💭 Biblical swarms of giant Crickets are turning US farms to dust
Northern Oregon rangeland, Jordan Maley and April Aamodt are on the lookout for Mormon crickets, giant insects that can ravage crops.
“There’s one right there,” Aamodt says.
They’re not hard to spot. The insects, which can grow larger than 2 inches (5 centimeters), blot the asphalt.
Mormon crickets are not new to Oregon. Native to western North America, their name dates back to the 1800s, when they ruined the fields of Mormon settlers in Utah. But amidst drought and warming temperatures — conditions favored by the insects — outbreaks across the West have worsened.
Can they be a secret tool in the battle against climate change?
ETHIOPIA IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST CENTERS of major and minor crop diversity. Ethiopian farmers have grown wheat, barley, sorghum, and peas for millennia, passing seeds from one generation to the next through an informal community-based seed sharing network.
Despite this tradition of agricultural biodiversity, Ethiopia is also an arid region, one vulnerable to climate change and drought. At a time of increasing globalization, Ethiopian farmers in recent generations have discarded seeds from hundreds of traditional grains in favor of a select few non-native industrial hybrids, but after many of these modern crops failed—partially due to climate change—farmers are shifting away from “modern” crops to safeguard the future and livelihood of Ethiopian rural communities.
Beginning in 2014, an ambitious project called Seeds for Needs, created with joint support from Ethiopian farmers and researchers at Bioversity International, Mekelle University, and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, began researching Ethiopia’s past to reawaken ancient grains that might provide solutions to the country’s extreme vulnerability to drought and other environmental conditions.
TIGRAY IS ONE OF NINE REGIONAL STATES of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia, a country with over 100 million people. It is a small region, with only 5.5 million people, most of whom belong to the Tigrinya ethnic group, a vital cultural and political fixture in the country’s social landscape. While the Ethiopian population is growing rapidly—the average woman has four children in her lifetime (World Bank)— its food systems cannot keep up with growing demand. Consequently, undernutrition contributes to a child mortality rate of 28%, with stunting affecting 38% of children under the age of five (UNICEF).
Improving nutrition is made increasingly difficult by climate change, which now impacts healthcare, the environment, and the productivity of many crops and livestock. Thanks to its rich heritage of agricultural biodiversity, Ethiopia has the capacity to address undernutrition by enhancing agrobiodiversity, which spreads agricultural “risk” by growing a range of crops to meet the challenges of uncertain times. Unfortunately, most agronomic research is generally overlooked, while policymakers incorrectly assume that indigenous crops developed by hundreds of generations of farmers are less productive and unable to contribute significantly to food security. Policymakers have recently encouraged farmers to grow a small collection of modern grains to please food processors and international markets. This approach, which rarely includes traditional varieties, now threatens the country’s agricultural biodiversity and with it the survival of the country’s food production system.
One solution may come from the country’s near past. The Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, the largest and oldest Seed Bank in Africa, holds 6,000 accessions (different varieties) of teff, 7,000 accessions of durum wheat, and 12,000 accessions of barley. Can the bio-regional genetics of these seeds provide clues that may aid in the struggle against climate change? The international coalition behind Seeds for Needs thinks so. Led by Bioversity International, Scuola S. Anna in Pisa, Mekelle University, Amhara Region Agricultural Research Institute (ARARI), and the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute (EBI), this project has adopted a holistic, participatory action-driven approach to researching whether traditional varieties can help solve today’s agricultural challenges. The program, which has grown to include GIZ, the World Bank, the Integrated Seed System Development (a Dutch initiative), and the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture, uses extremely simple yet effective logic: if 4000 ancient grain varieties kept in the National Gene Bank’s seed vaults survived and adapted for millennia on farmers’ fields, they may provide benefits if returned to the very farmers who first developed and saved them. In Tigrinya, the farmers have a name for the initiative: Wehabit … or “We got it back”.
💭 Exotic, Gluten-Free Grain Grows in Popularity — Enough to Cause a Dust-Up in Eastern Oregon
A little-known grain from the Horn of Africa — billed as the next wave in America’s quest for healthy foods — is proving that competition for a hot commodity can get downright nasty.
Only a few thousand acres of Oregon farmland are believed devoted to the production of teff. But people suffering from gluten intolerance together with immigrants hungry for traditional Ethiopian and Eritrean ethnic dishes are driving up the domestic demand for the iron-rich grain.
All of which appears to have played into an angry clash between rival teff traders in the out-of-the-way Starlite Cafe last year in Vale.
Tiny grain
In Ethiopia:
Sometimes known as “love-grass,” teff was domesticated in Ethiopia in ancient times and is commonly grown the country’s highlands. While it’s the preferred grain of the Ethiopian people, it also is the country’s most expensive grain. It covers the greatest area of farmland of any Ethiopian crop, but has low per-acre yields and requires labor-intensive harvesting and processing techniques.
In U.S.:
How much teff is grown here is difficult to determine. OSU Extension agent Rich Roseberg calls it a “specialty crop.” “It’s a very attractive plant,” he says. “There are some types that have a purplish seed head and leaf that we are looking at as potentially ornamental.”
