The 37th Session of the Symposium on the Agricultural History of Eastern Europe (Voronezh, September 22–26, 2020)

The 37th Session of the Symposium on the Agricultural History of Eastern Europe was held in Voronezh in September 2020. The participants of the session raised an academic issue of “The Rural Social Life in the 10th–21st Century: Landowners/Landlords and Farmers”. Russian and Belorussian academics introduced the latest findings related to the social evolution of landowners and farmers and their relations with the state authorities.

The Importance of How Regions are Constructed

In this article the author discuss how many regions can be identified in the province of Bohuslän. Region is a construction that covers everything from landscape, people and economic structure, to nature, political structure and structures for subsistence. We have to keep this fact in mind, because these aspects, will be the reasons for how and why our material remains have the shape and distribution that they do. Different materials within the region can also be the result of the agricultural history, as well as the influences of the interested group of collectors could create for the artefacts. Therefore it seems most correct to use the term region only in the geographic sense.

The Life and Achievements of Hyder Bux Jatoi, With an Special Reference to His Social and Political Contributions

Comrade Hyder Bux Jatoi, also known as ‘Baba e Sindh’, was the most prominent leader of the farmer societies of pre-independence Pakistan. Although he was a bureaucrat turned into a farmer activist, but later he played a very important role in the social and political settings of the country at that time. Most of the Pakistani people remember him as a sign of change and renovation in the agricultural history of Pakistan. This was a great effort to credit the front-runners and their struggle; it is very prominent among the laborers and landless leaders of the world. He devoted his entire life to set peace up for the struggle of land ownership rights to dispossessed farmers, and highlighted the cause, to be noticed by the notables. The vision of Mr. Jatoi is still reflected in many situations when initiatives are taken by the various governments of the world to provide the masses with the basic requirements of development and peace.

Postharvest handling, grading and sorting.

Postharvest handling systems move produce from the grower to the consumer with minimal losses in quality and quantity providing a uniform, year round supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. The postharvest handling phase includes all stages of processing immediately following harvest and is characterised by various methods of pre-cooling, washing, cleaning, trimming, sorting, grading and packing. Postharvest handling and sorting has been in practice for as long as plants have been consumed by man. The earliest forms of handling systems would have simply involved dividing fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and other produce into those which were fully ripe and/or damaged and require immediate consumption and those which could be put aside and stored for future use. Removal of rotten and inedible plant material immediately postharvest would have been carried out with the objective of preventing contamination of any produce to be stored, further ripened or processed by drying. Washing, cleaning and trimming are the postharvest operations which have been in use the longest. For much of agricultural history, fresh fruits and vegetables were harvested and consumed within a short time frame, thus the requirement for extensive grading, packaging, cooling and transportation was minimal. However, since the 1940s there has been a shift from consumers buying mostly fresh seasonal locally grown produce, to a vast international trade in a wide range of horticultural commodities. Some, such as apples and kiwifruit, may be stored for up to a year at a time before sale and consumption. This shift in produce handling has meant an increased reliance on postharvest handling systems to grade, sort, treat, classify and store produce in the correct way to standardise sizes, colours and maturity levels in order to maximise storage life and quality. Produce is often transported over large distances, passing through many handling systems before sale. Thus, attention to sanitation and food safety has become an increasing concern in the postharvest industry. Modern packhouses incorporate many standards and procedures to ensure produce is of the highest compositional and safety quality for consumers. The use of strict guidelines for packhouse and field food handling systems, GAP process (good agricultural practices), correct storage, grading out of reject product and classification into maturity levels have all assisted with this.

Linking Coleopteran Diversity With Agricultural Management of Maize-Based Agroecosystems in Oaxaca, Mexico

Biodiversity is known to be influenced by agricultural practices in many ways. However, it is necessary to understand how this relation takes place in particular agroecosystems, sociocultural contexts and for specific biological groups, especially in highly biodiverse places. Also, in order to systematically study and track how biodiversity responds or changes with agricultural practices, it is necessary to find groups that can be used as practical indicators. We conduct a study of beetle (Coleoptera) diversity in maize-based agricultural plots with heterogeneous management practices in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico, a region with outstanding biodiversity and a long agricultural history. We use a mixture of local knowledge and multivariate statistics to group the plots into two broad and contrasting management categories (traditional vs. industrialized). Then, we present an analysis of Coleopteran diversity for each category, showing higher levels across different diversity indexes for the traditional plots. Specifically, Coleopteran guilds associated with natural pest control and soil conservation are more common in traditional plots than in industrialized ones, while herbivorous beetles are more abundant in the second. Also, our results let us postulate the Curculionidae family as an indicator of both management type and overall Coleopteran diversity in the agricultural lands of the study site. We discuss our results in terms of the agricultural matrix quality and its role in strategies that favor the coexistence of culturally meaningful agricultural systems and local biodiversity.

Ecological Change, Agricultural Development and Food Production in Malawi: a Historiographical Review

Given its economic significance, agriculture has been at the centre of historical scholarship in Malawi. Yet despite the significant contribution this scholarship has made to the country’s development, there has been no effort to systematically reconstruct Malawi’s agricultural historiography. This article, therefore, takes stock of the progress that has been made by historians on research in the country’s agricultural history since the mid-1950s. The ultimate goal is to establish not only what might be regarded as the country’s agricultural historiography, but also the place of food production, which has become an important food security aspect of most Malawian peasants. After assessing the earlier works, the study observes that Malawi has an agricultural historiography which, prompted by the political and economic thoughts of the time, has conceptually evolved after the traditions of modernisation, underdevelopment and social history schools. It is argued here that, despite raising a strong case about the processes by which colonialism and capitalism disrupted peasant food economies, the historiography has made little effort to explore the patterns of peasant food production that emerged through this process, except for those studies that sought to understand the growth of famine and hunger. While resonating in many respects with the agricultural historiography of southern Africa, the Malawi case has gone beyond to include smallholder irrigation farming, which despite being globally recognised as a panacea for maintaining food production in the changing climate, has been under researched even in the dominating regional climate historiography.

An Evolutionary Approach to the History of Barley (Hordeum vulgare) Cultivation in the Canary Islands

The Canary Islands are an archipelago that lies about 100 km west of North Africa. Barley (Hordeum vulgare) has been continuously cultivated since the colonization of the islands. To investigate the agricultural history of the islands, the DNA from multiple individuals of six extant landraces of barley was sequenced, and the resulting data were analyzed with ABC modeling. Estimates of separation times of barley populations on the different islands and the mainland were congruent with archaeological dating of the earliest settlements on the islands. The results of the genetic analyses were consistent with the continuous cultivation of barley on Lanzarote island since it was first colonized, but suggested cultivation was carried out at a smaller scale than on Gran Canaria and Tenerife. Contrary to archaeological evidence and early written historical sources, the genetic analyses suggest that barley was cultivated on a larger scale on Tenerife than on Gran Canaria. The genetic analysis of contemporary barley added support to the dating of the colonization of the islands and pointed to the need for more archaeological data concerning barley cultivation on Tenerife.