Transcripts

RAY CLARK: Go walk right into the cold room then just like the seed. We keep all our seeds here in glass jars.

SPEAKER: Ray Clark is a keeper of our agricultural history, a history he's got stored in a cramped cold storage warehouse just outside Ames, Iowa. In this oversized refrigerator are stored thousands upon thousands of old and exotic seeds from around the world.

RAY CLARK: Many of these lines are from Indian tribes in the United States. And we've tried to get as complete a collection of these old Indian tribe corns as we could. We also have some corns here from South America. One of the old, small--

SPEAKER: The corn collection here is the biggest at the Ames Regional Plant Introduction Station, but this is also the country's main seed bank for most grass species, some sunflowers, and many vegetable crops. In fact, perhaps the most important seed here is a small tomato seed not much bigger than the head of a pin.

RAY CLARK: It's one of the species called the currant tomato. It's a very small red-fruited wild species found in Peru. It was the original source of the Fusarium wilt disease resistance. So that one accession has probably entered into more commercial releases than any other line in this whole collection.

SPEAKER: It's really the characteristics of these seeds, like the wilt resistance of that tomato, that Ray Clark is saving in his seed bank, genetically determined characteristics mainly having to do with resistance to disease, pest, and drought. Clark says most of these older varieties are much hardier than modern cultivated crops and the genetic characteristics of these older varieties, he says, can provide a wealth of important genetic material for our modern plants.

RAY CLARK: We're trying to collect material that's more what we call basic germplasm. And there are several reasons. One, that's where you're going to find new sources of plant characteristics. The material that's being used by farmers is very uniform now. It has to be for mechanical harvesting and so on and the culture that we're using. And the other thing is to try to broaden the base of some of these currently used corn and tomato lines to get different sources of genetic material into those currently used varieties so that they have a better chance to withstand any new onslaught of disease or insect pest.

SPEAKER: The effort to collect and store seeds from around the world has gone on to varying degrees almost since the founding of the union. Benjamin Franklin was an early supporter of the effort. For most of this century, the work's been the responsibility of the US Department of Agriculture and the land grant colleges and universities.

But in just the past decade or so, plant scientists have become increasingly alarmed about the condition of the so-called germplasm network. Two developments have them worried. The first was the corn blight of 1970, which showed just how important it is for American seed companies to breed in traits from these hardier, more exotic plants.

The second, more troubling development, somewhat ironically is the Green Revolution, the effort spearheaded by Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug to increase third world food production through the introduction of new highly developed seeds. The Green Revolution has dramatically increased the productivity of third world farmers but it has also brought about what scientists call genetic erosion, the crowding out and eventual extinction of older varieties as the new high yielding seeds take hold. With the loss of those older varieties goes the loss of their specific sets of genetic material.

RAY CLARK: We live in a world that's changing very rapidly and a lot of new technologies have come.

SPEAKER: Garrison Wilkes is a Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts.

GARRISON WILKES: As we have more productive varieties, those areas of the world that have acted as gene banks in situ, the natural indigenous agriculture are going to disappear. And the thing about gene extinction is that once it takes place, it's forever.

SPEAKER: Wilkes is among the scientists and breeders calling for a massive new effort to ensure the future of germplasm through seed banking. He says the condition of our current seed bank system, here and abroad, is spotty at best.

GARRISON WILKES: Probably the best gene bank is the rice gene bank, which is at Los Banos in the Philippines, the International Rice Research Institute. And it has a very good track record of storage. It has a very good track record for collections and it has a very good track record for making those accessions useful to what would be small time nations or third world nations in their plant breeding programs.

Other crops were not in quite such good shape and then there's probably 50 crops worldwide in which we have no backup in gene banks at the present time.

SPEAKER: And getting the seeds into storage is only half of the battle according to Bill Brown. Brown has just retired as the Chairman of Pioneer Hi-Bred, the world's largest breeder of corn. In his younger days, Bill Brown was one of the handful of American plant explorers who bushwhacked through remote corners of the Western hemisphere to collect what exotic and old seed varieties we currently have.

BILL BROWN: There's still some collecting to be done that has not been done. In other words, there are some gaps that have not been filled. But an even more critical need today, I think, is not that of additional collecting but instead that of evaluating the vast amounts of material that have already been collected and is now residing in our germplasm banks. And until those materials are evaluated and the information made available, I'm afraid that much of that germplasm, and I have no doubt that much of it is good germplasm, I'm afraid that much of it will not be used, will not get into our modern cultivars.

SPEAKER: Brown is calling for a massive infusion of new money to bring our germplasm system up to snuff. Tripling the current $15 million US effort, he says, might just be enough. Millions more will be needed for other banks around the world. And without that kind of money, he says, we are needlessly endangering perhaps our most important agricultural resource.

BILL BROWN: We talk about our soil and our water as being natural resources without which we could not live, which is true, but unless one has germplasm to go with those other two natural resources, the water and the soil is not going to be of any great benefit to us.

SPEAKER: This is Mark Highsted reporting.