니다. 오늘 소개한 세 자매 농법도 그것들 가운데 하나입니다. 승자가 모든 걸 독식하는 무한경쟁은 나쁘다고들 하지만, 이런 식으로 서로가 서로의 성장을 돕는 경쟁은 모두에게 도움이 될 수도 있지 않을까 하는 생각이 듭니다. 그러한 결과를 얻으려면 작물을 심기에 앞서 미리 충분히 계산하고 심사숙고하여 설계하는 일이 필요하다는 건 당연한 일이겠지요.

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북미의 호박벌 유전자를 조사한 결과, 북미 원주민들이 호박 농사를 짓는 것과 함께 호박벌들이 곳곳으로 확산되었다고 한다.


너무너무 흥미로운 내용이라 기록을 남긴다.



http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1833/20160443




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고추에 병 하나 없이 깨끗함. 이건 초록물의 효과일까? 


호박은 별로 달리는 게 없음. 


오이는 오늘 잔뜩 땄다. 반 푸대는 되겠다.



토마토는 이례적으로 사상 최초로 병으로 시들거림. 


고구마는 폭풍 확산 중. 거기에 섞어짓기하는 조도 이삭이 나와 잘 크고 있음.



기장은 이삭이 나와 조금씩 익어가고 있다. 이걸 새들에게서 어떻게 보호할지 걱정이 되기 시작.



콩은 무럭무럭 자라서 꽃이 피었음. 하얀꽃과 보라꽃.



팥은 튼실하게 자라고 있음. 


녹두는 이제 꽃이 피면서 하나씩 꼬투리가 달리기 시작. 



밭벼는 아직 이삭이 패지 않았음. 논벼들은 벌써 이삭이 패기 시작하던데 좀 늦다.



이상 오늘의 텃밭.




마지막으로 텃밭 지킴이... 사마귀...


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우리가 호박잎을 먹듯이, 베트남에서도 박과의 하나인 카요테의 새순을 먹는다.

우리가 나물을 무쳐 먹듯이, 그것과 똑같이 살짝 데쳐서 먹는다.



개발도상국 사람들, 가난하고 지저분하고 거칠다?

이건 편견임이 틀림없다.

그네들의 사진을 보면, 그런 곳에서만 찍어서 그런지도 모르겠지만 정말 순박하고 아름다운 웃음을 보여준다.

아래에 카요테 새순을 잘라 나르는 아가씨의 얼굴도 참 맑다.





나른 카요테 새순은 시장에 내다팔기 위해 잘 추려서 단으로 묶는다.





1단에 무려 1kg! 엄청 많네.





카요테는 이렇게 생겼다. 호박과 친척.




언제 베트남에 가면 저 카요테 나물을 먹어 봐야지.

베트남 음식은 한국 사람 입맛에도 잘 맞더라. 이것도 맛있을 것 같다.




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4월 30일 밭에 심은 호박의 새싹이 드디어 나왔다. 

오늘이 13일이니 열흘 정도 걸림 셈이다.

새싹이 땅을 열고 나오는 모습은 언제 봐도 감동이다. 이 세계에 잘 왔다 호박아, 함께 잘 살아보자. 




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The concept of companion planting, in which one plant helps the other, is the basic idea behind the Three Sisters, but focusing on this alone glosses over many of the nuances in native garden traditions.

Photo By Rob Cardillo Photography




Considering how corn, beans, squash and other “New World” foods have changed the course of human culture, the time is ripe to take a fresh look at Native American gardening. Here, within easy reach, is one of the greatest horticultural treasures — a system of gardening that is, by definition, an icon of biodiversity. Offering a rich array of unusual tastes and textures, the Native American garden is part and parcel of what I consider the “soul” of American food. And yet the full story is not exactly a happy one.


Years ago I had the pleasure of chatting with the late Gladys Tantaquidgeon (1899-2005), a Mohegan anthropologist with whom I discussed some of the pressing issues facing Native American gardening. She expressed frustration about Mohegan garden seeds not being preserved during the 19th century, and how this loss is reflected by what Mohegans — tribespeople from upstate New York and later Connecticut — grow in their gardens today.

