Leopold Center - Conference seeks to strengthen traditional public breeding programs

With the advent of Bt corn and Roundup Ready™ soybeans, no one questions why major funding for breeding programs has gradually moved from the public to private sector. Genetic engineering – the ability to manipulate a single gene in a plant or animal – opened the door to create new products that could be marketed to many users.

As a result, traditional breeding programs that rely on selection among genetically variable populations have taken a back seat at many colleges and universities.

“Many public breeding programs have gone out of existence,” said William Tracy, who leads the sweet corn breeding program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of a few such programs in the United States. “Some programs are strong because of the individual breeder, but that enthusiasm often ends when the person retires.”

Tracy was among a group of nearly 100 researchers, farmers and others interested in traditional plant and animal breeding who met in Ames September 12-14 to discuss why these programs need to be continued and even expanded at land grant universities and other public institutions. The Leopold Center helped co-sponsor the conference with the Raymond F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding at Iowa State and the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) based in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

The meeting was a follow-up to a national Seeds and Breeds Summit held in Washington, D.C., in 2003. The September conference reviewed existing breeding programs to develop strategies that could be included in the 2007 Farm Bill.

University research wanes
Tracy developed one of the first bi-color varieties of sweet corn with a high sugar content and good germination, the forerunner to popular super-sweet varieties marketed today. Without the development of improved germplasm, which Tracy says is no longer happening at universities and in other public programs, society is losing more than just researchers.

“Food security is one of the primary reasons that plant and animal breeding should be done at our universities with public support,” Tracy said.

“Plant breeding decisions determine the future of the world’s food supply,” he said. “Placing the world’s crop germplasm and plant improvement in the hands of a few companies is bad public policy. We need both genetic diversity and a diversity of decision-makers.”

As a result of consolidation and vertical integration, only five corporations dominate the genetics of most crops grown worldwide, according to research conducted by Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Although ownership of breeding stock is still fairly dispersed in livestock production, they found some equally disturbing trends. For example in the Holstein breed, which makes up over 90 percent of the dairy cows in the United States, more than 60 percent of the cows come from only four family lines.

Few organic varieties
Lack of diversity in seedstock has a huge impact on organic farmer Ron Rosmann. He has few choices when buying seed for his 600-acre farm near Harlan in west central Iowa. More than 90 percent of commercial corn seed consists of genetically modified varieties or varieties developed to grow with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides not used in an organic operation. On the other hand, there are only a few varieties of certified organic corn seed on the market.

“You can’t take conventional seeds developed under specific conditions and expect them to perform under entirely different conditions,” said Rosmann, who also spoke at the conference. “It’s a significant problem, probably the biggest one we have right now.”

Rosmann and other farmers who use alternative production systems have similar challenges finding cattle and hogs suited to their needs. Newer breeds are meant to perform well on diets of grain and in large indoor facilities, rather than in the primarily outdoor pasture systems with variable weather conditions that are favored by organic producers.

For example, Rosmann feeds his hogs a mixture of barley and spring peas, a legume that eliminates the need for soybean meal. He interplants the two crops in the same field and would like to see varieties that mature at the same time.

Specialty or niche crops often are overlooked by private breeding programs, which are designed to sell large volumes of seed over a wide target area. Also missing are cultivars adapted to local environments because the size of the market may not support even a modest breeding program by small seed companies and farmer-breeders.

“It’s a difference of objectives,” Tracy explained. “The main objective of private corporations is to make profit for owners and investors. Public breeders are generally less concerned about sales volume and may be more interested in developing cultivars that actually reduce seed sales, such as long-lived perennials or cultivars from which the farmer may save seed such as pure lines and open-pollinated cultivars.”

Global research needed
Internationally, the need may be even greater for public breeding programs to help increase food production. There are only five public breeders who work with bananas, a food staple grown on more than 11 million acres, and three public breeders for yams, another major food crop in Africa.

“In developing nations, public breeding programs are withering and dying,” Tracy said. “Between 1960 and 1985, food production was outpacing population growth but since 1987 we’ve just been keeping up and it actually looks like per capita food production is going down.”

He said plant and animal breeders always need to look to the future. Typically, there’s a seven- to 10-year delay from research lab to commercial introduction of new plants or animal breeds.

“By predicting the future, we create the future and breeders need to be more involved in discussions about the future and what’s needed by farmers and desired by consumers,” he said. “We need to be reinvigorated about our own sense of mission and re-connecting with the people who need it most, which is the mission of the land grant university.”