It didn’t take long for him to get hooked. Simon worked there in the summers while in high school, meeting potato curators and plant collectors. It just so happens that he grew up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin-down the street from a National Plant Germplasm System bank, this one housing the potato collection. Simon is a USDA/ARS plant breeder at University of Wisconsin-Madison who’s been breeding carrots and collecting seeds around the world for decades. If you’ve ever eaten a carrot, you might owe Dr. The National Plant Germplasm System plays a vital role by banking unrestricted seeds for plant breeders throughout the world. But because of the increasing privatization and use of restrictive intellectual property practices in the seed industry, plant breeders are having a more difficult time finding genetic resources they need to improve crops. It’s an ongoing process, which means that plant breeders are almost always on the lookout for new or wild genes to continue it. This is how humans have coevolved with plants through time-by selecting ones that have traits we need and replanting their seeds. Good plant breeders walk the line between developing a plant that’s reliable for the farmer while keeping the genetic pool big enough to allow for future breeding. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the plants, farmers, or the eaters. That’s because the uniformity we see on our tables, like all of the cherry tomatoes in a clamshell being about the same size, is the result of narrowing the variation in the plant’s gene pool. The selections plant breeders make each year to reach these goals end up narrowing the genetic diversity in the crop over time. Customers, like produce buyers or chefs, look for produce that’s similar in size and shape and tastes good.īut there’s a bit of a rub. Farmers look to breeders for plants that will germinate and ripen around the same time to help with farm planning and labor. While plant breeders keep eaters in mind, they also think about what farmers need-and that’s usually uniformity, flavor, and performance. Some plant breeders focus on making plants resistant to a nasty disease or veggies that are super nutritious.Ĭarrots in a rainbow of colors. Depending on their region, the farmers they work with, and the crops they focus on, they might be creating carrots in a rainbow of colors or something even more novel like a habanero pepper that isn’t spicy. Plant breeders select plants that fit their goals. Plant diseases change, climates change, and human tastes change, making the key to a resilient agriculture system a hardy and biodiverse seed supply. And since nature isn’t static, plant breeding is an ongoing endeavor ensuring human survival. Investing in seedsįor the past 10,000 years or so, humans have evolved alongside plants by selecting the ones that fit our needs and domesticating wild species for cultivation. Right now, plant breeders are raising the alarm that this bank needs attention-attention from everyone who depends on seeds for survival. Plant breeders have an incredibly important bank they can turn to for the essential tools they need to create crops for the future-the National Plant Germplasm System. They’re the unsung heroes building the foundation of our food system one seed at a time. In addition to farmers who grow the world’s food, we’ve got plant breeders to thank for our meals. Chances are most of us are not really sure. “It is just so much more important to have access to this material now than it was in the past because human intervention is challenging biological stability,” says Haga, adding people need to understand that “we have so severely impacted our natural environment that we have got to safeguard what we have.Ever heard the saying that you can’t eat money? Take a second to think about the last meal you ate and ask yourself where the seed that grew it came from. It’s an act of human intervention that is becoming more urgently needed as time goes on. “Ideally, we want to have a copy of each unique plant variety around the globe in Svalbard so if anything were to happen in any other seed bank around the globe, we could rest assured that we can still find the variety that we’re looking for and be able to use it for natural breeding for the plant that we need,” Haga said. In May 2016, more than 8,000 varieties of crops - including sheep’s food and chili peppers - from Germany, Thailand, New Zealand, and the World Vegetable Center were deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.Īmong other seed types, there are currently 200,000 varieties of rice and 125,000 varieties of wheat being protected at the vault.
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