WHY SO MANY MODERN VARIETIES ARE UNSUITABLE FOR GARDENERS
Gardeners aren’t the main customers of plant breeding companies
The main customers for modern varieties are commercial growers so, predictably, their breeders breed varieties for them. The UK pea crop provides a good illustration of this. About 40,000ha are grown commercially in the UK. Farmers aim for about 7 – 800,000 pea plants/ha, amounting to about 30 x 109 pea seeds planted in total. A packet of pea seeds sold to gardeners contains about 250 seeds so this number of peas is equivalent to about one hundred and twenty-eight million retail packets – it is unlikely that even 1% of this, half a million packets, are sold to gardeners in the UK every year!
Plant breeding companies are also often influenced by commercial growers directly. A Dutch colleague of mine recently told me: ‘In tomato and other vegetable breeding in the Netherlands, the companies very-very closely listen to what the growers say about their varieties. That info comes to them through the representatives that also are the technical advisors. Feedback through these channels is highly effective’. Dutch gardeners weren’t mentioned at all!
Plant breeders are breeding new varieties for their main customers; they just aren’t gardeners!
Gardeners have different needs to commercial growers, so modern varieties bred with commercial growers in mind often don’t suit them.
For commercial growers, time is money so they mechanise everything they can. Where I grew up, frozen peas are an important market. The crops are harvested destructively in one harvest by huge combine harvesters (see below, left). For this to work, the plants have to be dwarf and all the peas on the crop have to be ready for harvest at the same time. Fortunately, the two traits are genetically linked. It also avoids the plants needing stakes, which would prevent machine harvesting anyway, and plants are also usually bred leafless or semi-leafless to avoid the machines clogging up (see right-hand picture below from Mr Fothergills catalogue).
However, the fact that such dwarf varieties of peas provide their yield of peas during only a short period is a disadvantage to most gardeners, providing a glut followed by famine! The same is true for other crops, for example, dwarf beans grown by mechanised farmers are only used by gardeners provide an early short-season crop. Similarly, the modern bush varieties of tomatoes grown by large-scale growers of canning crops in Italy don’t suit gardeners. Commercial crops also have to survive machine harvesting, sorting and grading, long-distance transport and they need a long shelf life. So tomatoes in supermarkets always seem to have an unpleasantly-thick skin!
Even for the humble cabbages and cauliflowers, the uniformity of modern F1 hybrids is designed to suit growers who want to harvest them mechanically in a single visit. And commercial growers may also be more at ease than gardeners with using chemical fertilisers and pesticides so the breeders also select for these conditions.
A similar situation occurs for modern flowering plants. For example, bedding plants are now dwarf. Such varieties make wonderful formal displays in large gardens and parks and, because they flower earlier, sell better to gullible gardeners when on sale in the garden centre because they are already in bloom – but they don’t have the potential for growth that the older varieties had. Remember those tall old-fashioned wallflowers, each capable of spreading over a large area, compared with the stunted modern varieties.
The seed company Real Seeds identifies the problem well:
“Basically, seeds are now bred for large industrial farms (which is where the money is) and you, the home grower, just get fobbed off with a few of the same thing. Modern advert copywriting sometimes tries to disguise this. So when you’re offered something that’s ‘good for freezing’, what they mean is that it was bred to ripen all at once for machine harvesting & you’ll get a glut.
Here are a few examples from other catalogues that we found: How about ‘really uniform fruit’ – which often means ‘inbred for the supermarket, narrow genetic base, may not adapt to your soil’. Or ‘straight long shanks’ usually means ‘bred to fit the packing machine.’ Or the best one yet – ‘Leafless peas – easy to find the pods’ translates as ‘much smaller yield (the plants have no leaves!) – but at least now we’ve got rid of the leaves we can harvest them with a combine.”
Yet UK garden retailers sell these commercial varieties to UK gardeners, often putting a tiny number of seeds in each expensive glossy packet. Not their breeder’s intended customers but tapping into the commercial seed supply chain, they don’t cost the garden retailers much, so a nice profit.
Modern plant breeders don’t interact with gardeners
No major international plant breeding company is based in the UK. I obtained nineteen blight-resistant tomatoes to test outdoors in the UK in 2022, aiming to cover the available range; only two were definitely British-bred, the majority were clearly foreign. And most seeds of varieties even from the few UK-based plant breeding companies (Tozer, Pro-Veg etc) are also multiplied overseas, because of a better climate for this. And they sell to gardeners through seed retailers, so again little interaction with UK gardeners. The value of seeds on the world export market in 2018 was a colossal $13,812,000,000 but the UK ranked only 24th.
