Saving Our Agricultural Heritage

When you flip through the newest seed catalogues or peruse the seed racks at your local big box store, you’d be forgiven for assuming that there is a plentiful supply of seeds available for any type of gardening endeavour. But you’d be mistaken.

You see, our seed supply in Canada and around the world is skewed towards the breeding of plant varieties that can be patented, whose breeders retain control of the germplasm (i.e. genetic material, such as seeds) and receive royalties on their sales. Modern plant breeders’ focus (most of whom work in corporate breeding labs) is on the protection of intellectual property rights of breeders, which includes limiting farmers’ and growers’ access to the seeds and their genetics.

That’s why you see so many “F1” notations on varieties – these are the first generation of seeds from a modern plant breeding project and, as such, are covered by patent protection. These types of seeds are, indeed, plentiful – if you can afford them and don’t mind buying them every year. You see, the seeds from F1’s will not come “true to type”, meaning that the plants that grow from the seeds will not all resemble their parents.

Why? Modern breeding selects two parents who exhibit a particular desired trait and inbreeds each line repeatedly until the desired trait is most strongly evident, at which point the two lines are crossed. F1’s are the seeds of that first crossing: they’re highly productive and, as the first cross, genetically unstable. Because this breeding process relies so much on inbreeding two parent lines, the resulting genomes (genetic traits) of the offspring are very narrow.

This is a modern issue and, by modern, I mean in the last few decades. Before the introduction of scientific plant breeding, new varieties of plants were developed by farmers, home gardeners, and seed companies in crop fields of hundreds of plants. Plants with desirable traits were selected from the field and their seed gathered for planting the next year. Doing this successively over a number of years resulted in the new traits becoming stabilized and a new variety developed.

Quite often, home gardeners (and almost every family had a home garden) would save the seeds of varieties they treasured, growing them out over the years until they became adapted to their local growing conditions. This type of plant breeding is called Classical Breeding and it results in open-pollinated plants that are not patent-protected and whose seeds are freely available for further research and development. Because many parent plants are used, open-pollinated plants have broad genomes with complex genetic profiles.

Heirloom and heritage plant varieties are all open-pollinated and are, in fact, living gene banks for cultivated plants. They preserve a wide diversity of genetic traits and are often used for breeding projects. However, they’re disappearing at an alarming rate and taking their genes with them.

Why, when heirloom varieties are so important, are they disappearing? To answer this question, we need to look to some global trends: the increasing consolidation of the commercial seed industry, an increased focus on ownership of seeds through intellectual property rights, and the increasing use of technology in plant breeding.