Sexless seeds could be game-changer in sector

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/10/2016 (3253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s no denying a talk called Eliminating Sex from Agriculture to Feed the World is a sexy subject at a farm writers’ convention.

So Tim Sharbel, research chair in seed biology at the Global Institute for Food Security, had his audience’s full attention at the recent Canadian Farm Writers Federation annual meeting.

“Population is growing at a fast rate, and based upon status quo agricultural practices, we can’t feed everybody in the next few years,” he told his audience. “So scientists and all these policy-makers are scrambling around trying to figure out how we’re going feed everyone.”

Sharbel, who got hooked on evolutionary biology studying the reproductive habits of flatworms in the Italian Alps, has been trying to figure out how some species have developed an ability to reproduce through apomixis, meaning without fertilization.

Flatworms reproduce both sexually and asexually. The one method transfers genes from two parents while the other propagates by cloning itself.

Sharbel is looking for the genetic switch that makes that possible and applying it to agriculture. His work has the potential to transform the seed business.

Farmers used to save their seed from year to year. But the development of higher-yielding hybrid crops has increasingly meant they must replace their seed every year. The “hybrid vigour” achieved from crossing two or more parental lines is lost if the seed is reused because the plants revert to their cross-pollinating ancestors.

If Sharbel cracks the code, farmers could continue using their hybrid lines indefinitely.

“If we can have a genetic switch that turns sex on and turns sex off, just like you see in natural populations… the idea would be that you create this first-generation hybrid and then you turn sex off and the plants reproduce clonally,” he said. “The farmer can buy seed from that company one time and never again. It’s an extremely disruptive technology.”

This is bound to appeal to farmers who enjoy the yield boost hybrids bring to their farms but who also have felt the sting of dramatically higher seed costs. However, judging from the venture-capital interest in his work, there is money to be made, possibly by selling the spray that quashes a plant’s amorous tendencies.

Indeed, it could be a game-changer. But will it feed the world? Not likely.

Despite the rhetoric, there is little evidence to suggest the world has a productivity problem. In the industrialized world, markets are more often depressed due to oversupply than not. This year is no exception.

In this context, increasing yield is actually counterproductive because farmers wind up dumping crops that were produced using non-renewable resources into oversupplied markets at below their true cost of production. That undermines the so-called efficiency of modern farming practices.

Meanwhile, most of the world’s hungry people are farmers in poor countries who must grow their way out of poverty. They often see upwards of 60 per cent of their harvest lost due to lack of storage, transportation and market infrastructure. They are unable to take full advantage of hybrid crops because they are working with soils so biologically degraded they cannot efficiently use water and fertilizer.

We can’t expect individual researchers such as Sharbel to solve the world’s problems. But we can expect more from the publicly funded Global Institute for Food Security for which he works.

The Saskatoon-based institute portrays global food security as a yield issue that is solvable through “disruptive innovation” and sexy science. It is focusing its efforts on a future problem that wouldn’t exist if we put some effort into ‘constructive’ innovations that could make a difference today. This is absurd given its altruistic mantra.

For every dollar that goes into increasing farmers’ yields, let’s spend a quarter on research aimed at ensuring increased productivity is used to its fullest potential.

Laura Rance is editorial director for Farm Business Communications. She can be reached at laura@fbcpublishing.com or 204-792-4382.