And the plant breeders now have degrees in plant breeding/ genetics and work on research stations with laboratories and farms equipped with computers loaded with modern statistical packages, scientific measuring equipment, farm machinery, fertilizers and pesticides. Again, little common ground with either gardeners or gardens!
All these are barriers to modern plant breeders appreciating UK, or for that matter any, gardeners.
Plant breeding is now science-based
Plant breeding has changed from being empirical observations to scientific measurements of crop traits, such as yield, sugar content and unpleasant or toxic compounds and using genetics to plan crosses etc. Their equipment can determine sugar and starch content, acidity and amounts of trace elements or phytochemicals such as β-carotene (precursor of vitamin A). This can have huge advantages. In Uganda where I used to work, the breeding priorities for sweet potatoes included β-carotene, zinc and iron content. And it is scientific equipment that has allowed plant breeders to remove toxic compounds such as glucosinolates and erucic acid from rapeseed.
BUT time and money spent measuring things in minute detail inevitably subtract from resources available to observe other things such as overall taste. Modern varieties of sweet corn may remain super-sweet on a supermarket shelf but lack the complexity of flavour of heirloom varieties selected many years ago by eye and by mouth.
Modern plant breeders also often select for plants with specific sections of DNA – conferring maybe GM herbicide resistance, rejecting all that don’t possess it. And this genetic testing can be done on seedlings, so all seedlings lacking the necessary gene are rejected. This prioritises genetic tests on seedlings because it can mean the best yielding plants are missed simply because they never get grown to maturity.
Exclusive possession of varieties, genes and processes
Almost all modern varieties are F1 hybrids and seed packets sold to gardeners are usually expensive, with few seeds. The intrinsic technology behind an F1 hybrid is simple and clever (see ‘Advantages‘). But an F1 hybrid can be produced only from its inbred parental lines, providing exclusive possession because the parental lines never need to be sold. And this opportunity to hike prices is often the only reason for the F1 hybrids; as Carol Deppe in her excellent book on plant breeding points out, F1 hybrids of some crops yield little or no more than open-pollinated varieties, yet they have the same plethora of F1 hybrids.
And by-the-bye, if gardeners save the seeds of an F1 hybrid, the yield of the offspring is nowhere near as good as the original, largely because one or a few recessive deleterious genes often remain in the F1 hybrids to be expressed in the next generation, preventing seed-saving. And this is probably more by design than chance since companies even utilise male sterility to enforce this.
Academic scientists developed male sterility to enable F1 hybrids to enable one inbred parent to be cheaply field-pollinated by the other inbred parent with no risk of self-pollination. BUT THE OPPOSITE HAPPENED! the seed remains expensive and the savings pocketed by the seed companies! And male sterility is used to prevent other plant breeding companies gaining access to any unique genes in the F1 hybrid, preventing their widespread availability to the general disadvantage of gardeners, commercial growers and other plant breeders and allowing another price hike!
The products of genetic manipulations (GM) similarly are also usually controlled by patents on the genetic material and/or on unique aspects of the process of genetic manipulation.
The various means of maintaining possession have encouraged huge investments to be made in plant breeding. Yet these investment do not necessarily encourage the breeding of better plants; just the breeding of varieties better protected by exclusive possessions of parental plants and by patents and so better able to gouge more money from purchasers.
F1 hybrids restrict crop diversity
In maize, the first commercial source of sterility is genetically linked with susceptibility to Southern corn leaf blight. Since most companies used the same source, most hybrid varieties succumbed to the disease. The economic losses from this epidemic (in the 1970s) were catastrophic, estimated then to total about 1 billion dollars. The food lost was many times greater than even in the infamous potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s (Bruns, 2017), though few people have heard of it!
This risk is still being taken because commerce requires maximising profit through the widespread use of a successful resistance gene. Thus powdery mildew resistance of onion based on a single gene found in Allium roylei, a wild species from the Himalayas, is being used in several varieties of onions sold worldwide by at least two international companies, Hazera and Bejo/De Groot en Slot. The latter company has also introduced exactly the same gene into a shallot variety, Innovator.
Together, the Ph-2 and Ph-3 resistance genes are widely used to provide late blight resistance in tomatoes. And it’s easy with F1 hybrids: once the resistance gene(s) has been bred into one inbred parental line, all that is needed to breed a series of F1 hybrids with perhaps yellow instead of red fruit or small cherry tomatoes instead of beefsteak ones is to cross it with an appropriate parental line. As a result, there are now several series of lines of F1 hybrid tomatoes, for example, the Crimson Crush, Crimson Cherry, Crimson Plum etc series and the Mountain Magic, Mountain Merit etc series: all contain the same resistance genes.
