Can organic farmers count on better cultivars for organic production? The short answer is yes, organic farmer selections and participatory breeding often outperform conventional varieties. The success of the farmer selections is clear.
A major part of our research is to test the organic farmer-selected lines and compare them to conventionally bred varieties in an organic production system. We now have multi-year data on the performance of a wide range of farmer-selected lines. All of these experiments are conducted on organic fields, either on research stations or on commercial organic farms.
In our potato work, some farmer selections had higher yield and fewer internal defects than Yukon gold, a popular variety across Canada. On average, organic farmer selections demonstrated greater early season vigour and less disease than most check varieties, which included Kennebec, Yukon Gold, Agria, Atlantic, Chieftain, and Envol.
The farmer selections are helping AAFC scientists develop potato varieties better suited to organic production, achieving one of original goals of the program. In further recognition, the national potato breeding program of AAFC at fredericton is advancing the farmer-selected lines in their mainstream breeding program.
Farmers play an important role in developing superior lines of oats for organic production. Farmer selections are being funneled back into the organic oat breeding program of AAFC in Brandon, Manitoba.
Oat breeder Dr Jennifer Mitchell-fetch has run organic oat breeding program since 2004. In her own organic nursery, she now considers lines from the farmer participatory program. In 2019, the majority of the lines which she decided to advance to the “B” test (which is the series of field tests before the official registration tests) came from the farmer participatory program. This was an exciting result for the farmers and all those involved in the Participatory Plant Breeding program (PPB).
Farmer-selected wheat lines have been evaluated in two major studies. The first group of farmer lines were evaluated in 2014 and 2015. While there was significant variation in agronomic performance of different farmer-selected lines, the farmer selections were generally taller, later maturing, more susceptible to lodging and higher yielding than the check cultivars.
The second wheat study evaluated another cohort of farmer breeders involving field experiments at several sites in 2017 and 2019. Results mirror those of the first set of farmer-breeders; that is, farmers are selecting lines that perform better under organic production than most conventionally-bred varieties.
How Participatory Breeding Works
Developing cultivars for organic production has become a topic of interest in Canada and elsewhere. It is clearly documented that organic production systems experience challenges that differ from conventional systems with different soil nutrient status, soil biology, and weed pressure. A number of carefully conducted studies have confirmed that direct early generation selection under organic management results in genotypes that are better adapted to organic production.
Evolutionary participatory breeding (ePB) takes PPB to another level to emphasize the utilization of natural selection in combination with site-specific farmer selection to segregate early generations of a crop population.
Small-holder production systems and modern potato breeding in the Netherlands have gained significant experience in PPB. For example, as of 2014, 148 active farmer breeders in the Netherlands were involved in ePB with a goal to select for late blight resistance.
The ePB concept has not been widely explored in the Canadian plant breeding context, but a number of factors encouraged us to do so. There was interest in improving crop varieties for organic production, farmers were motivated to become involved in the process, and funding partners were willing to support the work.
The first step in the process was to identify interested farmers: farmers who were willing to grow segregated populations in their organic fields and select superior plants. The farmer network was achieved through close collaboration with the regional coordinators of the Bauta family initiative on Canadian Seed Security. The interested farmers were approached by the Program coordinator with information about what genetic material was available for selection.
The populations that would eventually go out to farmers for selection were created by AAFC scientists and by our program staff at the university of Manitoba. Wheat and oat crosses were made by AAFC scientists based in Manitoba while potato crosses were made by AAFC scientists in new Brunswick.
In one instance, the farmers reached out to us to learn how to make their own cross. They were successful and were able to select from the offspring of a cross they made themselves.
Farmers were then provided with a list of crosses, and this information included which varieties or landraces had been used as parents in the cross. This allowed farmers to choose material that may be best suited to their area and their organic production system. This makes the process similar to sire selection in on-farm beef breeding, which some of the participating farmers were familiar with.
The first phase of the project involved on-farm selection. The second phase involved testing the farmer-selected varieties, and comparing them to conventional varieties developed for conventional production.
Interestingly, lines selected on farms close to the site of field testing performed best in those environments. For example, lines selected by two farmers in Southern Saskatchewan performed best in the experiments at Swift current test site. We think this may reflect the value of local selection.
