Open-Source: From Software to Seeds

I grew up in a rural area of Massachusetts, so I have good memories of the agriculture that surrounded us -- mostly dairy farms and apple orchards. But I'm not a fan of Big Agriculture whose twin goals sometimes seem to be squeezing out more profit while squeezing down more small farmers.

(As an example of what I mean: consider Monsanto's powerful herbicide Roundup which kills pretty much anything. In order to grow, say, corn, a farmer who uses Roundup to control weeds has to use "Roundup-ready" seed, also from Monsanto. Traditionally, farmers set aside a portion of their best crop-seed for next year's planting. But Roundup-ready seeds are second-generation sterile -- known in the business as "terminator seeds" -- so that farmers can't put any seed aside from their crop, but must every year buy the newest version from Monsanto. Monsanto argues that this requirement ensures that their technology helps prevent the spread of Roundup resistance to other species. A side note: there is little evidence that the use of Roundup-ready seed increases either the yields or the profits of the farmers who use it.)

Anyway, you can understand why I was interested by a pair of articles that appeared this week, one in the Washington Post, about a new seed-breeding technology used by the likes of Monsanto, and the second on National Public Radio, about a move to "open-source" plant breeding.

In the first, by Adrian Higgins (full article, published last Wednesday, here), describes the new technique of "marker-assisted breeding":

Marker-assisted breeding... lays bare the inherent genetic potential of an individual plant to allow breeders to find the most promising seedling among thousands for further breeding. Because the plant’s natural genetic boundaries are not crossed, the resulting commercial hybrid is spared the regulatory gantlet and the public opposition focused on such plants as genetically modified Roundup Ready corn or soybeans, which are engineered to withstand herbicide sprays.

Marker-assisted breeding has been embraced not only by the multinational biotech companies here in California’s Central Valley but also by plant scientists in government, research universities and nongovernmental organizations fervently seeking new, overachieving crops. The goal is to sustainably feed an expanding global population while dealing with the extremes of climate change.

But critics of Big Agriculture worry about the needs of small-scale farmers and breeders. Low-tech conventional breeding — judging plants by how they look and perform, not by their DNA — has been the lifeblood of small seed companies and local growers, often in conjunction with breeding programs at land-grant universities. But those programs have shrunk by a third in recent years, and the remaining ones are increasingly gravitating to the trendy sphere of molecular breeding. 

What's a small-scale farmer to do? There may be hope in a new "open-source" seed movement, as reported by Dan Charles on NPR's Morning Edition program (here).

As with open-source software, which is freely available to all for further improvement and development (but not to be converted to a proprietary product), open-source seeds will be made available to all to use and share. At yesterday's inaugural event at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, 29 new varieties of kale, broccoli, quinoa, and other vegetables and grains were released (Wisconsin press release, here).

While many commercial seed companies will not use the open-source seed to breed new varieties (because, as one said, there would be only "limited potential to recoup the investment"), some organic-seed companies have already signed up.