Agroecology Workday
3/23/24
When I pulled up to the gates of the Hope Community Center, there was another car parked by the side of the road. I couldn’t see if anyone was in the car because of how the light hit its windshield, but inside was a 11th grade volunteer waiting to be dropped off. The gate was closed, and I was waiting for Yesica to come open it. About a minute later, another call pulled up with a smiling young woman wearing our pretty blue shirt. I stepped out of my car, introduced myself, and told her that the gate would be open shortly. She said her name was Skye with a kind smile.
After a few more minutes, I contacted Yesica, who was able to open the gate for us remotely. I pulled in, followed by the car with the 11th grader, but the gate shut before Skye, and now Dominique, could enter. One more call to Yesica and she took care of it.
We gathered by the small wooden table in between the green house and the shed. Dominique and I introduced myself to Skye and the 11th grader, and we encouraged them to drink water and eat some of the snacks Dominque had brought with her. We unlocked the shed, got a few tools out, and made our way towards the tomato plants.
Our first order of business was to prune the “suckers” off the plants. According to Tomato Plant Suckers: What Are Suckers On A Tomato Plant | Gardening Know How,
“A sucker on a tomato plant is a small shoot that grows out of the joint where a branch on the tomato plant meets a stem. These small shoots will grow into a full-sized branch if left alone, which results in a bushier, more sprawling tomato plant. Tomato suckers or side shoots are the growths that appear in the junction between the stem and a branch of a tomato plant called the "axil". When left to grow, tomato plant suckers will become another main stem with branches, flowers, fruit, and even more suckers of their own”
One of the principles behind our pruning of these little suckers can be referred to as developmental plasticity in evolutionary biology. Developmental plasticity refers to an organism’s ability to alter its course of growth and development in response to stressors and inputs. By pruning these new off-shoots, we were directing the plants to continue to direct their energy and resources to building its established branches and leaves, as well as to the flowers that yield the lovely fruit. Developmental plasticity can be understood under the theoretical perspective of Life History Theory, that notes that organisms rely on finite resources as they grow and develop. Because the needed resources are finite, organisms sometimes make [1]“trade-offs” in the face of scarcity or hardships. A common trade-off exhibited in stressful environments is to direct energy to immediate maintenance and repair, diverting energy away from important (but energetically costly) long-term growth and development. To take a human example, and one that is relevant to the communities we serve at FWAF, consider the findings from Biological Anthropologist Barry Bogin and his colleagues.
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[1]While the phrase “make trade-offs” suggests a conscious choice, the reader should note that there is no consciousness directing the resources here. The trade off is metabolic, not deliberate.
In 1998, Bogin and his colleagues measured the height and sitting height of 1,347 Mayan children living in Guatemala. Then, in 1999 and 2000, the researchers measured the height and sitting height of 431 first-generation Mayan American children of Guatemalan parents. The results were telling. As the authors note, “Maya American children are currently 11.54 cm taller and 6.83 cm longer-legged, on average, than Maya children living in Guatemala. Consequently, the Maya Americans have a significantly lower average sitting height ratio (i.e., relatively longer legs in proportion to length of the head and trunk) than do the Maya in Guatemala” (Bogin, et al. 2002).
Our legs contain the largest bones of our bodies, and as such, they are “energetically expensive” from a caloric standpoint. Thus, human biologists rely on population measures of relative leg-length (the contribution of legs to an individual’s overall stature) as a key indicator of a population’s health. Note the emphasis on population. Another key principle of evolutionary biology is the fact that all populations exhibit variation. Some individuals are shorter, other individuals are taller, and so on. Thus, relative leg length should not be used to assess an individual’s health or nutritional status. At the population level, however, we can readily infer that groups with shorter relative-leg lengths come from either nutritionally scarce environments, environments that present many and frequent immunological “challenges”, or both. A quick and superficial study of Guatemala’s history is enough for a reader to realize that the indigenous populations have been brutally oppressed for centuries, often aided by the US government (Bowen, 1984; Copeland, 2020; Gaffey, 2020).
The metabolic parallels between tomato plants and humans (as well as all other living organisms) recall the power of community gardens. These are places where individuals come together to literally improve the soil of our Earth. The work is selfless, as there is no private property involved. And as a community-based initiative, it is important for us to draw as many lessons we can from plants, ecology, resource management, as well as from socio-political processes, so we can educate ourselves and our community about systematic forces that negatively and disproportionately affect some groups over others. In service of our soil, we must be reminded of our debt to our sisters and brothers who work to produce the food that sustains the entire world.
By Ernesto Ruiz
FWAF Research Coordinator
Literature cited
Bogin, B., Smith, P., Orden, A. B., Varela Silva, M. I., & Loucky, J. (2002). Rapid change in height and body proportions of Maya American children. American Journal of human biology, 14(6), 753-761.
Bowen, G. L. (1984). US Policy toward Guatemala 1954 to 1963. Armed Forces & Society, 10(2), 165-191.
Copeland, N. (2020). A New Deal for Central America: In Central America, addressing the root causes of mass migration requires a reversal of destructive US foreign policies in favor of redistributive, ecologically sustainable development. NACLA Report on the Americas, 52(1), 67-76.
Gaffey, K. A. (2020). The lasting effects of US Intervention in Guatemala.
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