Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tion in project meetings and written publications. Researchers agreed
with this assessment in general, as the project was designed to respond
to a specifi c need for information in order to shape the regulatory frame-
work for conservation varieties and was not intended to be a program
of participatory plant breeding. The information gained and lessons
learned from the FSO project can be used to in collaborative projects, as
it helped researchers learn more about farmers evaluation of their variet-
ies and their motivations in cultivating these non-conventional varieties.
It is hoped that the results submitted to the European Commission will
result in a regulatory framework that is more conducive to on-farm con-
servation and selection.
The project
Croisements du Roc
began as an initiative of farmers within
the RSP and has been co-constructed by farmers, the RSP and the research
team. The majority of farmers involved in the
Croisements du Roc
project
also cultivate historic varieties or landraces within the larger RSP associa-
tion. There is an ongoing discussion on the advantages and disadvantages
of making crosses rather than selecting plants within landraces or making
mixtures of landraces of interest. This includes questions of which meth-
ods of plant breeding are ethically acceptable in organic systems, whether
planned crosses have a place in the creation of farmer varieties, and whether
this affects the integrity of the plant or variety. Crossing landraces provides
more diversity for selection for new conditions, especially when landraces
have lost most of their initial diversity through reduction in the land area
cultivated or through conservation ex situ in a genebank. This presents an
alternative when there is not diversity present in a landrace or when varieties
are not working in a mixture. However, the in situ conservation of landraces
with on-farm mass selection to improve local adaptation and performance,
and the approach of mixing landraces and allowing the mixed population to
evolve in situ are also very valuable as methods of introducing diversity and
maintaining evolutionary potential. Current studies in parallel to the
Croise-
ments du Roc
project are evaluating the longer-term evolution and adapta-
tion of these populations in the farmer network.
