Article cluster: on-farm crop breeding for climate resilience

For the past two years, I have roamed northern California and southern Oregon, and have closely followed the activities of small farms in the region. It has been a great adventure for this South Dakota native, transplanted from New England. California is an absolute Eden about 97 percent of the time; the other three percent is utter catastrophe. In my time here, there have been a hearty handful of farms I have known to have been swept up in the actual flames and left in a pile of char and ash. Although, there need not be flames on site for the fires to figuratively burn a business to the ground.

Strategies to use on your farm: a breeder’s perspective

I write this article to empower farmers and crop breeders: we can and must build a better line-up of crops that will feed humans in the more difficult future. What does this have to do with crop genetics? The answer: don’t think we can solve this by putting physical barriers between global climate change and our crops. We must not delude ourselves into believing that a techno fix like greenhouses precludes the need for crop genetic adaptation. Open-field agriculture will remain the biggest source of human foods.

While lobbyists and some politicians have managed to paint the climate change debate as a partisan issue, farmers are increasingly feeling the impacts on their production environment and asking themselves: How can I re-think my operation in order to continue farming with increasingly unpredictable weather conditions? In this article, I am summarizing my lifelong quest for understanding climate resilience and offer a self-assessment template to help you plan for more resilience.

Farmers say this all around the Columbia Basin in Eastern Washington, an excellent region for growing a variety of crops. But extreme heat, low water supplies, catastrophic wildfires, sunburned crops, earlier harvests, and shifting crop-growing zones are impacting crops from our changing and unstable climate. As of this writing (August 28th), our region had 97 days without measurable precipitation (starting May 24).

In my last couple of articles, I wrote about cultivating resilience and understanding and predicting conditions. DIY weather-forecasting, phenology and Growing Degree Days are some tools I suggested for improving access to information about what plants are experiencing or could soon be experiencing. In this article, I’m going to write about several other strategies: using soil temperatures when deciding planting dates; scouting and monitoring for pests and diseases; using pest and disease forecast services; and being prepared for the effects of extreme high and low temperatures.

In the April 2020 issue, Brett Grohsgal’s article “Breeding crops for resilience to a changing climate” and Fred Hempel’s “Breeding tomatoes on a farm: practical selection advice,” encouraged us to select varieties for certain traits or to breed our own varieties. Fred Hempel’s “On-farm tomato breeding: making crosses and managing projects” in May 2020 took the skills up a notch. In March 2009, I wrote, “An introduction to growing seed for yourself or for sale,” for small-scale growers venturing into seed growing. Now, I am tackling the question of how to extract, process and conserve seeds from your selected seed crop until sale or planting.

My experience is as a vegetable grower, growing a few seed crops alongside vegetable production. In this first article, I will focus on wet-seed processing and demystify fermentation and drying. A future article will address dry-seed crops (which develop in pods, husks or ears, and dry on the plant) and vegetatively reproducing crops (clones like garlic).

In late July, the weather was cold and drizzly in Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula west of Seattle. Port Townsend receives only 19 inches of precipitation annually, and summers are generally sunny. But this year, the springlike weather was lingering well into summer and causing the farmers at Midori Farm to worry about one crop in particular: their carrot seed.

This is a great time of year to think about growing a seed crop. The demand for organic and heirloom seeds is growing, and seeds can bring a good financial return for the time and land invested. There are both practical and political reasons to grow seed crops. And there are perhaps new skills to learn on the way. Growing seed allows you to improve on a variety if you want that, or simply maintain the variety for bulk sale.

“There’s a huge gap between the need and the production of organic seed,” said Matthew Dillon, advocacy director of the Organic Seed Alliance. “Because of that gap, there is opportunity for growers who want to get involved in seed production.”