Modern and heirloom varieties were bred using quite different approaches.

 

 

Each method is quite different in all stages. How they have become so different is dealt with under Modern Varieties. But why should gardeners keep growing varieties bred by the ‘old-fashioned’ method of breeding their varieties whilst commercial growers choose exclusively modern varieties?

Just think about it. Heirloom varieties are pre-World War II. Post-WWII, wheat and maize yields have increased four to eightfold in the developed world. Amazing advances have been made in our knowledge of plant genetics. And many major genes providing resistance to devastating diseases of our crops have been discovered. The disadvantages of modern varieties for gardeners must be very large to make them discard their advantages. So a means of avoiding the first is clearly desperately needed.

Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is based largely on the concept that the users of varieties (farmers, smallholders, gardeners etc) and professional breeders all have useful but different knowledge, experience and facilities for plant breeding and they achieve maximum success by combining forces (A good test for the genuineness of participatory plant breeding is whether the plant breeder uses ‘open-ended’ questions (passes test) such as ‘Which of these plants suit your needs best ‘, followed by ‘Why’ rather than ‘closed’ questions (fails test) such as ‘Which plant yields the most’ or ‘has the highest sugar content’).

Many of the benefits of modern plant breeding, such as identifying and incorporating newly-discovered genes providing higher yield or greater resistance, are best incorporated into new varieties by plant breeders working in research stations whilst advantages of the empirical method by which heirloom varieties were bred can only be gained by using gardens and gardeners. Plant breeders need to know the priorities of gardeners in order to select parental breeding material and gardeners need the advice of professional plant breeders in selection and analysis of the results.

PPB works by bringing gardeners and plant breeders together. It’s simple, isn’t it! Well, perhaps not so.

So, what is holding us back?

A disadvantage of PPB for some actors, particularly commercial companies, is that ownership of breeding lines is important, yet gardeners are such a disparate group of individuals that companies may be unwilling to share them. Indeed, an essential aspect of PPB is that breeding material is distributed to all users from an early stage. This can make commercial companies want to work only with entities with which they can make legally binding contracts guaranteeing their retained ownership of plant breeding material.

Nonetheless, there are sources of modern plant breeding expertise available other than for-profit companies; they occur in, for example, universities or government research institutes and these may value ownership of breeding material less highly. Even with these partners though, progress has been slow. In order to ensure it continues to advance steadily, we need to understand the history of PPB with gardeners.

It started with so-called freelancers collaborating.