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March 29, 2011
· Heirloom cult: Are old seeds any better?
· Japan farmers grapple with nuclear scare
· The race is on for tougher wheat varieties
· Research probes how plants fight diseases
· Cornell releases two new potato varieties
Heirloom cult: Are old seeds any better?
(thespec.com)
– As gardeners stock up on heirloom seeds for spring, Rob Johnston, the
chairman of Johnny’s Selected Seeds in
OK, so it doesn’t have seatbelts. But the swoop of the fenders resembles Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Better yet, the rest of the Oldsmobile’s curves are all Lana Turner.
And the technology! Where else can today’s driver find such innovations as knee-action wheels and a solid steel “turret top”?
Even with all a ’36 Olds has going for it,
So to return to
He argues that his typical customers — small market farmers and avid home gardeners — have better choices. Modern seeds, generally hybrid crosses, produce a “more vigorous plant, better resistance to diseases.”
And here’s the heirloom heresy: They often taste better, too.
Heritage seed buyers could rebut some or all of those claims — and they do. But agronomy, in a sense, is the least of it.
Seventeen years ago, in the New York Times, writer Michael Pollan spelled out the economic and environmental hazards of hybrid seeds in an article that came with a fright-movie title, The Seed Conspiracy.
In the years since, the superiority of certain types of seed has grown into a kind of orthodoxy among right-thinking gardeners. The philosophy could be called heirloomism. According to some plant breeders and seed sellers, it propagated a reactionary — and sometimes confused — argument about food, farming and science.
The debate may seem abstract. But one question it raises for the gardener is plain as dirt: What kind of seeds will succeed?
One thing nobody would dispute is that business is booming
in heirloom seeds. Seed Savers Exchange in
Sales shot up 100 per cent in 2008 at Baker Creek Heirloom
Seeds, a
According to a survey by the National Gardening Association, one in five American households with a yard or garden reports an interest in heirloom fruits, berries and vegetables. But Gettle, 30, contends his generation cares even more about heirlooms.
“New gardeners, younger gardeners — 90 per cent are interested in heirlooms and traditional varieties,” Gettle said.
The appeal is plain to see, not just to taste. The Baker Creek catalogue can deliver as much wonderment as the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. How can common vegetables come in so many comical shapes and unlikely colours?
Beyond the aesthetics, Gettle said his customers espouse “almost a total rejection of GMOs,” or genetically modified organisms. Further, they don’t want “hybridization in their seed supply. They want to be independent and be able to save their seeds. They don’t like the big boys.”
One of the undeniable big boys in garden seeds is W. Atlee
Burpee & Co. The Doylestown,
But this “third-generation seed man” also seems to relish acting as a heckler of the heirloom movement. In an op-ed piece in the Des Moines Register last summer, Ball wrote, “Today, greener-than-thou gardeners crusade for heirloom seeds while unjustly condemning hybrids. Increasingly, their anti-science credo has hardened into a Luddite fundamentalism.”
Ball laughs a bit about the bombast of phrases like “greener than thou.” But he sticks by his main claim.
“Heirlooms were varieties that were so unsuccessful they wouldn’t be sold today,” he said. “Every product declines until it’s replaced by new heirlooms.”
That term, new heirlooms, may seem like an oxymoron. Yet while heirloom seeds stay stubbornly the same, the heirloom brand continues to evolve.
One of the first print references to heirlooms appeared in a 1949 article in the New York Times, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That dictionary’s definition of “heirloom” matches the one used by Seed Savers Exchange: open-pollinated varieties that are more than 50 years old and have been handed down through generations.
But that classification describes only a portion of the 13,500 varieties in the group’s yearbook. So Torgrimson, 60, embraces a wider and more useful classification that includes four categories.
First, there are the family legacies, such as Bakery’s
squash. Emma Adkins, of
Perhaps the greatest number of heirloom
seeds come from the second group: old market varieties. A classic
example is the
Third is a “modern heirloom” such as the sugar snap pea. Vegetable breeder Calvin Lamborn developed this open-pollinated favourite for Gallatin Valley Seed Co. in the 1970s.
