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THE FUTURE IN SEEDS OF THE PAST
Canberra Times
Published: Sep 03, 2007
Australasia
The farmer's tanned, furrowed, face is thoughtful. "You should ask
the old women," he says after a pause. He smiles, dull veins of gold
in his teeth.
>From village to village, farm to farm, others agree. "Ask the old
women."
They are helpful and nostalgic, and after an obligatory vodka or two,
melancholic.
We are high in the mountains of southern Armenia on a mission they
understand. They are farmers in the land where farming began.
So we start calling out the old women, who emerge from lightless
kitchens and farm buildings reliable electricity also just a memory
in these remote pockets of the old Soviet empire and we explain our
quest. They hurry away and with extraordinary generosity re-emerge
with tins, jars and knotted cloth containing biological treasures
the seeds of bygone crops.
Grains of wheat, barley, beans and peas disappear into small yellow
envelopes, marked with the name of the village, the name of the family,
and the GPS position the hand held satellite positioning device an
object of wonder to scores of children.
The old women wish us well. Some cry, because these visiting scientists
seem to understand what they have known intuitively all along: that
the traditional varieties were special.
There is a surrealism to these meetings, underscored by the dissonant
chatter of Australian, Russian and Armenian accents as the team
probes for knowledge of yesteryear crops, and asks for a little of the
seed that might be hoarded. As we travel over rutted mountain roads
we are also looking for places where ancestral plants might still
grow on high plains. We are on a hunt for genes; for lost genetic
resources that agricultural scientists say will be crucial for the
world to keep feeding itself despite climate change and deteriorating
agricultural landscapes.
And so this small band of genetic detectives is scouring the birthplace
of agriculture, the Caucuses Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and parts of
Russia for remnant on-farm storages, and for ancestral wild grasses
from which modern crops like wheat and barley were first bred some
5000 years ago.
The mission is led by a Syria- based Australian, Dr Ken Street, an
agricultural ecologist with the International Centre for Agricultural
Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), and comprises Russian and Armenian
plant researchers, as well as another Australian, Perth-based Dr Clive
Francis from the Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture. Their
work is partly funded by Australia through the Australian Centre
for International Agricultural Research and the Grains Research and
Development Corporation.While a two- or three-degree increase in
average temperatures may be perceived by people as merely a comfort
issue, a fraction of a degree change can be enough to stop many food
plants from flowering and delivering grains and fruits. So the genes
that allow the old relatives of modern crops to flourish in frozen
or arid landscapes need to be found and reintroduced.
"We are going back through time, backwards through man- made
evolution," explains Dr Ken Street, who has been leading seed
collecting expeditions into Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan
over the past six years.
"We are looking for the grasses that were used for bread-making
thousands of years ago at the start of civilisation when people first
saw that keeping and sowing seeds from the best plants gradually
improved what they were harvesting. We are searching for what our far
distant ancestors were using; not because they are better but because
they have a wider genetic base. A modern wheat plant might have a few
hundred parents from a breeding program, but the ancient wild varieties
had hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of parents." The genetic
diversity of the Caucuses, and the lure of discovery, is also what
keeps pulling Clive Francis back, long after he had intended retiring.
Gazing across a meadow brimming with plant life, he explains that
in Armenia alone there are 125 species of Astragalus, part of the
legume family.
Legumes are his passion. "The legumes we grow in Australia are annuals,
but there are perennial crop plants here that could help us manage
our wheatbelt water table and limit the build-up of salinity," he says.
Collected seed is planted and assessed at ICARDA in Syria and the most
promising lines sent to plant breeders in Perth, Adelaide, Horsham and
Tamworth for introducing to local crop improvement programs. Legumes
are increasingly important in Australian agriculture as rotation crops
between wheat and barley plantings, as they break potential disease
cycles, and increase soil nitrogen. Their deep roots improve soil
structure and closely mimic native plants in the way they help prevent
rising water tables that cause most of the wheatbelt's salinity.
Aside from benefiting Australian farmers, improved generations will
be sent back to ICARDA to help agricultural development in developing
countries.