Nutrition:
Teff is 11 percent protein, 80 percent complex carbohydrates and 3 percent fat, according to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. It’s an excellent source of essential amino acids, particularly lysine, often deficient in grain foods. It’s gluten-free, making it an alternative to wheat, rye and barley.
Wayne Carlson of Caldwell Idaho, founder of The Teff Co., has pleaded guilty in Malheur County Circuit Court to a misdemeanor harassment charge in the incident with Tesfa Drar, who was born in Ethiopia and now lives in Minneapolis.
“This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” said Drar, a U.S. resident since 1981. “I was shocked.”
Court records say Carlson sat down beside Drar, who was meeting with a prospective teff grower in the cafe, and accused him of cheating growers and smuggling seed into the U.S. from Ethiopia. The two had never before met face-to-face, and Carlson allegedly used a racial epithet and told Drar to go back to his own country.
Carlson was sentenced in April to 12 months of probation, community service and ordered to write an apology to Drar.
The confrontation raised a lot of eyebrows. Teff production is a mere blip on the annual U.S. Department of Agriculture’s major agricultural crop charts. It stands in obscurity alongside organically grown Kamut, an ancient khorasan wheat from Egypt, and quinoa from the Andes of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, in the ranks of exotic grains newly popular among health food consumers.
Drar said he thinks Carlson is afraid he’s going to take over the international teff business. “I have better access to the consumers who buy it,” he said.
Carlson and his attorney, Mike Mahoney of Vale, didn’t return phone calls for comment.
Teff is increasingly embraced as a high-quality horse hay and grown in at least 25 states, according to the University of Nevada Extension Service. Nevada is emerging as a big teff state, with 15 variations grown in Churchill County alone, mostly for cattle and horse forage.
Farmers in Oregon cultivate about 3,000 acres of teff for hay, said Rich Roseberg, an
Oregon State University Extension agentin Klamath Falls. They grow another 1,000 acres for food grain, he estimated.
Nationally, fewer than 10,000 acres are believed dedicated to food grain production of teff for milling into flour.
That’s in stark contrast to 53 million acres of wheat, 73 million acres of corn and 73 million acres of soybeans harvested annually in the United States.
Consumers, however, are catching the buzz that teff is nutritious, gluten-free and can be baked into breads, cookies, pizza crusts and other pastries. It’s widely used in East Africa for a flatbread called injera, for a porridge similar to cream of wheat and as a fermented alcoholic beverage.
Neil Koberstein, purchasing manager at Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods of Milwaukie, buys about 18,000 pounds of teff every 45 days to be stone ground into flour and sold, he said. That’s up from 7,500 pounds a decade ago.
“We’ve had remarkable growth in the last 10 years,” Koberstein said.
Teff seeds are so tiny, about 1.25 million to the pound, that “if you were to puncture a bag, it pours out like water,” Koberstein said. It takes about 150 teff seeds to equal a single grain of wheat.
For some people, flat breads and other pastries made from teff flour are an acquired taste, he noted. Taste descriptions range from sour to bland to delicious.
“Injera is sort of like a sourdough pancake,” said Brian Charlton, an OSU Extension agronomist in Klamath Falls who enjoys Ethiopian cuisine. “I liked it right away. I wish somebody would open a restaurant in Klamath Falls. I’d eat there all the time.”
Drar is adamant: Teff is the food of the future, and he wants everybody to eat it. His enthusiasm for the offbeat grain borders on the mystical and mythic:
“Ethiopians are always No. 1 as marathoners. Why do you think?” he asked, having dinner recently in the Hamley Steakhouse in Pendleton, where teff is definitely not on the menu. “It’s teff! They eat it three times a day!”
The word teff in the ancient Ethiopic language means “lost,” because the grains are prone to blowing away in the faintest breeze, he said. Three-thousand-year-old teff seeds have been found in Egyptian pyramids, he says.
Then, stealing a march on the biblical mustard seed, Drar added, “This is the smallest seed on Earth!”
Drar immigrated to America to study computer science and later to earn his living as a commodities trader. He was dismayed to find the injera that he was accustomed to having with his meals was absent from stores. He longed for it constantly.
Eventually, Drar flew to Ethiopia and brought 20 pounds of teff seed back to Minneapolis. He began cultivating a few acres, talked others into doing likewise and ultimately marketed his “Selam” brand of teff flour to ethnic grocery stores and restaurants.
These days, he travels the nation six months a year, using his van, smartphone and laptop as a mobile office. He takes orders for teff from ethnic stores and restaurants and works hard to convince farmers to partner with him in growing and marketing the grain.
Someday, he hopes to export American-grown teff to Ethiopia, which is too parched to grow enough for itself, he said.
“Teff is in my blood,” Drar said. “I don’t want to see people hungry.”
