permaculture

[Bill McDorman <bm@seedsave.org>]

John Navazio, phd plant genetics, of the Organic Seed Alliance has been
teaching horizontal resistance to seed growers in the West for several
years.  The Alliance is the organization formed after Abundant Life Seed
Foundation burned a couple of years ago.  The focus now is on educating
organic and sustainable farmers about the seed breeding techniques needed to
survive pests and disease like soybean rust.

http://www.seedalliance.org/

A fascinating article about the power of this method can be found in the new
issue of Wired magazine.  Coca farmers in Columbia have located and
propagated a Roundup-resistant strain of Coca.

b

---------------------------------------------------------------
Bill W.  McDorman
Seeds Trust, High Altitude Gardens
bm@seedsave.org
http://www.seedstrust.com

> michael snow wrote:
>> I'm not sure what message this responds to, that is, what the concern is.
>> I'm new here, and don't want to step into a conversation I haven't followed
>> from the beginning.  But here's a thought:
>> Breeding resistance.  The potato anecdote reminds me of what is called
>> Horizontal Resistance, that is, breeding polygenic resistance in plants.
>> Such a program would expose a population to ALL pests, parasites, diseases,
>> etc that occurr locally or regionally, the inocculation roguing the
>> population in its own way.  Horizontal resistance is accumulated using
>> recurrent mass selection: the surviving individuals are selected en masse
>> and improved up on in the next generation.
>> So, pick the beans that don't get rust.
>> see Return to Resistance, Roul A. Robinson.  1996: agAccess, Davis.
> 
> Michael:
> 
> Here's a followup from Bear in the PCPlantDB list:
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Synth, comments, etc
> Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2004 17:32:15 -0800
> From: Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>
> To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
> 
> The message from John D'hondt actually tied in well with a couple of
> books I've found recently called Return to Resistance, and
> Self-Organizing Agro-Ecosystems by Raoul A. Robinson (available free
> online as PDF's from http://sharebooks.ca). It's a recommended book if
> you don't know of it already. Raoul is a crop scientist, and talks
> about the difference between "vertical" (modern, single-gene parasite
> resistance that parasites can evolve around) and "horizontal"
> resistance (multi-gene resistance, that can't be easily adapted
> around). Also some history of a variety of crops (potatoes, etc), and
> the recent obsession with Mendelian breeding, vs "qualitative"
> breeding. It's all been rather informative. The techniques of D'hondt
> are very much what Robinson would recommend (save seed, maintain
> parasite pressure [don't destroy the affected crop] and select seed
> from crops that are forming resistance).
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