Legumes' ability to transfer nitrogen from the atmosphere to the soil,
and research being done to adapt them to sub-tropical environments,
is seen as a low- cost, practical way to restore impoverished soils
in hunger- ravaged areas of Africa.
But in contrast to the almost ready-to-use legumes, harnessing genes
from wheat's ancestral grasses is a 10 to 15 year proposition, a
process that could be accelerated by using genetic engineering. Wheat's
ancestors are too far removed to be able to be crossed with modern
plants, given that wheat is essentially a man-made crop. However,
while the use of GM technologies would allow researchers to retrieve
from ancestral grasses the gene sets capable of delivering traits such
as drought and frost tolerance comparatively quickly, this cannot
be contemplated until the moratoriums on growing GM crops in NSW,
Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia expire in 2008.
The frustration for Australian researchers is that their counterparts
in North and South America have no such restrictions and are enjoying
a handy head- start.
In recent years, Street's seed collecting missions have become part of
an international program developed under the auspices of the Global
Crop Diversity Trust, set up as an instrument of the International
Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
This was established two years ago to try and arrest the erosion of
the world's plant genetic resources.
"It's a survival issue," says Street. "For most people around the
world that means avoiding starvation, while for farmers in countries
like Australia it is economic survival." Late-season frosts destroy
millions of dollars worth of cereal crops in Australia because the
European origins of Australian varieties do not have the ideal genetic
lineage for the Australian environment. "There are wheat varieties
in central Asia and the Caucuses that comfortably tolerate frost and
low rainfall," Street says.
The work by Street and Francis also involves trying to save,
or rebuild, the once pre-eminent plant collections housed in the
neglected botanical institutes of the former Soviet republics in
central Asia and the Caucuses.
"The world is losing irreplaceable seed from these collections simply
because the local people can't afford to replace water pumps, or
stored seed is being eaten by mice," says Street.
"This is frightening, because the genetic origins for a very large
proportion of the world's food crops, including the crops we grow
in Australia, do not exist anywhere else." He says it's all about
making sure that despite the environmental pressures facing global
agriculture, the world's farmers can still keep bread on the table
figuratively and literally.
Canberra Times
Published: Sep 03, 2007
Australasia
The farmer's tanned, furrowed, face is thoughtful. "You should ask
the old women," he says after a pause. He smiles, dull veins of gold
in his teeth.
>From village to village, farm to farm, others agree. "Ask the old
women."
They are helpful and nostalgic, and after an obligatory vodka or two,
melancholic.
We are high in the mountains of southern Armenia on a mission they
understand. They are farmers in the land where farming began.
So we start calling out the old women, who emerge from lightless
kitchens and farm buildings reliable electricity also just a memory
in these remote pockets of the old Soviet empire and we explain our
quest. They hurry away and with extraordinary generosity re-emerge
with tins, jars and knotted cloth containing biological treasures
the seeds of bygone crops.
Grains of wheat, barley, beans and peas disappear into small yellow
envelopes, marked with the name of the village, the name of the family,
and the GPS position the hand held satellite positioning device an
object of wonder to scores of children.
The old women wish us well. Some cry, because these visiting scientists
seem to understand what they have known intuitively all along: that
the traditional varieties were special.
There is a surrealism to these meetings, underscored by the dissonant
chatter of Australian, Russian and Armenian accents as the team
probes for knowledge of yesteryear crops, and asks for a little of the
seed that might be hoarded. As we travel over rutted mountain roads
we are also looking for places where ancestral plants might still
grow on high plains. We are on a hunt for genes; for lost genetic
resources that agricultural scientists say will be crucial for the
world to keep feeding itself despite climate change and deteriorating
agricultural landscapes.
And so this small band of genetic detectives is scouring the birthplace
of agriculture, the Caucuses Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and parts of
Russia for remnant on-farm storages, and for ancestral wild grasses
from which modern crops like wheat and barley were first bred some
5000 years ago.