Chief James “Lone Bear” Revey (1924-1998) of the N.J. Sand Hill Band of the Delaware Nation also devoted many hours to passionate discussion with me on the seed losses taking place among his people. The causes have been many — inroads of changing lifestyles, poverty, government programs forcing native peoples into a mainstream mold, the loss of foodways and native religions — and the results have at times been devastating.

But much has survived. There are perhaps two distinct Native American gardens: the stereotypical one many of us envision, consisting of just the “Three Sisters” (corn, beans and squash), and a more complex one that served not only as a source of food for native peoples, but was also an extension of their religions. For many tribes, each plant was assigned a specific spiritual role, and each part of the plant (the roots, stems, leaves and flowers, as well as the fruits) was imbued with deep meaning and a role in native healing practices.

Reproducing a Native American garden isn’t easy, which is why I’d like to make this a clarion call to find a way to preserve this heritage. This imperative is especially urgent given the spread of genetically modified corn and the radical manner in which it has transformed corn from the nurturing “mother” of Native American culture into a largely inedible, industrial material. The innate spirituality of this graceful plant has been grossly denatured. Planting a Native American garden is a rewarding way to recapture this connection with the Earth.



The Real Three Sisters Garden


The concept of companion planting, in which one plant helps the other, is the basic idea behind the Three Sisters, but focusing on this alone glosses over many of the nuances in native garden traditions. Growing plants to work together symbiotically — using hills of corn to serve as poles for beans, and interplanting this with squash to keep down invasive weeds — is as much about compatibility and harnessing nature to do part of the work as it is a study in what we take from nature and what we give back. Modern agribusiness is based on yields extracted from the land as though strip mining. The Native American garden, which was actually a form of small-scale farming, made the land richer — one reason why early settlers were eager to seize Native American fields.

Some of the earliest illustrations that have survived of Native American fields — depictions of patches of corn and squash from the 1580s — show no evidence of Three Sisters gardening. They do show a clear understanding of the separation of corn varieties so they tassel at different times and thus do not cross-pollinate. Some native peoples farmed with other mixes of plants. The Hopi introduced a fragrant wildflower into their gardens to attract pollinators. Other peoples intermingled their corn and beans with sunflowers, which make wonderful “poles” for beans that grow too tall to climb up cornstalks.

Native American gardens were fine-tuned to their local micro-climate, and this is a feature often overlooked by gardeners today. one seed does not fit all gardens. Native peoples maintained a wide selection of plants because they often moved around, so what may have worked well in North Carolina among the Cherokee may not have been successful on the Great Plains. The Pawnee of the Midwest, for example, maintained four sacred corn varieties, of which their white-flour corn, called “Mother Corn,” was the most highly venerated. If one failed, they had others they could rely on.

Native American Corn

Native corns are heartier and generally more drought-resistant and adaptable than modern-day industrial varieties. Choosing the right corn to grow in your region is important, especially because the corn more or less serves as the “framework” for a Native American garden. If you plan to save seed for next year, choose one variety of corn to grow at a time in a given area to prevent cross-pollination.


Pure strains of native corns are difficult to distinguish unless they’ve been carefully grown in isolation, such as those sold by Native Seeds/SEARCH, a nonprofit headquartered in Tucson, Ariz. Some Native American cultural museums sell seeds connected with their cultures, and Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, has many members who offer seeds believed to have come from Native American sources in its annual yearbook.

I have been growing native corns for many years and recently began large-scale grow-outs at Mill Hollow Farm near Edgemont, Pa. Two corns in particular — ‘Tutelo Strawberry’ (a short-eared flint) and ‘Delaware Indian Puhwem’ (flour corn) — have done extremely well, and seeds are available directly from the farm (see the chart key in Seed Varieties for Your Native American Garden). In the future, I plan to offer some Seneca corns, particularly ‘Ha-Go-Wa’ (hominy corn) and ‘Blue Bear Dance,’ as well as ‘Tuscarora’ flour corn.

