Category: Travels for Crop Trust

27 February 2024

SHUSHILA SPEAKS OUT

As our convoy of three cars arrived to Bamuliya, a village an hour out of Bhopal, we were met by a gaggle of men. They escorted us to a field neatly planted with grasspea. I asked which of the men was the farmer and then attached a microphone to his shirt. I forgot some equipment, […]
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4 February 2024

PRESERVING MALAN IN CENTRAL KALIMANTAN

Papa Dewi told me about his way of ‘malan’. That means farming in his native Ngaju Dayak language of Central Kalimantan in Borneo, Indonesia. And it’s based on planting seeds according to local wisdom and ancestral customs. Those seeds are inseparable from the Dayak way of life. But the malan traditions are disappearing as traditional […]
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27 January 2024

THE ROADSIDE MARKET IN PNG

If you want a good sweetpotato in Papua New Guinea you don’t need to go to a supermarket. Just pull over on the road … on almost any road (but there are not too many roads in this super rugged country). My hosts from the National Agricultural Research Institute and I drove past a market […]
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25 January 2024

I DON’T CARE SWEETPOTATOES

There’s a sweetpotato in Papua New Guinea called ‘gimane’. But the farmers prefer to call it ‘I don’t care’. It’s because it grows so well they don’t have to care about much once they get a vine or tuber in the ground and it’ll grow. No fertilizers, no insecticides … not really much to care […]
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1 January 2024

A DAYAK WELCOME IN BORNEO

The inter-tribal warfare amongst the Dayak people of Borneo in the old days was pretty brutal. But once the tribes made peace they welcomed their former enemies in a ceremony called ‘tampung tawar’. Now the Dayak use the ceremony to welcome visitors. My colleague, Beri, and I came to the village of Tumbang Samui in […]
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1 August 2023

TWO STANS AND ALFALFA

The glaciers of the Tien Shan mountain range in Central Asia are receding quickly. And that’s causing a lot of concern amongst the farmers of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The glacial meltwaters which allowed them to irrigate their crops are no longer abundant. And without adequate water, yields plummet. I joined a group of scientists brought […]
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6 November 2022

A DAY IN THE RICE PADDIES OF CAO PHONG

Timing is so important in photography. And I seem to get it wrong so often. I stayed an extra day in Vietnam so I could see rice being harvested in terraced paddies. But it soon appeared that my timing was wrong. Turns out most of the rice in northern Vietnam had already been harvested. Nothing […]
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30 October 2022

A TWILIGHT STROLL THROUGH HANOI’S OLD QUARTER

I came to Vietnam as part of a Crop Trust-supported genebank review team and after five days here I thought I’d only see a slice of Vietnam between our hotel and the plant resource center. But the team was able to wrap up its work by mid-afternoon on Friday so we all travelled to Hanoi’s […]
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5 October 2022

THE FRIENDLY COUNTRY OF LAOS

VIENTIANE To be honest, I can’t tell you much about Laos. I can tell you the Americans bombed the s**t out of the country 50 years ago. In fact, Laos’s claim to ‘fame’ is that it is probably the most bombed country in history. 270 million cluster bombs were dropped on the country. That’s about […]
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