By Mark McLellan
Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, Portland State University
Truly extraordinary magicians–those who capture our attention and spark our sense of wonder– are a rare breed. In agriculture, they walk among us, defying the improbable and meeting the impossible head-on. While few of the public recognize their work, we encounter it every day at grocery stores, farmers’ markets and in growers’ fields. I am of course talking about our plant breeders.
Plant breeders, through the extraordinary application of science and infusion of passion, directly address the challenges of feeding growing populations across a world under threat of climate change. Norm Borlaug, who passed 10 years ago, was one of those magicians. People apply many names to Norm: father of the green revolution, leader in agriculture, compassionate feeder of the poor. He was all those things, but at the end of the day, Norm was a plant breeder.
So who are these intrepid scientists we call breeders? The names, of course, would fill a library, among them being – the “Susan Brown”s of Cornell, the “Bhimu Patil”s of Texas A&M, the “Fred Gmitter”s of the University of Florida and on and on … And like the work of all breeders, theirs draws from a rich history left by prior researchers and explorers whose work laid the foundation of knowledge to which later generations now contribute. These breeders are a curious bunch (smiles all around), for they work in an area of science not known for its huge research grants, thus their rewards are more in the creation of knowledge and literally the creation of solutions — the next varietal, the next genetic variant — the next apple, onion or orange.
I once asked Dr. Borlaug to speak before an advisory council of companies. He gladly accepted my invitation. So here was a Nobel Prize winner and world-renowned agriculturalist addressing the group… But Norm, in his most comfortable self, dove into his passion as a plant breeder and about what was possible and what was needed. He conveyed to the company representatives the enormity of a breeder’s challenges and importance of the breeder’s role in supplying the food system with new options for drought and salt tolerance, yield and quality, shelf life and transport. His talk that day is just as appropriate now that the world is struggling with the realities of climate change and population pressures, and thank God, many are still fighting Norm’s fight.
There are many fronts on that fight. Sometimes I am asked about public versus private plant breeders and my answer is simple — we need both. The role of universities (where Norm did most of his work) is to train the next generation of breeders through hands-on experiential learning processes. The public breeders are also those that will push into the smaller, less economical breeding areas to answer the needs of specialty crops, organic varieties, and other niches. Occasionally, too, the brilliance and insight of the university breeder leads to breakthroughs in breeding – like the green revolution! Private corporate breeding brings focus and success to the intensive commercial agriculture needed to preserve today’s biodiversity by producing high yields with lower inputs on current and more challenging growing environments.
Breeders have a deep appreciation of genetics, of what makes an apple an apple. Consider what a modern human would think of the evolutionary ancestor of the varieties of corn grown commercially today. Would they recognize it as the forerunner to the most widely grown feed grain in the U.S.? Would they realize the role breeders have played, and continue to play, in the story of our food? As we expand our understanding of the basic biological construction of food, breeders will deploy a greater variety of tools to identify and produce foods with attributes that can help feed the world as the climate, and thus our agricultural landscape, changes.
As a food scientist who had the pleasure of working as director of Florida’s Agricultural Experiment Station, I was privileged to engage with many of these unsung heroes, our breeders. Those referenced above are friends who I know personally, but beyond them, there are hundreds. Their intensity and passion are bound to lead to the discovery of novel solutions to the challenges of feeding the world. They are the ones who make the magic happen. They are our plant breeders.