Two days ago, Elaine Solowey, who will be my supervisor here at the Arava Institute, took us all out on a tour of the experimental orchard she founded about 25 years ago and which houses some unbelievable desert specimens from around the world. But collection is not the main agenda with her orchard – she is aiming to be a part of what she would call the second domestication. Agriculture began about 13,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and had independent foundings in a few other parts of the world like China and MesoAmerica. Through selection of seeds, farmers thousands of years ago domesticated essentially every single food that is eaten on a large scale today. But over the past fifty years, crop diversity, both species and genetic, has been rapidly declining as seed sales have conglomerated into fewer and fewer hands, and the demands of an international market for consistency lead to the same seeds and methods being practiced all over the world. Some put the number at about 2 percent a year. The concept of socio-ecological resilience is based around diversity and functional redundancy, and as those things decline, a system like the global food system is much more vulnerable to shocks.
A Marula Tree, native to Southern Africa, is one of the fruit trees that Elaine has successfully bred a couple lines of for high yield and big, juicy fruit. It's related to the mango, but you just have to bite into the fruit, tear a hole in the skin, and suck out the delicious juice. They're making it into brandy and fruit juice on the Kibbutz.
So Elaine is busy collecting wild desert plants with useful properties and attempting to domesticate them. As she says, she loves plants that “rejoice to be in the desert”, and most of the crops she’s working on use as much water in a year as the date palms next door use in a week, and need almost no pesticides or fertilizers. Her major success stories are four wild plants that she has selected over a few generations to the point where they can be planted commercially – one of which will be central to my life for the next two years: the Argan. This tree is endemic to about 100 million acres in Morrocco (now, due to deforestation and land use change, this is down to about 50 million), and is central to the lives of the people who live in the Argan forest. They use the tree for the oil contained in the nut of the fruit (which is also its trade value), but since the tree can remain green through periods where almost everything has gone dormant it can also provide much needed fodder for animals and shade when there’s nothing else around. It a beautiful tree with a very, very deep root system that flourishes in the driest of conditions and provides a very high quality oil, good fodder for animals, and extremely good wood when coppiced – Amazing! Looking around the experimental orchard, you’re struck by just how much valuable diversity and potential surrounds you.
This is a pitaya, the fruit of a cactus that Elaine has had success growing on the orchard and adapting to the extreme desert climate. The varieties she's developed are now off to other growers.
A couple interesting side notes about Elaine for those interested: One is that she was in the news a lot a couple years ago because of her central involvement in the germination of an ancient date seed recovered in an excavation of Herod’s Temple! The seedling, named Methuselah (I would have voted for Rip Van Winkle :-), is now a couple years old and growing strong. We may have right here at the Institute the re-animation of the ancient Judean date palm, thought to be functionally extinct. Another fantastic story arose from a project of hers consisting of growing Tibetan medicinal herbs to help preserve some very rare specimens. It just so happened that when the Dalai Lama was in Israel, he caught wind of the project and had to see it himself. There is a wonderful picture of Elaine and the Dalai Lama arm in arm holding a Pitaya.
This last one is the Argan, which will be my intellectual darling for the next two years. In the tree are goats (yes, goats). There is a special breed of goats in Morrocco that climbs the trees looking for tender shoots amongst the sharp thorns, and the ripe fruit containing the precious nut. In accounts dating back to the 17th century, a common experience is related about the fruit. Upon cutting it open, you are met with an incredibly delectable, almost cloying smell. Then you bite into the fruit and its taste makes you a little naseous. I have to say, this is entirely true.So what exactly will I be doing? People with aversions to science talk may want to stop reading now ;-). I will be examining the soil around the roots of the Argan to see what sort of creatures are symbiotic (literally, living together) with the tree roots. It is known that this tree is very mycorrhizal dependent, meaning that it grows much better when it has fungi infecting its roots. Here infecting is the technical term, and doesn’t mean they’re pathological, but the fungi really does penetrate the root cells. These fungi extend the surface area of the root system sometimes by as much as an order of magnitude, scavenging for scarce nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous in exchange for carbohydrates that the tree makes through photosynthesis. Since the trees are growing very well, and Elaine never inoculated them with any commercial strains of mycorrhiza, I want to figure out if they’ve recruited any little friends native to the soil here, and if so who they are. I’m pretty excited about it: symbioses are one of the most fascinating aspects of biology – and a potential way forward in thinking about sustainability.
So that’s a little taste of where I am and what I’ll be thinking about, I mean, besides navigating an explicitly multi-ethnic and very political living situation and program. Countdown till worlds collide: 8 days.
Woohoo!
p.s. I guess Eilat will have to wait for next time. Oops.
This blog really gets my goat.
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