The origins of the sugar snap, a rogue, thick-walled pea, lie in Torgrimson’s fourth category, “mystery heirlooms.” These are serendipitous discoveries and field crosses that farmers and gardeners decide to preserve and plant again.
In the plainest sense, heirlooms are just old seeds. What
has changed is the way we venerate them, said Bill Tracy, 56, a sweet-corn
breeder and professor of agronomy at the
Marketing them as heirlooms, however, is “a new concept, a
concept of the early 21st century,”
“The farmer or the gardener has the opportunity to select the type that is best for their farm,” he said. And “previous generations of farmers, our parents or grandparents” did just that.
An open-pollinated seed wasn’t an item to be named, treasured and monastically cloistered. For their part, the seed companies and catalogues, which were then small and regional, collected seeds from the plants that performed best from year to year.
John Navazio, 56, a
“A 1902 cabbage by Burpee was a perfectly good cabbage by 1902 standards,” Navazio said. “But none of our ancestors ever viewed these things as done. You never stopped breeding your livestock. You never stopped selecting your cabbage.”
For the discriminating food shopper, the word “heirloom” has another meaning. Heirloom vegetables are the delicious ones. These are the turnips dolled up in magazine photo spreads and honoured by name on the menus of the better restaurants — even some of the worst ones.
Torgrimson admits he has dallied with a few hybrids in the past. But “you can’t beat the taste” of heirlooms, he said. He recalled what a visitor to Seed Savers’ Heritage Farm asked last summer after biting into a gusher of a tomato: “Why does the tomato in the store taste like a red rubber ball?”
Bob Heisey, a 62-year-old tomato-and-pepper breeder for United Genetics Seeds Co., has heard that question before.
“A lot of the complaints,” he said, “are about supermarket tomatoes that are picked when they’re green, and gassed with ethylene to develop the red colour and then refrigerated to keep them fresh so that they look marketable when they get to the store.”
Heirlooms are not intrinsically more appetizing than modern hybrids. Heirlooms began as hybrids, after all — a fortuitous cross of two parents. Modern hybrids, or so-called “F-1s,” are usually proprietary to a seed company. But this is still the 19th-century genetics of Gregor Mendel, not genetic engineering.
Heirlooms grow glorious fruit for many reasons. One is size.
An heirloom tomato is often a big, robust plant. The central stalk is usually
indeterminate: It keeps shooting up after setting fruit. Ball, of Burpee,
recalls a customer telling him about a
An heirloom tomato will also have a lot of leaves, in groups of three, Heisey said. All that green surface area translates into a lot of photosynthesis, which means higher sugar levels, one of many factors that make for a mythic tomato.
A modern, hybrid tomato, by comparison, is typically determinate in the way it grows: The stem will stop growing. The leaves come in pairs. Farmers prefer compact plants with earlier and higher fruit yields.
But that’s not the end of the story. As any impatient gardener will testify, many of those old tomato plants don’t like to be hurried to make fruit. While they’re hanging around the yard, the foliage can pick up a legion of common diseases.
As the stricken plant sheds leaves, it has less sugar to channel into the fruit.
By comparison, some blight resistance has been bred into the hybrid for decades, Heisey said. Most commercial types now have resistance, as do many back-yard varieties.
The great bank of heirloom seeds is ripe for fresh creations and practical improvements, said Navazio of the Organic Seed Alliance.
“When people say hybrids are better than the OPs, well, duh! You’ve been throwing all of your brainpower at developing hybrids for more than 30 years. And the nonhybrids, the OPs, have sat and languished with almost no one doing any good selection and genetic maintenance on them. At that point, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
His organization’s cause is not to romanticize old seeds, he said. Instead, the Washington-state nonprofit hopes to rebuild the regional farming culture that invented those cultivars. The place for such a movement to start, Navazio argues, is the small farm. And the people to do it are the farmers themselves.
As Siskiyou announces on the front page of its website, “Our
vision is to connect seed growers, gardeners and farmers in a mutually
beneficial relationship to support small-scale agriculture with superior
genetics selected for the
Put another way, Siskiyou isn’t dealing in nostalgia. What they pledge to sell is a better seed.