Native American Squash and Beans

Locating authentic Native American squash for your garden will prove extra challenging, because many of the squash varieties have been “improved” over the years by plant breeders looking for characteristics that appeal to present-day cooks. ‘Early White Scallop’ and ‘Yellow Summer Crookneck’ are examples of this kind of improved plant stock. While both can be documented to the 18th century and earlier, they are somewhat different from the Native American originals. The old-style plants were vining rather than bush in habit, for example.

Aside from pattypan squash, finger squash and a few others, not many varieties of squash and pumpkins have survived from early Native American gardens, especially in the eastern part of the United States. I have been involved in a project in my own garden to recover Nanticoke “maycocks,” an old native name for summer squash eaten green. These squash probably represent a range of what native peoples were looking for in squash, as some are good for cooking fresh, some for drying, some for seed oil, and others for long-term storage.

There are a great many Native American beans, but few of them are preserved under their original Native American names. After quite a bit of research and some luck, I discovered that the meaty ‘Ohio Pole Bean’ — a favorite of mine — was actually an old variety grown by the Delaware, Potawatomi, Shawnee and Miami living in the vicinity of Ft. Wayne, Ind., in the 1790s. The ‘Amish Nuttle’ bean is another Native American variety that has come down to us under several non-native names. The chart in Seed Varieties for Your Native American Garden has many more recommended varieties.


 http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/native-american-gardening-zm0z13fmzsto.aspx?page=3#ixzz2Iav870GO

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82호_먹고 보고 즐기는 호박.pdf



Ⅰ. 넝쿨째 굴러들어온 호박

○ 약 9,000년 전부터 아메리카 대륙에서 재배되기 시작한 호박은 15세기 말부터 전 세계로  전파되었 고, 우리나라로의 전파는 1600년대 초로 추정
○ 세계적으로 30여 종의 호박이 있으며 동양계, 서양계, 페포계의 3종이 가장 널리 재배
○ ‘11년 우리나라는 2,511억 원의 호박 생산액을 달성하며 꾸준히 성장 중에 있으며, 일본,  싱가포르, 러시아 등에 단호박 중심의 수출이 추진 중



Ⅱ. 먹고, 보고, 즐기는 호박
○ 건강식품 소개에 빠지지 않는 스타급 농산물로 한방에서는 여러 가지 질병을 치료해주는 약재로 사용되어 왔으며 현대과학으로도 증명
○ 웰빙식과 다이어트 식품으로 젊은 층에까지 인기가 높아지고 있으며, 기능성식품과 식품업계에서의 활용도도 증가 중에 있음
○ 할로윈 데이의 호박 초롱에서 시작된 호박 조각이 이제는 공예작품을 넘어 예술로까지 발전되고 있으며, 공모전을 통한 유명 작가도 탄생 
○ 할로윈 데이를 기념하고 수확의 기쁨을 나누기 위해 오래전부터 개최되어 온 호박 축제가 지역에 기여한다는 것이 매우 중요한 특징
○ 지역 활성화와 농가소득 향상을 위해 호박을 지역 특성화 사업의 테마로 이용하고 있으며, 성공한 영농 사례들이 다수 존재



Ⅲ. 시사점
○ 도시농업의 좋은 소재이며, 고령층과 귀농인력에게는 재배가 쉬우면서 소득을 올릴 수 있는 작목으로 성장가능성이 큼
○ 호박 산업의 최대의 관건은 시장 규모를 확대하는 것으로 육종, 식품가공, 유통 등 연구개발 투자가 필요
○ 도심 근린공원을 도시농업, 체험농장 등으로 특화하는 방안이나 귀농귀촌 단지 조성 및 특성화사업지원 정책도 고려해볼 필요


82호_먹고 보고 즐기는 호박.pdf
3.46MB
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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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


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