Thank you everyone who submitted questions for Richard from the Sentinels seed saving group in New Zealand. We incorporated as many as we could in the episode that is due out in a few weeks.
Our next guest is Salvatore Ceccarelli, who has been working to assemble genetically diverse populations of staple grains for distribution to farmers in Europe and the middle east so they can select their own evolutionary populations.
Hello Salvattore Ceccarelli,
1 - I grow 5 kilo of your evolutionary wheat population in Central France, although that it has been an off year with 5 month of much rain it seems to be doing not too bad. I wondered where the furthest north is this wheat population has been grown and if there’s a similar project up north i should start adding seeds from for next years trial.
2 - i work with two neighboring farmers, because i’m on their land doing small scale experimental farming and together we fix barns and wells and gutters, they explain me their colleagues mostly don’t like new ideas, especially if they’re brought by university people with no hands on experience in the field. How do we reach the people that work the land to feed the world? Could you elaborate on that?
3 - is coming, it concerns a name of a French farmer i saw a video about yesterday.
Don’t have a question yet (will have a few…), but for those interested he published a pledge for what he called “evolutionary plant breeding”, dating its historical roots in the West to about 1929 (Harlan). More on this history and how it relates to the broader history of agriculture here and here (3minutes in total). I would love him to expand a bit on that, namely: how “strange” has been modern breeding in contrast with 9000 years of agriculture and why evolutionary plant breeding / landracing / adaptation agriculture is some kind of revival of the common breeding method used over thousands of years.
His pledge for diversified population is of a scientific tone, and content. But I particularly liked his distinction between 2 approaches within that evolutionary breeding trend, so to say “how to constitute an evolutionary population”. Here it is. In itself it is an interesting train of thoughts. Maybe we could ask him to expand a bit on that matter, and on the relative trends he sees in the farming/breeding world :
“what is the relative importance and trends of breeding on pre-selected criterias (1st approach) and breeding on a broader spectrum of the species, or even interspecific (2nd approach)? Who prefers the first and why who prefers the second and why?”
His most articulate presentation of his breeding work is here. I will relisten to it. Talking to other contemporary breeders, from Turkey. It is a bit too complex though, or at least at the beginning, as he brings in “breeding equations” and other hardcore concepts of plant breeding as made by scientists… But all the Q&A from 50’ is much more easy listening. It is a video summarizing the main points of his pledge, using the same graphs and narrative.
As he is working in many parts of the world maybe we could ask him about the overall trends of the seed sector, and how our methods fit in. And as I tend to over-romanticize the non-western world I would love him to expand a bit on how he operates in Uganda, Nepal, etc. And if - or not - he brings there a real added value to what the farmers are already doing. In other words: did they lose already their seeds, breeding methods, i.e. and for example growing only “pure” strains? Just saying because it seems that in parts of South America (Peru) nothing has been lost, so what he/we propose should not be of great interest to them: they kind of like that westerners go back to some more “intelligent” breeding, vigorous and resilient in essence, because diverse, but what we have to offer as “new” methods of breeding has zero added value to what they are already doing and have been doing for ages… By the way that is something we want to dig in prior to Antibes workshops…
To summarise this in a question: “does the adaptation agriculture / evolutionary plant breeding methods are revolutionary to the western world only (which has lost common sense in general…) or is it a revolution of a bigger spectrum?” And every contrasts in between: continental, national, local, etc.
Awesome question/point of view thingy Thomas.
I try to get my farmer friend to look into this sort of stuff too, but he doesn’t speak English. Is there some relevant French info about evolutionairy population you’re aware of?
To come back to question 3,
I saw this mini documentary of farmer Frederic Thomas. It was about a farmer changing his soils by growing mixed covercrops, crimping them and then seeding mais in it. He seems to have some very early/ rapid growing cereals my farmer friend tried to get to try at his farm.
This might not be Salvatorre’s field of research at all, although in my simple point of view it’s relatively overlapping. Has some research been done into this kind of rapid growing/maturing cereals?
My farmerfriend asked if it could be brought to scale? I told him yes, but he insists he’s worried about weeds growing in the evolutionary population.
I might add more questions after ping ponging info to and fro, until when do we have Shane?