Japan
(AFP via Yahoo! News) NIHONMATSU, Japan – Farmers are facing the bitter aftermath of Japan's nuclear emergency, which could see crops left to rot over a vast swathe of the country's agricultural heartland.
Growing national and international unease about the spread
of radioactivity from the crippled
Farmers working the soil in
Tadayoshi Tsugeno,
who farms just outside Nihonmatsu in
"This is exactly the time when we should be harvesting the plants, but we have no idea whether or not we will be able to sell them," the 59-year-old told AFP.
"We are being told that we need to get rid of them and that's going to be expensive. This is my biggest crop, my biggest earner for the year.
"I planted these in June, so there's been the expense of farming them since then, which I'm not going to get back if I can't sell them.
"I won't be able to buy things and I've got debts to service. It's going to be hard."
Senior JA officers visited ministers and top lawmakers Monday to lobby for compensation.
Farmers have long been able to charge a premium to customers
in
But the huge tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at the nuclear power station on Fukushima's coast following the 9.0-magnitude earthquake more than two weeks ago, has -- for the time being at least -- put paid to that reputation.
Radioactive vapour from the plant
has contaminated farm produce and dairy products in the region, leading to
restrictions on shipments to key markets in the
At the weekend,
Higher than normal radiation was last week detected in tap
water in and around
And the radiation threat appears to be spreading, with
contaminated lettuce from
The contamination is a further worry for a country already reeling from the effects of the quake-tsunami, which has killed more than 10,000 people, with around 17,000 people still listed as missing.
Just a few kilometres from Tsugeno's farm, supermarket manager Misako Anzai confirmed she had taken all local vegetables off her shelves.
"We were told that we should not be selling things
produced in
Anzai said they were sourcing goods from further afield, despite the extra costs, and regardless of the impact on local suppliers, whose livelihoods depend on the relationships they have built up over the years.
"Our local producer complained yesterday and asked us if we could sell his goods. It's sad, but we have to stop," she said.
"We would really like to be able to help... but we have been told not to sell these things, and we have to think about what customers want."
Mizuko Ouchi was loading her basket with fresh produce to cook for her family.
"I think we have to be very careful because these are
things we buy every day," she said. "If I have the chance to buy food
produced somewhere else... somewhere a long way from
Ouchi's attitude is exactly what farmers like Satoru Abe fear.
He was out in his fields pruning pear trees for a crop he expects will be ready at the end of August.
"I don't know if we'll be able to sell them, but we have to get things ready or we won't have a chance to," he said.
"All farmers are worried at the moment."
The race is on for tougher wheat varieties
(The New York Times) – In 2009, Monsanto, the biggest agricultural company in the world, did something that had been unthinkable just five years before.
It made a major investment in wheat.
This wasn't the company's first foray into developing more advanced wheat cultivars. In the 1990s, it had begun research in developing Roundup Ready wheat to add to its suite to herbicide-resistant crops. But economics reared its ugly head. Acreage in spring wheat had declined dramatically, and Monsanto ended the research in 2004.
Just five years later, wheat markets were on the upswing.
Growers began pushing heavily for private investment in research. Monsanto
bought WestBred, a small grain biotechnology research
firm out of
Monsanto gave itself five to seven years to develop genes that promoted drought tolerance and high yield. The company is now developing high-yielding, locally applicable varieties, and the next step will be to apply biotechnology know-how acquired in corn research to begin playing with wheat genetics, said Claire CaJacob, wheat technology lead for the company.
"The biggest focus is on drought and intrinsic yield," said CaJacob. Disease and pest control -- a factor also linked to climate change -- "is also pretty important."
In the short term, Monsanto will continue to develop its germ plasm through advanced breeding techniques, using molecular markers -- pieces of DNA that 'mark' a certain trait on a plant's genetic blueprint -- to formulate climate-hardy seeds.
Eventually, the company hopes to develop its germ plasm to a point where genes from corn and soy to improve yield, drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency can be implanted into the wheat genome.
Looming challenge to seed developers
Monsanto could start field testing genetically modified wheat by 2012 and deliver the variety to the market in the next decade, said a spokesperson for the company.
