National Museum of Agriculture

All the Fun of the Farm

10 August 2008

Nobody goes to the National Museum of Agriculture (Narodni zemedelske muzeum) and that, of course, is part of the reason why I'm here.

The NZM reopened in Prague in 1994, having spent most of its existence in exile in the provinces, but remains one of the city's more obscure museums.

Housed in one of a pair of functionalist 1930s buildings, the agricultural museum is across the street from the matching National Technical Museum (Narodni technicke muzeum).

(The agricultural museum is the one with the tractors outside.)

With temporary exhibitions dedicated to potatoes and, yes, tractors, the NZM almost sounds like a parody of a Communist museum.

In spite of the unpromising premise, however, I'm keeping an open mind, hoping to be blown away by displays of unexpected flair and imagination.

The truth, it turns out, lies somewhere in-between.

Judging by the smell of wet concrete that greets us as we enter the museum, the NZM is in a state of flux.

Reconstruction work is ongoing, and the museum's ticket office is in the basement, with the tractor exhibition.

The ticket woman warns us that the museum will be closing in an hour but we decide to take our chances and pay our 60 crowns (around two quid).

In the absence of a gift shop, the souvenirs are locked away in a glass case.

The Zetor T-shirts and baseball caps look interesting but time is tight and we decide to press on.

As a layman, I don't have a lot to say about the vintage tractor exhibition.

There's a lot of them, from Europe and North America; they're painted jolly colours; and they're in pretty good nick.

Beyond basic descriptions of the exhibits, though, most of the information on the walls is in Czech, and my limited vocabulary can't handle in-depth explanations of the internal workings of a Lanz Bulldog or a McCormick-Deering.

We move upstairs, to the potatoes.

On a hot Saturday afternoon, the museum is very quiet, and the little old lady guarding the exhibits seems pleased to see us.

As I'm sure you know, 2008 is International Year of the Potato, and, over three rooms, the NZM's Brambory - skryty poklad ("Potatoes - Hidden Treasure") exhibit celebrates this auspicious occasion.

Potatoes have given me a lot of pleasure down the years and perhaps because of that, I enjoy this exhibit more than the tractors.

Whatever you feel about spuds, it's obvious that some love has gone into Hidden Treasure.

The walls, for instance, are covered in soil-like dark brown paper, with descriptions printed on yellow potato-shaped boards.

In the first room, I learn that Prague was a relatively late adopter of the potato, in 1647, and pick up the word "tuberisation" from an English-language description of a potato in a test-tube.

A TV shows potato-themed propaganda films in the next room, highlighting the role of "our friends the Soviets" in agricultural research, along with Communist-era potato recipe pamphlets.

Adding a touch of high-tech, the final room offers computers loaded with potato-based games but we don't have time to stop and play.

We move along to the museum's permanent exhibition, on food production in the 19th and 20th centuries.

One half of the long room is mainly given over to vintage equipment; the other is dominated by large-scale models of food production facilities.

There are some impressive pieces, but the lack of interactive displays is a little disappointing.

I wander round to the back of an intricate wooden model of a mill, looking for a button that might set the whole thing in motion, but instead find a label that snarls "Hands off!"

A sizable "rotating stone for rubbing and polishing barley groats for groat machine" is only a small consolation.

(If groat-rubbing's your thing, this is the place for you -- but look, don't touch.)

Adding a little drama to proceedings, my award-winning girlfriend points out that a sugar beet in a preserving jar looks like an aborted freak-show baby.

We move on swiftly.

The permanent exhibition ends with two mighty scale-models.

The first, "A model of the automatic mill presented at the World's Exhibition in Brussels 1958", is huge.

The second, a 1:10 scale reproduction of a sugar-processing plant, is even bigger.

The attention-to-detail is oddly touching -- in what I assume's the quality-control room there's even a tiny woven basket.

We almost miss the final exhibit, hidden away at the end of a long, forbidding corridor, but I'm glad we don't.

Globalni klimaticke zmeny ("Global Climate Change") is a vaguely sinister exhibit, illustrating the perils of mixing science and politics.

Aiming to show both sides of the climate-change debate, the NZM has given equal space to the government-run Cesky hydrometeoroligicky ustav (Czech Hydrometeorological Institute) and the Centrum pro ekonomiku a politiku (Centre for Economics and Politics).

CEP is a "pro-market think tank" set up by Czech President Vaclav Klaus, an economist who dismisses climate change as a myth and last year compared environmentalism to Communism.

In theory, it's a good idea for an exhibition, but CEP's superior grasp of presentation means it isn't really a fair fight.

While the weathermen fill their half of the room with heliographs and anemographs, Klaus's friends offer slick infographics culled from conservative American groups like the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Carefully chosen statistics cast doubt on the relationship between carbon emissions and global warming, and show the negative impact the Kyoto agreement would have on the world's poorer countries.

In a building dedicated to science, visited by parties of schoolchildren, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Thankfully, the museum garden is a happier place.

Along with a herb plot, there's a hen run, a few rabbit hutches and a pen containing two very noisy sheep.

One of the chickens is making a noise like a boiling gas kettle but the animals all look extremely healthy.

According to the sign on their pen, the sheep are called Cecilka and Dorotka, and are sponsored by Czech celebrities Vitek Havlis and Eva Aichmajerova.

There's also a pub in the garden and it's here where we end up, enjoying the end-products of the malting and brewing processes.

Hooray for agriculture.

Sam Beckwith
Domesticated Animal
Prague, Czech Republic

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