Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is mainly associated with people with different knowledge, experiences and know-how and often from different environments working together – for example, team leaders working for a charity ensuring information is freely exchanged, plant breeders working in a university or government research station guiding the selection of novel parents and achieving difficult crosses and growers or retired gardeners selecting the best progenies in smallholdings or gardens.
Neither growers and gardeners nor trained plant breeders may be used to working with others and leaders with skills attuned to getting the most out of different people can prove invaluable.
Cross-fertilisations obtained by the use of gardeners’ and growers’ gardens or fields can help avoid selections being inappropriate for their conditions due to unfamiliarity. Gardeners and growers are also often very skilled in selecting plant types that will flourish under their conditions and their households can be keen observers of the taste and other requirements of the yield. This makes the plant breeders more ‘client-oriented‘. It also can more-or-less to eliminate the disadvantages that big business has brought modern plant breeding (See: Modern varieties).
PPB is also cheaper because gardeners are usually very happy just to participate, simply taking joy from being involved! And seeing how modern varieties are created, gaining perhaps vigour through stacking beneficial genes and new resistances to pests and diseases combined with the general ‘fitness for purpose’ of heirloom varieties can be very rewarding too.
The inclusion of plant breeders with research facilities is a considerable gain over freelancers even when the latter collaborate amongst themselves. In particular, professional plant breeders can access diverse parental breeding material through their professional links and achieve difficult crosses, may work with others who can analyse plant chemicals, for example, for sugar content and have access to on-farm facilities where they can produce the hundreds or thousands of progeny seedlings needed from which to select a new variety. They might also have access to statisticians to help design trials covering many locations and analyse the data.
The benefits of participatory plant breeding
Nonetheless, with all these apparent advantages, why has the development and take-up of PB taken so long? Gardeners, like organic growers, are a relatively small market, the retail trade has been able to fob them off with varieties developed for the much larger commercial market and the commercial trade likes to maintain this deceit, because it allows their varieties to be sold into a larger combined market.
Attempts at pooling of effort and skills can also bring disagreements. For example, the plant breeders might want to do genetic manipulations or genetic engineering not wanted by all gardeners or organic growers; on the other hand, gardeners might not want traits which plant breeders see as commercially necessary. Ownership of rare genetic traits and new varieties can also cause disagreements.
On the other hand, gardeners are tax payers; in this way, they may pay the salaries and costs of state or university breeders who may therefore consider gardeners worthy of their time and resources! My career has several examples of this. In the 1970s, I discovered glandular hairs on the foliage of some wild potatoes trapped insect pest and Cornell University bred this trait into Prince Hairy and King Harry potato varieties, grown mainly by organic growers and gardeners who didn’t want to apply pesticides. I also received UK Government funding to work with smallholders in Africa to breed sweet potato and cassava using PPB.
Analysing the history of PPB and how it has succeeded in some circumstances but not others helps us to understand the difficulties of the approach for gardeners and to understand where and how best to use it.