With not a single genetically engineered wheat variety on the market, and a pressing need to feed an estimated 9 billion people by 2050, seed developers are beginning to grasp the challenge looming just ahead.
While traditional wheat breeding has been accelerated by modern science, it is still no match for the potential of genetic engineering. Isolating a drought-tolerant or nitrogen-efficient gene through crossbreeding different species -- even with today's molecular marker technology -- can take up to 20 years.
In theory, genetic engineering can cut that time in half, even less. But there are other factors that are keeping genetic engineering research stalled.
According to Mark Sorrells, a
researcher in plant breeding and genetics at
In addition, unpredictable results might require multiple
attempts at placing the transplanted gene into a wheat genome. And although
official reports claim that bioengineered crops are no less safe than
traditional ones, many people -- especially in
But despite the costs, scientific uncertainty and public skepticism, even traditional plant breeders agree that genetic manipulation, along with age-old methods, is needed to keep the world fed through the next 40 years. The two approaches are complementary; both have their place.
And whether for transgenic or traditional breeding research, recent private investment in wheat has elicited a sigh of relief for many in the industry.
"There's only so much public investment that will go through research," said Jane DeMarchi, director of government affairs for research and technology at the National Association of Wheat Growers (NAWG). "If we limit ourselves to just public investment, we might not see the innovation we need for our crop to reach its potential."
Hybrid wheat, approaching the 'holy grail'
Like Monsanto, Syngenta, the third-largest seed company in the world, is looking to corn, wheat's competitor on the global market, for clues on making heartier varieties. The company is developing a hybrid variety of wheat -- a cross between two species of the same genus -- that is impossible to create in nature.
Hybrids are often much more vigorous than their inbred versions. In the case of corn, the hybrid variety far outyields its non-hybrid version, and responds better to fertilizer, as well.
"Hybrid wheat has been holy grail for people in wheat genetics," said John Bloomer, head of cereals for Syngenta. That's because hybrids are a moneymaker for seed companies, who can resell the choice variety every year. Otherwise, farmers would simply save the seeds themselves.
Since wheat naturally pollinates itself, cross-pollinating two parents from different varieties to create a hybrid is impossible without some genetic prodding. Expensive biotechnology is needed to correct this has inhibited hybrid research. Syngenta is using its experience from the development of hybrid barley -- a close relative to wheat -- to develop a hybrid variety of wheat.
For fighting climate change, research has centered on strengthening the rooting structure of wheat, enhancing the intake of water, increasing the plant's biomass and facilitating CO2 absorption.
Last year, Syngenta partnered with CIMMYT, a Mexico-based nonprofit corn and wheat research and training center, to do some more advanced wheat research. Using advanced genetic marker technology and traditional seed banks, the partnership seeks to develop both native and genetically modified traits for wheat. The company did not disclose its financial investment in the partnership.
"We're looking at genetics, native traits, GM approaches, seed care products," said Bloomer. "We're looking at all the tools possible to make plants utilize water better."
Research probes how plants fight diseases
(UC
Riverside)
Her breakthrough research can help scientists come up with effective strategies to treat crops that have succumbed to disease or, when used as a preventative measure, to greatly reduce their susceptibility to disease.
In a paper published in the March issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe, Ma, an assistant professor of plant pathology and microbiology, and her colleagues show that the bacterial pathogens target isoflavones, a group of compounds in plant cells that defend the plant from bacterial infection, resulting in a reduction in isoflavone production.
An arms race
First, the pathogens inject virulence bacterial proteins, called HopZ1, through needle-like conduits into the plant cells. These proteins then largely reduce the production of the isoflavones and promote disease development. However, by sensing the presence of HopZ1, the plants mount a robust resistance against the pathogen, including the production of a very high amount of isoflavones. At this point, the pathogen must come up with new strategies by either changing the kind of proteins it injects into the plant, not injecting any proteins at all, or injecting virulence proteins in a way that helps them escape detection by the plant. In this way, the virulence bacterial proteins and the plant host engage in an endless “arms race.”