Nearly 1,500 people died of malnutrition in just part of Ethiopia’s blockaded Tigray region over a four-month period last year, including more than 350 young children, a new report by the region’s health bureau says
Nearly 1,500 people died of malnutrition in just part of Ethiopia’s blockaded Tigray region over a four-month period last year, including more than 350 young children, a new report by the region’s health bureau says. It cites more than 5,000 blockade-related deaths in all from hunger and disease in the largest official death toll yet associated with the country’s war.
“Deaths are alarmingly increasing,” including from easily preventable diseases like rabies as medicines run out or expire, the head of Tigray’s health bureau, Hagos Godefay, told The Associated Press late last year as the findings were being compiled. “This is one of the worst times of my life, I can tell you.”
His report on the findings, published Wednesday by the independent Ethiopia Insight, says 5,421 deaths were confirmed in Tigray between July and October in an assessment by his bureau and some international aid groups. It was the first such assessment since the war between Tigray and Ethiopian forces began in November 2020, he said.
The deaths were overwhelmingly from malnutrition, infectious disease and noncommunicable diseases as the health bureau and partners sought to gauge the effects on Tigray’s population of its health system being largely destroyed by combatants.
The deaths do not reflect people killed in combat, Hagos told the AP on Thursday in a call from the Tigray capital, Mekele, though the report reflects a small percentage of deaths from airstrikes.
The mortality assessment covered just roughly 40% of Tigray, he said, since occupation of some areas by combatants and the lack of fuel caused by the blockade has limited data-gathering and aid delivery.
“Since the magnitude of the destruction and health crisis in the inaccessible areas is undoubtedly high, the survey is bound to underreport the real extent of the crisis,” Hagos wrote.
Severe acute malnutrition in children under 5, at less than 2% in Tigray before the war, was now above 7%, he said. The assessment found at least 369 children under 5 had died of malnutrition, part of 1,479 people in all.
The AP last year confirmed the first starvation deaths under the blockade along with the government’s ban on humanitarian workers bringing medicines. even personal ones, into Tigray,
Hagos told the AP that without medical supplies or vaccines, easily preventable disease like measles were emerging in Tigray and COVID-19 has begun to spread. HIV patients “are coming all the time to my office to ask if drugs are coming or not. But my hands are tied,” he said. Earlier this month, the United Nations said Ethiopia’s government had released over 850,000 measles vaccines to Tigray,
Ethiopia’s government cut off almost all access to food aid, medical supplies, cash and fuel in June last year when the Tigray forces regained control of the region. Since then, the United Nations has repeatedly warned that less than 15% of the needed supplies have been entering Tigray under what it called a de facto humanitarian blockade. Ethiopia’s government has expressed concern about aid falling into the hands of fighters.
But under a new wave of pressure this month after Tigray forces retreated back into their region amid a military offensive, Ethiopia’s foreign ministry in a statement on Sunday said it was working with aid partners to facilitate daily cargo flights to Tigray “to transport much-needed medicines and supplies.” The government in part has blamed issues with aid delivery on insecurity it says is caused by Tigray forces.
It is not clear when the daily flights will begin, though the International Committee of the Red Cross on Wednesday announced that it had made its first delivery of medical supplies to Tigray since September, calling it “a huge relief.”
An ICRC spokeswoman told the AP that the cargo of surgical supplies and essential drugs would help to treat at least 200 injured people, and that the group intends to send more supplies in the coming days and weeks.
Ethiopian government spokesman Legesse Tulu and Health Minister Lia Tadesse did not immediately respond to questions on Thursday about the daily flights and when the government’s blockade would be lifted completely to allow full access to the region.
Ethiopia’s government has sought to restrict reporting on the war and detained some journalists under the state of emergency, including a video freelancer accredited to the AP, Amir Aman Kiyaro.+
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 27, 2022
😈 ከጦርነቱ መንፈሳዊና ስጋዊ ተልዕኮዎች መካከል፤
❖ እንሰትን + ጤፍን + እጣንን መውረስ ይገኝበታል
💭 A Crop Virtually Unknown Outside Ethiopia | False Banana
While climate change disrupts farming practices, a crop named false banana could be the answer to food scarcity issues. Scientists say that it has the potential to feed more than 100 million people.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 22, 2013
The Spanish company from Valencia, Spain, Amandín, has just started marketing and selling good-old ‘Teff/ጤፍ as a health drink. We Ethiopians eat + run, Europeans drink and …?
The Teff: a gluten-free cereal
Teff is a cereal first grown in Ethiopia 5.000 years ago. It is rich in fiber, carbohydrates and minerals (calcium, iron and magnesium). It is highly appreciated by sports practitioners for its properties in helping to restore energy levels. This drink has no added sugars. It only contains naturally occurring sugars. But its main virtue is that it is a gluten-free cereal making it perfect for all people with gluten intolerance.
The Amandín organic Teff drink, like the rest of Amandín vegetable drinks, is lactose free and does not contain milk proteins. And is low in fat. Amandín Organic Teff drink is certified a by Comité de Agricultura Ecológica de la Comunitat Valenciana, CAECV, and for the Comité de Agricultura Ecológica de la Unión Europea