Agriculture historian Sharon Rempel wants to take people back to when producers, not corporations, drove wheat breeding programs.
She is encouraging farmers to tap into existing resources in their regions and to experiment with growing heritage varieties of wheat that may have been well suited to their particular area.
Rempel said breeding programs for organic wheat are non-existent in Canada. She said there are no public breeding programs, just corporately funded research. Organic wheat doesn’t attract corporate dollars.
So Rempel has established what she refers to as the Alberta Organic Seed Initiative, a community-based organic wheat breeding concept.
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She describes it as “potluck research” that will rely heavily on input from old-timers in the communities who used to grow wheat before the 1940s, an era before agriculture relied on high intensity inputs.
“Those old varieties are a gold mine that we have not explored,” said Rempel, who runs the Garden Institute of Alberta, a charitable organization that works with organic urban agriculture in Canada and overseas.
“It’s going back to a time when farmers grew the seeds and the varieties were developed regionally.”
Rempel sees herself as a facilitator in this process of wrestling breeding programs out of private hands and placing them back into the public domain.
She said she is a great networker who can provide interested parties with leads on where they can obtain heritage wheat seed and the names of researchers who could assist them in developing “on farm” organic wheat varieties.
“I can help people find things.”
Rempel plans to organize meetings in four or five regions of Alberta early in the new year. District agrologists, researchers, organic farmers and other interested parties will be invited to attend the series of one-day sessions.
Rempel will help bring people together and will assist in finding funding for these community-based breeding programs. But she doesn’t have any grand plan beyond that.
“It would be pretentious of me to define the methodology. That’s not (being) community-based.”
She doesn’t think the concept will require much funding because communities already have an abundance of untapped resources, including equipment and knowledge.
“They might have a retired wheat breeder in their community for goodness sakes.”
The goal will be to rediscover wheat varieties that have good weed resistance and disease hardiness that make them well suited to organic production in a particular region.
“It can’t just be that stupid mentality of how high is the yield because that is not sustainable,” said the organic activist.
“There is unexplored potential in a lot of the ancestral materials.”
Rempel recently invited Washington State University researcher Doug Lammer to speak at the Exploring Sustainable Alternatives conference in Humboldt, Sask.
Lammer is one of few breeders in the United States who is working on developing organic wheat varieties. He said it’s a whole new agenda.
“I don’t think that we’ve ever had to fundamentally challenge the way we’ve been managing our (research) plots for a lot of years,” said Lammer. “Now we’re getting into such a crisis with low prices of commodities and ever-rising inputs that that is causing us to rethink how we’re breeding.”
He said North American organic wheat growers are seeding the same varieties as conventional wheat growers, but there are problems with that.
“There’s probably a lot of traits in varieties bred pre-1950s which may have been lost as we intensified chemical use in agriculture.”
Lammer would like to find or breed new wheat varieties that have those old traits, such as weed competitiveness and nutrient use efficiency.
