Category: Breeding

Ok, here goes with those answers I promised last night, or some of them anyway.

What’s so new about climate change? After all, breeders have been preparing for, and reacting to, environmental changes of various kinds since their beginning as a profession. Well, for one thing the speed of the changes, and the fact that this time there is fairly solid scientific information about long-term trends. One of the things Cal Qualset recommended is that there should be a sort of worldwide network of testing sites relevant to the anticipated environments of the most threatened countries.

He also talked about evolutionary-participatory plant breeding, a newish name for an old idea going back to Harlan and Allard. This topic was taken up by Salvatore Ceccarelli of ICARDA and others later in the day. Salvatore asked why, in this year of biodiversity, we are talking about varietal uniformity as if it were the only option. He’s set out an alternative vision here with us before.

It revolves around making large mixed populations available to farmers, getting them to plant them in lots of contrasting places, and letting natural and artificial selection do the rest. He’s been doing that in Iran and other places with a mixture of 1600 F2 barley lines deriving from some 300 parents. He thinks he can get improvements in yield stability and stress tolerance over time, but almost certainly not quality. He calls this a way to get a “local solution to a global problem.” The question that was asked, however, was how long this would take. Cal Qualset let slip almost as an aside that his group is seeing very little change in Turkish wheat landraces since the 1930s, and that the variation within landraces wasn’t as much as they had expected. He’s working on a project to introgress smut resistance into these landraces.

And speaking of farmer participation in evaluation and breeding, Cal Qualset also mentioned in his keynote that he was able to see 2% yield improvement per year in the maize Chalqueno landrace by designing and helping farmers implement, in their own fields, a mass selection scheme.

More later.