The mission is led by a Syria- based Australian, Dr Ken Street, an
agricultural ecologist with the International Centre for Agricultural
Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), and comprises Russian and Armenian
plant researchers, as well as another Australian, Perth-based Dr Clive
Francis from the Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture. Their
work is partly funded by Australia through the Australian Centre
for International Agricultural Research and the Grains Research and
Development Corporation.While a two- or three-degree increase in
average temperatures may be perceived by people as merely a comfort
issue, a fraction of a degree change can be enough to stop many food
plants from flowering and delivering grains and fruits. So the genes
that allow the old relatives of modern crops to flourish in frozen
or arid landscapes need to be found and reintroduced.
"We are going back through time, backwards through man- made
evolution," explains Dr Ken Street, who has been leading seed
collecting expeditions into Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan
over the past six years.
"We are looking for the grasses that were used for bread-making
thousands of years ago at the start of civilisation when people first
saw that keeping and sowing seeds from the best plants gradually
improved what they were harvesting. We are searching for what our far
distant ancestors were using; not because they are better but because
they have a wider genetic base. A modern wheat plant might have a few
hundred parents from a breeding program, but the ancient wild varieties
had hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of parents." The genetic
diversity of the Caucuses, and the lure of discovery, is also what
keeps pulling Clive Francis back, long after he had intended retiring.
Gazing across a meadow brimming with plant life, he explains that
in Armenia alone there are 125 species of Astragalus, part of the
legume family.
Legumes are his passion. "The legumes we grow in Australia are annuals,
but there are perennial crop plants here that could help us manage
our wheatbelt water table and limit the build-up of salinity," he says.
Collected seed is planted and assessed at ICARDA in Syria and the most
promising lines sent to plant breeders in Perth, Adelaide, Horsham and
Tamworth for introducing to local crop improvement programs. Legumes
are increasingly important in Australian agriculture as rotation crops
between wheat and barley plantings, as they break potential disease
cycles, and increase soil nitrogen. Their deep roots improve soil
structure and closely mimic native plants in the way they help prevent
rising water tables that cause most of the wheatbelt's salinity.
Aside from benefiting Australian farmers, improved generations will
be sent back to ICARDA to help agricultural development in developing
countries.
Legumes' ability to transfer nitrogen from the atmosphere to the soil,
and research being done to adapt them to sub-tropical environments,
is seen as a low- cost, practical way to restore impoverished soils
in hunger- ravaged areas of Africa.
But in contrast to the almost ready-to-use legumes, harnessing genes
from wheat's ancestral grasses is a 10 to 15 year proposition, a
process that could be accelerated by using genetic engineering. Wheat's
ancestors are too far removed to be able to be crossed with modern
plants, given that wheat is essentially a man-made crop. However,
while the use of GM technologies would allow researchers to retrieve
from ancestral grasses the gene sets capable of delivering traits such
as drought and frost tolerance comparatively quickly, this cannot
be contemplated until the moratoriums on growing GM crops in NSW,
Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia expire in 2008.
The frustration for Australian researchers is that their counterparts
in North and South America have no such restrictions and are enjoying
a handy head- start.
In recent years, Street's seed collecting missions have become part of
an international program developed under the auspices of the Global
Crop Diversity Trust, set up as an instrument of the International
Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
This was established two years ago to try and arrest the erosion of
the world's plant genetic resources.
"It's a survival issue," says Street. "For most people around the
world that means avoiding starvation, while for farmers in countries
like Australia it is economic survival." Late-season frosts destroy
millions of dollars worth of cereal crops in Australia because the
European origins of Australian varieties do not have the ideal genetic
lineage for the Australian environment. "There are wheat varieties
in central Asia and the Caucuses that comfortably tolerate frost and
low rainfall," Street says.
The work by Street and Francis also involves trying to save,
or rebuild, the once pre-eminent plant collections housed in the
neglected botanical institutes of the former Soviet republics in
central Asia and the Caucuses.
"The world is losing irreplaceable seed from these collections simply
because the local people can't afford to replace water pumps, or
stored seed is being eaten by mice," says Street.
"This is frightening, because the genetic origins for a very large
proportion of the world's food crops, including the crops we grow
in Australia, do not exist anywhere else." He says it's all about
making sure that despite the environmental pressures facing global
agriculture, the world's farmers can still keep bread on the table
figuratively and literally.
