| Questions
of farmer seed saving, adapted varieties and the future of plant
breeding filled the 2005 Seeds and Breeds Conference,
hosted this fall by Nan Bonfils and Don Adams at their Full
Circle Farm near Madrid, Iowa.
Bill Tracey, a plant breeder at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wondered
aloud about the future, asking “Will plant breeders
continue to exist?” He stated that the reigning genetic
engineering paradigm is in direct opposition to the “selectionist”
paradigm of working with the genetic material within a species.
Unaddressed, he said, is the question of how plants will respond
to genetic engineering. He stated that plant breeding programs
increasingly focus on publishing papers rather than working
with and developing a feel for the organism that leads to
improving and releasing new cultivars.
Keeping plant breeding publicly funded and managed can be
a cost-effective form of social insurance, Tracey said, explaining
that commercial seed development can work against food security
because efficiency of scale works against a positive diversity
of people and plants.
Public plant breeders have to be in touch with the needs
of the local farmers and the local ecology to know what farmers
want to change in terms of energy use and crop selection,
Tracey said.
Role of the farmer in plant breeding
Matthew Dillon, executive director of the Organic Seed Alliance
www.seedalliance.org,
said the basic premise behind organic plant breeding is the
need for resilient genetics bred and adapted to the ecology
of the area of intended use. This allows the farmer to avoid
the need for inputs, he said, adding that organic crops must
be able to perform under an array of pressures. Dillon said
the key role of decentralized plant breeding systems is suitability
to the local ecological context and to local markets.
Dillon posed some difficult questions: Is it enough to involve
the farmer in field trials? Is the concept of participatory
plant breeding just to gain funder advantages? What about
skills, time and desire? Do farmers simply want their varieties
handed out to them? Plant breeders may have a desire to work
with farmers but will farmers have them? After all, he said,
farmers have been excluded from this role for decades as plant
breeding has been relegated to specialists. Therefore, if
seed breeders want farmers to participate, Dillon said, the
farmer must be recognized as a specialist (and farmers must
recognize a benefit to managing their own genetic resources
just as they do the nutrients in their soil).
Ecosystem health and farming systems
Don Wyse, professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant
Genetics at the University of Minnesota, asked two poignant
questions: “How do we develop systems that produce ecological
health and human health?” and “What type of crop
and animal systems produce ecosystem services?” The
answer to the first question, he said, lies in creating functionally
diverse agricultural systems. Nutrient cycles, flood management,
natural pest management, soil health, wildlife diversity,
water quality, erosion control, carbon sequestration, and
climate mediation, he said, are all examples of ecosystem
services. Wyse challenged the audience to engage plant breeders
in providing these services. He said we must develop plant
material for diverse agricultural systems that have an economic
pull into the marketplace, tying plant breeding programs to
finding solutions to major issues through ecosystem services.
Farming for Human Health
Michael Hamm, C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture
at Michigan State University, spoke about the direct links
between healthy soil, plants, animals, people, families and
communities. Agriculture, he said, can be an effective economic
development tool by focusing on health and the environment
as well as the economy. Hamm posed the question: “What
would happen to farming if we ate the way we should?”
We have a public health problem, he said, because we have
a public consumption problem (we don’t eat like we should)
and we have a production problem (we don’t produce what
we should, like we should).
An animal perspective
As the executive director for the American Grassfed Association
(AGA), Carrie Balkcom works closely with the American Livestock
Breeds Conservancy (ALBC), which seeks to conserve the diversity
of livestock breeds on working farms. Conserving irreplaceable
genetic resources in these breeds is a critical service, she
said, for farmers seeking animals with distinctive traits
that are best suited to their farms, farming systems and markets.
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