‘When we’re up against Monsanto, we need likeminded people, it’s like we’re an army. Clandestine soldiers for a different way.’
On a sunny morning in mid-June, I drove up through the city of Corvallis into the northern suburbs to visit plant breeder Carol Deppe.
Carol Deppe holds a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University and specialises in developing open-source crops for organic systems. She is author of multiple books on plant breeding, seed saving, and self-reliance in uncertain times. I had the very special opportunity to meet with Carol for lunch, later continuing this engaging conversation sat outside her home on her porch. This post is a summary of the highlights of our discussion, and an opportunity to reflect on some recurring themes of my trip so far.
During our time together, Carol shared many anecdotes from her life and career. Carol has been breeding plants for many years. One of the first women in her field, her career began at the University of Minnesota, but after working as a geneticist within academia, she left the constraints of the lab to focus on breeding for organic systems – putting the full power of genetics into the hands of the public and gardeners.
Carol’s breeding work is grounded in organics, and one thing she is sure of is that organic agriculture needs more suitable varieties: more diversity to challenge the reliance on the conventional methods. So, she focuses on growing crops under organic circumstances that taste better and out compete everything else. Some of her well-known varieties include the Candystick Dessert delicata squash, Fast Lady cowpea and Goldini zucchini. Carol tastes all her selections, choosing the biggest and most beautiful plants and fruits to save seed from, reassessing her selections at all stages of the plant’s life cycle. She talked in earnest of gardens and farms that could thrive in the face of greater climate unpredictability, of breeding crops that will grow well in a diversity of conditions and produce food that we really want to eat as well as sustain us.
Carol made the conscious decision to leave academia and focus on this self-reliant ‘DIY’ style plant breeding, and she has since created some incredible vegetable varieties which are sold across the US. It felt empowering to listen to her stories of success on her own terms. I asked her for her thoughts on the breeding process, and if one method was better than another in terms of maintaining diversity. Her response was that we’re all missing something as plant breeders or seed stewards. Whether in a lab or in the field, we all have our own selection biases and will be influenced by what we think is right. Even something as simple as breeding for flavour – we might think we have found the most delicious green bean, but that is just based on our own taste buds and in our own context. This is why having lots of people doing this work is important.
A handful of companies currently account for most of the worlds commercial plant breeding and seed sales. To challenge this control, and to offer a viable alternative to genetic modification, we need to embrace our diversity and forge affectionate alliances. We need seed companies with a keen eye for the unexpected cross, we need farmers breeding organic crops in their fields, and we need people like Jim Myers breeding for natural pathogen resilience in labs. We also need people like Lane, bringing everyone together to share and inspire. We need lots of folks stewarding and guiding these crops, all with different priorities and preferences but all working towards a similar goal. Carol said something wonderful in our conversation which gave me hope – when I asked her if she thought someone like me, without a background in genetics could be a plant breeder, she said people like me were exactly what the world of plant breeding needs. ‘You breed your own values right into the varieties’. By bringing a bit of our personalities to the selection process, we are breeding plants just a little bit different to everything else.
This led onto a topic I had hoped to dive into a little deeper with Carol - how far do we select? It seems, looking at our current modern agricultural crops, that we have a habit of intensely selecting for things that we want without considering the wider consequences. We as a species, are always looking for newness and originality so we focus on the unique individuals within a plant population. But by discarding the other members and creating homogeneity, what are we losing? Unique traits in plants (off types or mutations) according to Carol, can sometimes be recessive, so arguably we might be breeding towards weaker populations if we only focus on those unique individuals. Carol’s method of breeding is very much focused on the traits of resilience, superior flavour and vigour. In her own words she wants plants that will sustain us and enable human survival for the next thousand years. A key piece of advice she repeatedly gave was to ‘select for what matters to you’. Decide on the traits of the crop that are really critical, for example: sweetness, vigour and bush habit in a delicata squash. But everything else – all the things that don’t matter – don’t worry about those when making selections. If there are things you definitely do or don’t want, they are what matter to you. The rest can be left to just be, and by loosening the criteria for selections, we are allowing for some heterogeneity to continue within that variety.
Later that day I reflected on this discussion with Andrew from Adaptive Seeds. I often worry that humans have this relentless need for control, often to the detriment of other living communities. Are we bottle necking plant genetics through this desire to mould crops into a perfect version of themselves? But Andrew challenged me on this - perhaps we as a species are (for the most part) not looking to control, but just trying to get by. We are presented with problems, and our natural response is to try to fix or to solve them. We could be so focused on fixing the problem in hand (feeding the world, for example), that perhaps we don’t see beyond that moment in time, and the unintended consequences of our actions. We need a crop that will give us a high yield so we choose the plants that produce the most abundant fruit. We don’t consider what we might be losing when we take forward the genetics of just those one or two plants, we just focus on the positive we have gained from their high yield. Perhaps it’s not necessarily about domination, but more about functionality in the moment. It’s why building in redundancy and maintaining heterogeneity could be so vital – retaining genes or aspects of the plant that we think aren’t very important, when in fact they might be critical for future survival.
What was clear to me in my discussion with Carol that day is that she is interested in plants that thrive, in creating abundance, and bringing a little (or maybe a lot) of our own personalities to the plant breeding process. She is an advocate for breeding for what matters to you and your community. She really emphasised the importance of using our eyes, honing our own unique observation skills and really building a relationship with the crop.
Relationship and collaboration are themes that have been at the heart of my travels so far, and they continued to emerge in this conversation. Carol is the chair of the board of directors for the Open Source Seed Initiative, which is dedicated to fair and open source access to plant genetic resources worldwide in a diversified and decentralised seed industry. Like Frank Morton, she is passionate about an open source community where everyone has open access to germplasm, and Carol has pledged over 20 of her own varieties to the OSSI cause. She was also incredibly sharing in her knowledge and time with me – she mentioned that she much prefers teaching face to face – something she doesn’t get to do often these days. It was a unique day spent with someone with a deep understanding of plants and our interdependence.