And this also shows how the diversity of F1 hybrids is often not matched by an equivalent increase in genetic diversity and, despite the increased diversity of names, genetic diversity may decrease. Such series may look very different to us but, to the pest or disease, they all are the same ‘under the skin’ and all are equally susceptible to a resistance-breaking strain – a distinct lack of care for the future. If resistance breaks down in one variety, it breaks down in all, potentially a catastrophic outcome worldwide.
Genetically modification (GM)
It is government agricultural and horticultural institutes that often develop GM technologies that improve our plant varieties to the benefit of our health or survival, e.g., biofortification or the yields of our crops.
However, the UK is the origin of the privatisation philosophy and, in the 1990s, this resulted in the loss of about 80% of our government horticultural and agricultural research institutes. So, we have to rely on commercial companies for these benefits – and they may not be minded to introduce the ones we need FOR OUR HEALTH.
The most frequently GM genes introduced by commerce are those controlling herbicide and pest resistance, GM genes, for example, being present in almost all commercial American varieties of maize and cotton. Their only benefit is to make it easier for large-scale farmers to grow their crops.
The herbicide resistance enables the resistant GM crops to be doused repeatedly with herbicide; the crops survive and the weeds perish. Sales of that specific herbicide are also increased and the company owning the GM herbicide resistant varieties is usually the company that owns the herbicide. Thus the company can use one to promote the other and vice-versa, whilst at the same time gaining the benefit of monopolistic high prices on both the herbicide and the seed. The herbicide Roundup and Roundup Ready varieties owned by Monsanto are the prime example; The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has prepared an interesting discussion paper on this – there are a few pros as well as cons.
Their advantages may be fleeting
Modern resistances usually come from rare landraces or wild species; searching for them has often taken years of painstaking work on many thousands of plant genotypes. Because of their rarity, they weren’t ‘worth’ the pest or pathogen overcoming them. But when humans put such resistance genes in widely-grown crops, they do become worth overcoming!
Tomatoes could only be confidently grown in gardens in the UK once late blight resistant varieties of tomatoes became available in the UK around 2010. The Ph-1 blight resistance gene was discovered in the 1950s but quickly failed, the Ph-2 resistance gene was discovered in the 1960s and by itself is also ineffective, the Ph-3 resistance gene was discovered in the 1990s and is the one that allows tomatoes still to be grown outside. But late blight strains that can overcome Ph-3 are already known to science!
The potato cyst nematode-resistant potato variety Maris Piper was released in 1966 and its resistance comes from the H1 gene found in a South American potato landrace (CPC 1673) held in the Commonwealth Potato Collection, founded in 1939 and now based in Scotland. Until then, the cyst nematode was a serious problem for gardeners because their small gardens made it difficult to achieve long rotations, the only other way to control it. However, there is a caveat: its resistance is also single gene; scientists are worried it may not be durable and are already seeking alternative sources of resistance.
Time has shown that the benefits of single gene sources of strong resistance may only be fleeting. Heirloom varieties generally lack the strong sources of resistance to pests and diseases by modern varieties yet their weaker resistances have been proved to be durable.
Conclusions
The most pernicious problems for gardeners associated with modern varieties are linked to big international conglomerates exploiting the properties of F1 hybrids, sterility genes, patents on genes etc to ensure their long-term control over biological materials and consequent long-term monopoly rentals rather than competing to provide better and cheaper seeds for their customers.
This has led to the rejection of such seeds by concerned growers and gardeners, antagonism to Big Business and the development of worldwide seed sovereignty movements such as Navdanya International and The Gaia Foundation to oppose long-term possession of plant genetic material.
It is important to emphasise that gardeners and organic growers are not intrinsically against modern advances in seed improvement. Carol Deppe in her book on gardeners breeding their own varieties suggests that beneficial advantages of modern varieties include F1 hybrids as long as they do not affect seed sovereignty.
Bocking 14 is a hybrid between two species of comfrey which is beloved by organic gardeners and others, largely because of its value as a natural manure. Discovered by the ecotrepreneur Henry Doubleday, it includes both interspecific hybridity and its sterility as these both ensure its vigorous production of organic material. The latter property also ensures it flowers continuously so it is a wonderful food source for bees especially bumblebees, yet it doesn’t seed everywhere.
It is the purpose that causes the antagonism, not the science!
PPB and PVS, by contrast, bring plant breeders and customers together, ensuring customers regain their proper role as co-decision-makers, so avoiding the monopolies of plant breeding companies. Click here to explore how participatory plant breeding, sometimes releasing under open source licences, and participatory variety selection, can reward breeders of varieties that, by luck or design, are suitable for gardeners to use.