Population Breeding
Within our current food system, plant in-breeding, genetic drift, restricted gene flow, and small population size all actively contribute to a reduction in genetic diversity.
With the current climate crisis, bacterial, fungal and weather-related variations are common.
Without genetic diversity in crops, we risk loosing the entire harvest over and over again.
That’s why we are population breeding - a natural method of crossing and selecting seed to increase the genetic diversity of that seed population.
With monoculture, as one plant goes, they all go. With diversity, what happens to one plant may not happen to the whole crop.
Without the establishment of diversified seed populations, we risk major crop loses across the Hudson Valley over the next 50 years.
That means we can’t feed ourselves & our people.
One solution is diversifying our seed populations.
Development of crops over time, including a the loss of the diversity through the genetic bottlenecks of domestication, selection of landraces and modern plant breeding (adapted from [10], with permission from AAAS), and an example of a tall wheat landrace grown prior to the Green Revolution (left) and a modern high yielding cultivar selected for reduced plant height (right)
Coming Home Seeds 2023 Population Wheat
It has over 2000 parent varieties from around the globe.
In 2020, the first season of this population, we had very harsh weather conditions, making the surviving saved seed extremely climate resilient. Continuing to grow and save the “strongest” seed each season means the population is climate adaptive.
Case Study: Hudson Valley Peaches 2023
In 2023, the Hudson Valley growers lost majority of their peach crop and consumers lost access to NY peaches. We experience the lost peaches as a fractal of the food insecurity of our entire system. Monoculture is a risk, a huge one. Through this practice, humans have limited the food genetics pool so much that if a climate factor, such as an untimely frost, novel pest or disease comes in and wipes out one plant, it will likely take out the whole crop.
However, there are lines of defense in genetic diversity. That is why we’ve taken thousands (two thousand three hundred to be exact) varieties of wheat seed from across the globe, and allowed them to cross naturally (a process called population breeding), so that in every handful of grain harvested there is diversity.
In that diversity, there is food security.