The roots of farming

In Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine, noted ethnobiologist and writer Gary Nabhan sets out to determine what, if anything, persists of traditional seeds and farmer knowledge; this in a time when what we designate as "modern agriculture" and "development" are displacing both traditional crop varieties and their protectors. In this absorbing book, the author conducts his search by consulting the field notebooks of the late Nikolay Vavilov, one of the world's great traveling botanists, and following his footsteps back to nine of "the nursery grounds of the world's ancient seeds."

The story begins in 1941 with Russia's emergency evacuation of the Hermitage Museum in the face of an imminent German invasion, then reveals the Soviet Union's simultaneous failure to secure what was perhaps an even more precious treasure. Only a few blocks from the Hermitage was a collection of more than 380,000 "living, breathing samples of seeds, roots and fruits of some 2500 species of food crops that had been collected by Russia's world-class cadre of plant explorers who had worked for the Bureau of Applied Botany since 1894."

Foremost among these prominent botanists was Nikolay Vavilov, born in Moscow in 1887 in a time of recurrent famines. Growing up in an era that viewed science as a panacea for all mankind's problems, he chose to study plant pathology, seeking to understand, among other things, what made plants susceptible or immune to disease. His studies were driven by his extraordinary passion for travel, which Nabhan described as "his lifelong obsession--taking long excursions into the countryside to observe how traditional agriculture functioned in the fields of peasant farmers." Pursuing this passion Vavilov organized 115 research expeditions to collect seeds of food crops on 5 continents. Along the way he mastered 15 languages so he could talk to scholars anywhere and farmers everywhere. At work, he must have been an extraordinary sight; all the photographs of Vavilov in the book show him in a jacket, vest, tie, and hat--in the field.

Revisiting the sites of Vavilov's expeditions, Nabhan finds inevitable change and loss, and some surprising continuities. In many high, remote places indigenous farmers still tend their crops and bring foods to open markets bustling in the same locations where Vavilov first visited them. In Ethiopia, for example, Nabhan found a nation continuing to benefit from Vavilov's original visit and his "quest for unusual seeds." The Ethiopians' persistent effort to conserve their "farmer's varieties" engendered such resistance to the introduction of high-input hybrids after the 1980 famine, that the acreage devoted to indigenous crops like teff increased when adequate rainfall returned. It was also in Ethiopia that Nabhan found an open market laid out under the sprawling branches of what Nabhan saw as "the tree where man was born," exactly where Vavilov had found it.

Like Vavilov, Nabhan wanted to "sample the legendary oases of the Sahara strewn along the Spice Trail" in the Magreb region of North Africa, and found that date, olive and jujube trees still dominate the oasis landscape. Though the under-story crops had changed, Nabhan found the farmers growing heirloom varieties of vegetables that could tolerate the heat and soil alkalinity.

In the Pamir highlands of Central Asia, climate change has altered the heights at which traditional plants and animals are grown--wheat planted at higher elevations crowds out barley, rye and oats, while Karakul sheep now pasture above 1300 feet, risking snow leopard attack.

Sometimes Nabhan found that much of what Vavilov's notes recorded was gone. Most of the fragrant wild apple forests of Kazakhstan, which so astonished Vavilov have fallen to urban expansion. Since 1960, 70 to 80% of the apple forests in the mountains surrounding Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata) have vanished, though efforts are being made to save a few varieties. In Lebanon, already lured into export agriculture by Vavilov's time and subsequently torn apart by war, Nabhan found hope only in rising ecological awareness.

In 1930 and 1932 Vavilov made his final research trips. He traveled to Nabhan's own stomping grounds; the U.S. southwest, the Sierra Madre and Latin America. Nabhan's richly detailed accounts of these areas address the challenges of dry-land and tropical agriculture, but Vavilov's Latin American visit--14 countries in 8 months--had about it a sense of desperation, as if the scientist knew it was his last trip. Before he left, the Soviet Union had begun "its free fall" into famine, and Stalin was looking for a scapegoat. But Vavilov could not resist going. He was widely criticized at home for not having staved off the famine. Ultimately accused of intentionally wrecking Soviet agriculture, he slowly starved in prison and died in 1943.

The message of Vavilov's travels long outlives him. Simply preserving seeds, whether in regional seed banks or in the great Svalbard vault inside the Arctic Circle, cannot preserve the ongoing diversity maintained by indigenous farmers. Where Our Food Comes From is an urgent reminder that we must work to save not only the seeds that feed us but the farmers who grow and select them--those "vernacular plant breeders" on whom the long-term vitality of those seeds and a diverse agriculture depends.

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine, by Gary Nabhan, Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2008. 266 pp. ISBN: 978-1-597-26399-3. $24.95.

Joan Dye Gussow is a Professor Emeritus of nutrition and education at Columbia University. She is an avid grower and the author of This Organic Life.

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