The distinguishing features of both PARTICIPATORY PLANT BREEDING (PPB) and PARTICIPATORY VARIETAL SELECTION (PVS) are that they both involve the users of the target varieties in all or most stages of breeding, and and varietal selection, the selection amongst plant populations or varieties is in the users’ environments and it is during their typical usages of the crop. Both processes are all aimed at fine-tuning the development of varieties precisely to the needs of their users: in the jargon, they are ‘client-orientated’.
PPB also always involves trained plant breeders. In this way, it achieves the advantages of modern and older methods of breeding and selecting plant varieties. They have been used successfully at all levels of crop production, from large-scale commercial agriculture to small-scale subsistence, peasant or organic growers and even smaller-scale gardeners and allotment holders. This website serves to promulgate them and to act as a useful guide and reference.
For the purposes of this website, gardens, gardeners and their households are the expected environments and users. PPB for us is likely to involve trained plant breeders working on-station, often with advice from gardeners, to select and cross good plant parents, followed by selection amongst the progeny, initially (F2 generation) perhaps on-station but definitely in gardens and with gardeners and their households leading the selection process for subsequent plant generations.
Such a process combines the advantages of modern varietal selection through researchers’ wide knowledge of and access to good potential plant parents and ease of achieving crosses on-station whilst also gaining the benefits of older observational selection through gardeners’ knowledge and ‘eye’ for exactly what they need from a new variety.
Involving gardeners’ gardens and labour in selecting the final new varieties is considerably cheaper than doing it on-station and also more cost-effective because of the certainty that the selected varieties will be suited to the needs of the client. These advantages are especially beneficial for small-scale specialist plant breeders and not-for-profit organisations unlikely to be able to afford large on-station farms.
At the same time, this helps avoid the desires of commercial companies for traits which are disadvantageous to gardeners, for example, those which provide exclusivity to a plant breeding company or are detrimental to gardeners whilst benefiting other more commercial users (and thus encouraging extra sales).
Participatory plant breeding and selection, part of the broad umbrella of CITIZEN SCIENCE, are widely used in developing countries but have more often been used in organic farming in the developed world. They often emphasise strong disease resistance and other beneficial traits derived from landraces and wild species recently discovered by plant collectors. Earlier heirloom varieties cannot have these traits, demonstrating gardeners’ need for PPB and PVS to identify modern varieties for them.
This website explains:
- The main advantages and disadvantages of the different types of varieties (heirloom, modern, F1 hybrids etc).
- The reasons why modern plant breeding is skewed in favour of the seed companies and commercial growers to the detriment of gardeners, resulting in most available varieties being less well-suited to gardeners than they could be.
- And why, up till quite recently, this is so.
Huge (billion dollar!) international conglomerates breed most modern plant varieties and, for commercial reasons, target commercial growers needing suitability to mechanisation and ‘toughness’ traits enabling sales to distant supermarkets and factories. These are unnecessary, indeed often unwanted by gardeners.
Instead, plant breeders working for government, charitable institutions or for not-for-much-profit companies have been the main users of participatory methods and they have often chosen to work with organic small-scale farmers, rather than the wider and more diverse population of gardeners. Examples use an evolutionary account of participatory approaches. New methods of communication have proved particularly important for this.
The whole topic of plant breeding is extremely important but often overlooked by gardeners – they tend just to use the varieties available and not be concerned at how and why they were created. But the varieties of plants that gardeners grow are critical: get wrong ones and we’re disappointed however much we fertilise or otherwise pamper them. Yet a good variety often costs no more than a poor one.
Gardeners need varieties to be bred specifically for them, such varieties need to be identifiable and for knowledge of them (the whole truth and nothing but the truth!) to be available so the the correct ones can be selected. We need, for our own sakes, to get involved. And participatory plant breeding seems to be the best way to achieve this!
And, let me admit it, I personally found it a very satisfying cause, worth dedicating time and money to!