Canberra Times, Australia
September 3, 2007 Monday

THE FUTURE IN SEEDS OF THE PAST

T he farmer’s tanned, furrowed, face is thoughtful. ”You should ask
the old women,” he says after a pause. He smiles, dull veins of gold
in his teeth. From village to village, farm to farm, others agree.
”Ask the old women.” They are helpful and nostalgic, and after an
obligatory vodka or two, melancholic.

We are high in the mountains of southern Armenia on a mission they
understand. They are farmers in the land where farming began.

So we start calling out the old women, who emerge from lightless
kitchens and farm buildings reliable electricity also just a memory
in these remote pockets of the old Soviet empire and we explain our
quest. They hurry away and with extraordinary generosity re-emerge
with tins, jars and knotted cloth containing biological treasures the
seeds of bygone crops.

Grains of wheat, barley, beans and peas disappear into small yellow
envelopes, marked with the name of the village, the name of the
family, and the GPS position the hand held satellite positioning
device an object of wonder to scores of children.

The old women wish us well. Some cry, because these visiting
scientists seem to understand what they have known intuitively all
along: that the traditional varieties were special.

There is a surrealism to these meetings, underscored by the dissonant
chatter of Australian, Russian and Armenian accents as the team
probes for knowledge of yesteryear crops, and asks for a little of
the seed that might be hoarded. As we travel over rutted mountain
roads we are also looking for places where ancestral plants might
still grow on high plains. We are on a hunt for genes; for lost
genetic resources that agricultural scientists say will be crucial
for the world to keep feeding itself despite climate change and
deteriorating agricultural landscapes.

And so this small band of genetic detectives is scouring the
birthplace of agriculture, the Caucuses Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan
and parts of Russia for remnant on-farm storages, and for ancestral
wild grasses from which modern crops like wheat and barley were first
bred some 5000 years ago.

The mission is led by a Syria- based Australian, Dr Ken Street, an
agricultural ecologist with the International Centre for Agricultural
Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), and comprises Russian and Armenian
plant researchers, as well as another Australian, Perth-based Dr
Clive Francis from the Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean
Agriculture. Their work is partly funded by Australia through the
Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research and the
Grains Research and Development Corporation.While a two- or
three-degree increase in average temperatures may be perceived by
people as merely a comfort issue, a fraction of a degree change can
be enough to stop many food plants from flowering and delivering
grains and fruits. So the genes that allow the old relatives of
modern crops to flourish in frozen or arid landscapes need to be
found and reintroduced.

”We are going back through time, backwards through man- made
evolution,” explains Dr Ken Street, who has been leading seed
collecting expeditions into Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Tajikistan over the past six years.

”We are looking for the grasses that were used for bread-making
thousands of years ago at the start of civilisation when people first
saw that keeping and sowing seeds from the best plants gradually
improved what they were harvesting. We are searching for what our far
distant ancestors were using; not because they are better but because
they have a wider genetic base. A modern wheat plant might have a few
hundred parents from a breeding program, but the ancient wild
varieties had hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of parents.”
The genetic diversity of the Caucuses, and the lure of discovery, is
also what keeps pulling Clive Francis back, long after he had
intended retiring.

Gazing across a meadow brimming with plant life, he explains that in
Armenia alone there are 125 species of Astragalus, part of the legume
family. Legumes are his passion. ”The legumes we grow in Australia
are annuals, but there are perennial crop plants here that could help
us manage our wheatbelt water table and limit the build-up of
salinity,” he says.

Collected seed is planted and assessed at ICARDA in Syria and the
most promising lines sent to plant breeders in Perth, Adelaide,
Horsham and Tamworth for introducing to local crop improvement
programs. Legumes are increasingly important in Australian
agriculture as rotation crops between wheat and barley plantings, as
they break potential disease cycles, and increase soil nitrogen.
Their deep roots improve soil structure and closely mimic native
plants in the way they help prevent rising water tables that cause
most of the wheatbelt’s salinity.

Aside from benefiting Australian farmers, improved generations will
be sent back to ICARDA to help agricultural development in developing
countries. Legumes’ ability to transfer nitrogen from the atmosphere
to the soil, and research being done to adapt them to sub-tropical
environments, is seen as a low- cost, practical way to restore
impoverished soils in hunger- ravaged areas of Africa.

But in contrast to the almost ready-to-use legumes, harnessing genes
from wheat’s ancestral grasses is a 10 to 15 year proposition, a
process that could be accelerated by using genetic engineering.
Wheat’s ancestors are too far removed to be able to be crossed with
modern plants, given that wheat is essentially a man-made crop.
However, while the use of GM technologies would allow researchers to
retrieve from ancestral grasses the gene sets capable of delivering
traits such as drought and frost tolerance comparatively quickly,
this cannot be contemplated until the moratoriums on growing GM crops
in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia expire in
2008.

The frustration for Australian researchers is that their counterparts
in North and South America have no such restrictions and are enjoying
a handy head- start.

In recent years, Street’s seed collecting missions have become part
of an international program developed under the auspices of the
Global Crop Diversity Trust, set up as an instrument of the
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and
Agriculture.

This was established two years ago to try and arrest the erosion of
the world’s plant genetic resources.

”It’s a survival issue,” says Street. ”For most people around the
world that means avoiding starvation, while for farmers in countries
like Australia it is economic survival.” Late-season frosts destroy
millions of dollars worth of cereal crops in Australia because the
European origins of Australian varieties do not have the ideal
genetic lineage for the Australian environment. ”There are wheat
varieties in central Asia and the Caucuses that comfortably tolerate
frost and low rainfall,” Street says. The work by Street and Francis
also involves trying to save, or rebuild, the once pre-eminent plant
collections housed in the neglected botanical institutes of the
former Soviet republics in central Asia and the Caucuses.

”The world is losing irreplaceable seed from these collections
simply because the local people can’t afford to replace water pumps,
or stored seed is being eaten by mice,” says Street.

”This is frightening, because the genetic origins for a very large
proportion of the world’s food crops, including the crops we grow in
Australia, do not exist anywhere else.” He says it’s all about
making sure that despite the environmental pressures facing global
agriculture, the world’s farmers can still keep bread on the table
figuratively and literally.

Dr Ken Street is profiled in FutureCrop, published by the GRDC.
events/grdcpublications/ futurecropsect2