Organic Plant Breeding Yields Healthy Diversity

Home-grown 'Purple Haze' and 'Egmont Gold' carrots. (Gordon Joly/Wikimedia Commons)

Have you ever tasted a purple carrot? Yellow squash? Blue potatoes? Purple-and-white “Martian Jewels” corn?

Unlike what you might expect, these exotically colored vegetables are not the result of new artificial breeding experiments. The Martian Jewels corn was found in this year’s Seeds of Change catalog, which includes only organic seeds and varieties.

In addition to mainstream breeding techniques, there is organic plant breeding. There is no genetic modification (GM) in organic breeding, but that’s not all there is to it.

Organic breeding holds itself to high requirements based on plants’ natural reproductive ability, genetic diversity, natural species authenticity, species characteristics, agro-biodiversity, cultural diversity, and a focus on the cooperation between farmers, breeders, and traders.

A difference between mainstream breeding and organic breeding is that the latter aims to enhance inherent plant resilience instead of focusing on singular disease immunity and yield improvement.

“Apart from aversive socio-economic effects and environmental and health risks of the GM approaches, [organic breeding] is about values,” Dr. Edith Lammerts van Bueren, chair of organic plant breeding at Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands, told The Epoch Times.

“It focuses more on a partnership with nature and less on a ruler-subject or stewardship attitude toward nature.”

For example, one of her Ph.D. students works to redevelop old corn cultivars in Southwest Guizhou, China. These are used to prepare some traditional, special dishes that cannot be prepared with common corn varieties. The varieties are then bred on farms. This process involved breeder-farmer cooperation and was able to maintain cultural diversity.

The good news is that mainstream and organic breeding do not necessarily have to be antagonistic. Organic breeding can innovate mainstream breeding programs and vice versa.

For example, some molecular selection tools used in mainstream breeding programs can potentially shorten organic breeding programs without violating plants’ natural authenticity or damaging their natural reproductive ability.

Organic plant breeding can in return “diversify and innovate conventional breeding programs through its unique perspective and experience on plant breeding within a natural and cultural context,” Lammerts van Bueren said.