The main goals of the organic Science cluster PPB project in the next two years is to continue field testing of wheat that will produce a dataset large enough to allow proper multi-generational stability analysis to be conducted. We are also in the process of evaluating the farmer-selected lines for disease resistance and response to water and heat stress.
Step by Step: Farmers Select the Best Wheat and Oats for Them
We initiated a farmer participatory plant breeding program for wheat in 2011. In 2013 it was expanded to also include oats
and potato. By 2019, over 80 farmers from across the country have participated in the program.
The PPB program coordinator arranged to send the seeds to participating farmers in PEI, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Most famers were interested in trying more than one population. Therefore, most farmers received three different second or third generation populations for planting.
Each population contained between 3000 and 5000 wheat or oat seeds, which allowed the farmers to plant an area approximately 20 m2 per population. Populations are planted by hand, with a push garden seeder, or modified grain drills. Row spacing and seeding rates are the same as the farmers would use in commercial production.
We built the program to provide plenty of support for participating farmers: an instruction manual was sent to each farmer, and each farmer received a visit from the program coordinator in the first and second year of the selection program. Farmers were able to contact the program coordinator to ask questions throughout the growing seasons.
The farmers made selections throughout the growing seasons based on their preferences. This included removing undesirable plants from the populations and the identification of desirable plants.
Final selections were made at harvest. Farmers selected approximately 300 spikes or panicles per population. The selected spikes or panicles were sent to the university of Manitoba for threshing and cleaning and returned to the farmers the following spring.
In the case of wheat, when selecting from the same population, farmers produced distinctive crop lines. Differences were observed in disease response, days to maturity, height, lodging and yield. Four farmer-selected lines, PA00-KB-AL, BL26-KS, BJ13-HRE, and BJ08-IG displayed both above average multi-generational stability and high yield. They may be good candidates for future crosses in organic breeding programs.
No further selection was conducted by the research team during the threshing and cleaning process – the farmers’ selections were honoured.
The process of field production and selection as well as threshing and cleaning was repeated for three consecutive years for each population. At the end of the three-year selection process, the F6, or 6th generation, was harvested by the participating farmers.
No Small Potatoes Here
Farmers likewise participated in potato selection, and were supported by the research team in the same way as for wheat and oat selection. The instruction manual for potato breeding was made available online to farmers.
The crosses were made at AAFC Fredericton, NB by Dr. Benoit Bizimungu with some additional crosses made by Dr. Dwayne Falk in Ontario. Parents were chosen based on field performance and disease resistance.
Eight farmers, in New Brunswick and Quebec, received one or two populations of seeding tubers, with approximately 500 tubers per population. During the first year of selection, farmers were instructed to reject 70-90% of the clones (individual plants). One tuber from each of the remaining plants (10-30% of the original population) was saved on farm for planting the following spring. Farmers also had the opportunity to check for storability, as some seed pieces stored better than others.
During the second year of on-farm selection, farmers planted the dramatically narrowed populations. They cut potato tubers into four pieces and planted them as a tuber unit, separated by an empty space to avoid mix-up at harvest time. Selection in year two involved removing approximately 50% of the tuber units. After selection, approximately 15-20 plants per population remained for planting in year three. AAFC lent a hand by providing quality analysis and yield testing on a subset of the year two tubers.
During the third year of on-farm selection, tubers harvested from the selected 15-20 plants were planted in larger plots to allow for yield assessment and grading. Again, some of the selected tubers were sent to AAFC for quality analysis and yield testing.
The Future of Farmer-Selected Lines
There are two main options for farmer-selected potato, wheat and oat lines. The first is to use the farmer selections to develop official registered varieties suited to organic production. This is already happening with the farmer-selected oat and potato lines, as we have described. This model of crop breeding mirrors what is being done with potatoes in the Netherlands, where farmer selection is built into the mainstream plant breeding program.
The second option is for farmers to grow their selected lines as landraces for their own markets. This is being done with farmer-selected lines of wheat in Quebec, BC and more recently Manitoba. In this case, farmers can brand their organic grains as “farmer-Bred” in addition to the organic certification. In accordance with plant breeding regulations, these lines (or land-races) cannot be sold under any variety name and seed of these lines also cannot be sold as a variety.
(OSC3) Originally published in Organic Science Canada magazine, Issue #2, Spring 2020
