- Lethal Yellowing doing for coconuts — and livelihoods — in Mozambique. And typhoons in the Philippines.
- Potted history of maize hybrids from 1998.
- Unusual rice and tomato species sequenced.
- The challenges of measuring the impact of nutrition interventions.
- Old interview with Michael Pollan on biodiversity and health resurfaces, maybe to coincide with the above.
- What will be the nutrition impact of replacing matooke with cassava, I wonder? Maybe if it was yellow cassava it would be ok?
- Maybe Shamba Shapeup will tell us.
- Well, there’s always wine. Even in Ethiopia.
- Or insects. Or roiboos. If you’re in South Africa.
- Chinese dumplings responsible for climate change.
- New Scoop.it page on downy mildews.
- And new Flipboard section on quinoa. And something to add to it.
- Eid Mubarak! Celebrate with mango kunafa.
- But which variety?
1998 history of maize hybrids
This is the classic paper that shows increases in US maize yield from 1865 to 1995 (Fig. 1). It should be waved in front of all those people that think that all farmers must use their own seed of their own varieties that become `locally adapted’ and therefore better (in some undefined way).
The seed doesn’t. Yields of open-pollinated (and presumably fully locally-adapted) maize ticked along from 1865-1935 at around 30 bushels/acre; from 1935 yields of double cross hybrids steeply increased to 1960, then increased yet more steeply with double cross hybrids to 1990s with around 130 bushels per acre (with, of course, farmers buying seed each season and all the better for it).
Those who think farmers should save seed and indulge in in-situ conservation (of no value to farmers and little demonstrated value to the management of global genetic resources) should accept to cost to farmers of this conservation whim and then compensate farmers for lost yield (fat chance).
Yet the Treaty `Benefit Sharing Fund’ appears to endorse and fund the unproven concept of `local adaptation’ and diversification as of benefit to farmers. The experience with maize in the USA shows that the quality of a few varieties and commercial supply of seed beats the quantity and diversity of `locally-adapted’ varieties maintained by farmers hands down.
David, I don’t disagree with you on maize (and other grains), especially if your golden standard is only yield, but there are many crops were farmer-adapted varieties work quite well. Farmer “seed saving” and farmer “crop improvement” are two very different things, and your comments discount the historical importance of farmer innovation as well as the ongoing value of the work. I would go so far as to see your comments are not only dismissive, but poorly informed.
I’ve worked with medium to large scale vegetable producers in the US who have developed and maintained their own varieties. It is not so much “local adaptation” that is the goal but about that works better under a wider array of stress, has greater elasticity even if some small sacrifice in uniformity(and these farmer varieties are 98% uniform, so very little loss).
One example, Bill Reynolds (farmer in Northern California) and his Dark Star zucchini selected for dry land planting in harsh conditions. You can read about the breeding here: http://seedalliance.org/index.php?page=dark_star_zucchini.
It blows away any hybrid, and in fact large scale farmers in Baja are now using it. A couple of winters ago when a freeze hit Mexican zuchini production it was the only zuch that made it, and for several weeks was the only variety in major chains across the US. Again, not about the local adaptation but about a balance between relative uniformity and the heterozygosity needed for farming “on the edge”.Companies like Seminis focus on breeding veggies for the big industrial valleys of production in North America, but there are many farmers who find that their own improved varieties are working better. These are not tiny 1 acre subsistence growers but often producers in 400+ acres of vegetable production.
Cornell, Washington State, Univ of Wisc, Oregon State – plant breeders at all these land grants are working with local farmers to do breeding (more than basic selection). We need not only a diversity of crop genetics in the field, but a diversity of approaches to crop improvement. Hybrids and formal breeding are great, no debate there, but they are not the silver bullet solution.
Matthew: I have no doubt whatever that you are right: if it is done in the US with the enormous talent available, then farmer varietal selection will be a success. We have all the excellent long-standing `personal-named’ varieties on many crops – Fife, Chevalier, Hass, Fuggles and lots more (I need to check these further). Farmers and others can certainly select. What is less apparent but always assumed is `local adaptation’ (you note that working under a wide array of stress might be better). But is this local adaptation over time more important than farmers picking through a vast array of introduced varieties for pre-adaptation. This scatter-gun approach was the basis of the enormous efforts of the USDA going back more than a century (and of Vavilov and many efforts of colonial agriculture). You only have to look at major crop-exporting countries to see this (the USA, Australia, Brazil).
Rather than using this varietal introduction model (selection of pre-adapted varieties) most (not all) of on-farm crop conservation project models expect farmers to work with what they have in the expectation that it will `get better’. Possibly, but the cost to farmers is foregoing excellent varieties (and crops) already out there in some genebank. And it probably should be neither one nor the other, but both approaches in tandem.
This belief in the superiority of local adaptation has a long history. Bennett (pp. 115-129) in 1970 [Frankel and Bennett ‘Genetic Resources in Plants – Their Exploration and Conservation’] expands on the superiority of local populations. She believes in ‘local adaptation’, for example, as a result of disturbance associated with cultivation and contact with weed and wild relatives: “countless locally adapted races of cultivated species emerged.” And that: “local adaptive differentiation in primitive cultivars is general…”. We are therefore being told that local varieties, through local adaptation, are as good as it gets, and that introductions are not necessary. Bennett then makes the outlandish claim (p116): “Adaptation conferred by simple character differences has not been established by experiment. It is unlikely that adaptive traits can be attributed to single or even small number of genes.” She entirely misses the vast importance of introduced crops and of all the rust resistance adaptations in, for example, wheat. Worth reading to see what went wrong in Rome 45 years ago.