Commodity

Sri Lanka’s farmers who grow paddy for their home needs are now discovering a new trend. Instead of the widely-cultivated hybrid varieties they have opted to grow more traditional varieties of paddy as the latter are more nutritious, rich in taste, pest-resistant and need no artificial, petroleum-based fertilizer.

Apparently some farmers are keeping more than 350 different traditional varieties.

July 5, 2008

Psst! Wanna breed corn?

Karl J. Mogel from Inoculated Mind dropped us a note: “as part of my graduate school research, I’m making educational videos about plant breeding, and I just uploaded the first of them to my program’s website. Please consider linking to it in one of your blog posts.”

My pleasure!

So, off I went to the University of Wisconsin Madison’s web site to see. ((At this point, I have to say that last time I was in Madison we went to the ag students’ experimental ice cream facility and I was truly stunned by the quality of their results. Is that still going strong, I wonder? And are they still deep-frying cheese in Monroe?)) I couldn’t actually see a video there, but no matter, there were instructions for how to deal with that problem, and pretty soon I found myself watching Karl’s effort.

It’s really good.

There’s lots of diversity on display and you’ll learn about much more than just pollination. I learned, for example, that nowadays the commercial production of hybrid corn seed uses a specialized detasselling tractor to cut the male flowers off the plants that are destined to grow the hybrid seed. There are genes that make the male flowers sterile, and they used to be used in almost all corn breeding, but Karl told us that although these male sterility genes are used in breeding other crops, they are “not as extensively used in maize”. He didn’t mention that the reason is that the widespread use of a single cytoplasmic male sterility gene was the underlying factor behind the dreadful epidemic of southern corn leaf blight that devastated maize growers in 1970 and 1971. All the corn had the CMS gene, which also conferred susceptibility to southern corn blight.

The other thing that wasn’t mentioned was that if you fancy doing a bit of corn breeding, even mass selection rather than specific hybrid crosses, you need to save seeds from around 100 plants each time, otherwise you end up with inbred seed that doesn’t do very well.

Go to it, and let us know how you get on.

July 4, 2008July 4, 2008