“One question we are still trying to answer is how at the molecular level the bacterial virulence proteins promote disease,” Ma said. “Some scientists have shown that these proteins block signaling transduction pathways in the plant, which eventually weakens plant immunity. We are introducing a fresh perspective on this topic, namely, that the pathogens evolved strategies to directly attack the production of plant antimicrobial compounds, such as isoflavones, thus compromising the plant’s defense mechanism.”
Closing the circle
According to Ma, her results can be extrapolated to understand how plants defend themselves when attacked by pathogens. She is pleased to be resuming research first studied by UC Riverside’s Noel Keen, the late plant scientist and a pioneer in molecular plant pathology, who did fundamental groundbreaking work on understanding how isoflavones and isoflavone-derived compounds play a role in defending plants against microbial infection.
“This was an important topic of study about 30 years ago, but then the topic was dropped by researchers and it lost momentum,” Ma said. “My lab is now revisiting the problem. Of course, we still have many questions to answer. We need to fully understand how isoflavones function to protect plants so that we can design specific strategies aimed at better protecting the plant.”
Looking forward
Ma’s lab is also interested in understanding what makes pathogens what they are. Why is it that among ecologically similar bacteria, some cause disease while others do not? Her lab is also studying how plants evolve mechanisms to protect themselves from infection, how pathogens subvert this defense and become virulent again.
“Pathogens get wise to the disease-fighting strategies we use in agriculture,” Ma said. “This is evolution at work. But with fundamental knowledge on how pathogens cause disease we can develop sustainable and applicable strategies to combat disease.”
About Wenbo Ma
Ma received her doctoral degree in biology in 2003 at the
University of Waterloo, Canada. Thereafter, she did
postdoctoral research for three years at the University of
Toronto, Canada. She joined UCR in 2006. Her awards and honors include a
Regents’ Faculty Fellowship at UCR, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the W.B. Pearson Medal
from the
She chose the soybean plant to study because the pathogen
she was interested in, Pseudomonas syringae, attacks
the soybean plant. Soybean is the second largest crop and the largest
agricultural export in the
Ma was joined in the research by UCR’s Huanbin Zhou (first author of the research paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the Ma group), Jian Lin, Aimee Johnson, Robyn Morgan and Wenwan Zhong. Zhong is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry.
The research study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, UCR-Los Alamos National Laboratory collaborative program for plant diseases and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Experimental Station Research Support Allocation Process.
Cornell releases two new potato varieties
(Cornell University) – Kettle-cooked or ridged, salted or flavored, Americans love potato chips, consuming an average six pounds per person per year.
Breeders at Cornell are helping to feed the nation's
appetite for the crispy snacks -- and
Waneta and Lamoka
-- named after a pair of twin lakes in the Finger Lakes region of upstate
Lamoka also has a high level of
starch, a trait that is desirable for chipping because it soaks up less oil
when fried. Waneta has less starch, but is also less
likely to bruise, a characteristic that may appeal to farmers in
Both varieties are resistant to the golden nematode, a pathogen present in some New York soil that attacks potato roots, and common scab, another soil-borne pathogen present nationwide that can cause pits in potatoes. This gives them a distinct advantage over Snowden potatoes, the chipping industry standard, which are susceptible to both diseases.
"
First crossed in 1998, the varieties have undergone 13 years of testing, propagation and evaluation. They have been grown on several farms in trials across the country, and reaction among both growers and manufacturers has been positive, De Jong said.
Around 40 acres of seed were produced in 2010; that means that 400 acres of the new potatoes can be planted in 2011, and demand is already outstripping supply, he said. Each acre yields about 30,000 pounds of potatoes.
Waneta and Lamoka are the seventh and eighth varieties to be released in the past decade by the Cornell potato-breeding program, which develops both chipping and tabletop varieties. Other recent releases include Red Maria, Adirondack Red and Adirondack Blue, which have proven popular with consumers due to their novel red and purple pigmented flesh. De Jong also breeds for size, shape, texture, and disease-and pest-resistance.
Nationally, 28 percent of the domestic potato crop is sold fresh; 13 percent become potato chips and 35 percent become frozen fries. The average American eats 126 pounds of potatoes each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Almost half of the 20,500 acres of potatoes grown in
Potato chips were actually invented in
End Transmission