It’s the first week of January in Vancouver, 11° c with a steady drizzle—the perfect time to plant carrots. As you might suspect, this isn’t a normal carrot crop.
This week, my team and I—researchers and students at the university of British Columbia’s Centre for Sustainable Food Systems—are planting 120 carrot roots in a heated greenhouse. They will receive 16 hours of light every day from the sun and supplementary greenhouse lighting, growing into lush green plants in the middle of winter.
Growing carrots in the winter is just one step in a recurring cycle of crop production, selection, and seed grow-outs to develop new carrot varieties for organic production through participatory plant breeding.
Developing new varieties is one of the objectives of the Canadian Organic Vegetable Improvement (CANOVI) project. The project emerged from collaborations between UBC’s Centre for Sustainable Food Systems, the Bauta Family Initiative of Canadian Seed Security, and grassroots farmer organizations across Canada who support on-farm variety trials that help organic farmers identify promising crop varieties for their regions.
This collaborative work demonstrates that some regionally-adapted varieties offer better traits for organic growers, and that farmers are interested in working with university researchers to do their own breeding and develop improved regional varieties.
The Organic Science Cluster 3 (OSC3) project has enabled our UBC research team to dig further into this work, through funding provided by AAFC’s Canadian Agricultural Partnerships Program and the Bauta Family Initiative of Seedchange as our industry partner.
An important first step in this research was identifying the crops to focus on. Experience with on-farm variety trials, including farmer meetings and a national survey, gave the team background information on breeding priorities for organic and ecological farmers. Farmers identified carrots as high priority overall, and an important winter storage crop for direct market growers. Farmers were also concerned about relying on only a few hybrid varieties, and unsatisfied with the options for open-pollinated varieties which would offer less expensive seed and the possibility of regional seed saving.
Enter Dr. Phil Simon at the university of Wisconsin, who leads the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) public breeding program for table carrots and has been researching the crop for decades. Since 2016, Dr. Simon has worked with organic Seed Alliance, a non-profit based in Washington State. There, he has been developing an organic carrot breeding program focused on unique culinary and colour traits, as well as agronomic aspects, such as disease resistance and competitiveness with weeds.
Funding from OSC3 allowed us to build a cross-border collaboration with the U.S. based research group, bringing seeds from novel carrot populations to Canada and further adapting them to the needs of Canadian organic growers.
Seven experimental carrot populations were grown in the summer of 2018 at the UBC farm, chosen from hundreds of populations that Dr. Simon maintains as part of the USDA carrot breeding nursery. The U.S. team selected these populations for us based on priority traits for CANOVI participants: vigour, flavour, appearance, nematode and disease resistances, and a cylindrical shape with a rounded tip (called a nantes shape) that tends to last better in storage.
In October 2018, we held a field day where farmers examined the experimental lines and rated them for flavour and appearance. The roots were stored, carefully trimming the tops to allow for regrowth required for seed production. Roots prepared this way, with the growing point intact, are called stecklings.
These stecklings are what we’re planting in the UBC Horticulture greenhouse on this wintery Vancouver day. Carrot seed production takes two years outdoors, but a heated greenhouse in winter speeds the breeding process to produce seed before the next year’s growing season.
We made our first cross in early 2019, creating a multi-parent population that combined some of the best traits from three experimental populations and one commercial variety chosen through farmers’ ratings. In summer and fall of 2019, we grew this new population at the
UBC farm and at Forstbauer Family Natural Food Farm, a certified organic farm in Abbotsford, BC.
At harvest time in October 2019, all of the roots were laid on a table and examined by the Organic Seed Alliance researchers and the Forstbauer farm team. Roughly 25% of the roots were selected, based on shape, colour, appearance, and flavour, eliminating any with signs of disease, and stored as stecklings.
Now, in January 2020, we are again planting this population in the greenhouse, where they will flower and cross-pollinate, creating seed that we will plant in late June. This process is the core of evolutionary-participatory plant breeding: creating diversity through an initial cross, then repeatedly selecting the best plants based on farmers’ observations in the cultivation system where the variety will be used.
After one to two more cycles of selection to make the population more uniform, our research team will send seed out to a broader range of farms.
The growers will continue to send the best roots back to uBc to be crossed during the winter. By the end of the CANOVI project, we will have several advanced carrot populations, which can be shared with farmer participants for continued selection and eventual use as regionally adapted varieties.
The CANOVI project is also supporting a similar project with red bell peppers. Ontario farmers are collaborating with a public plant breeding program led by Dr. Michael Mazourek at Cornell University, to develop regionally adapted, early-maturing peppers for organic production in Ontario. These carrot and pepper breeding projects will serve as case studies of how collaborative vegetable breeding can be done by communities with minimal infrastructure, planting the seeds of participatory vegetable breeding here in Canada.
(OSC3) Originally published in Organic Science Canada magazine, Issue #2, Spring 2020
