—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, July 21,1979
20
Few
BELTS VILLE, Md. - In
the beginning, the United
States got shortchanged on
food plants. We’ve been
trying to make up for it ever
since.
Of about 200 important
food plants known to us, only
a handful--pecans,
blueberries, wild
strawberries, sunflowers, a
few others-were in this
country when mankind
arrived. Mankind brought
all the rest-com, wheat and
just about everything else
you can name-from other
areas of the world.
Some other parts of the
world were shortcanged,
also. “When the Bible
mentions ‘corn,’ it’s really
telling of wheat and barley,”
said George White, the plant
introduction officer for the
U.S. Department of
Agriculture. “Com was not
in that part of the world at
the time.”
In 1858, the Umted States
government sent a man to
China to collect tea seeds.
We’ve had a programmed
effort for decades to bring
new plant materials to the
United States to use in
developing new plant
varieties.
“We’re interested in
materials that’s alive, not
museum material,” said
White. Now in charge of the
effort, he coordinates in
troduction into this country
of plant material for
research.
“There are about 350,000-
plus species of plants in the
world. Only about 200 are
used as important food
crops. Of those, about 15 are
the major crops that feed
mankind, the ones
civilization is built on. ”
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White and his fellow plant
explorers visit other
countries to find plants of
value to the Umted States.
They turn the plants of their
seeds over to department
researchers who grow them
in large numbers and collect
more seeds. Pathologists
screen the plants against
insects and diseases.
Commercial plant breeders
evaluate the plants further,
transferring any useful
genes they find to our
varieties through controlled
cross-pollmation.
“We still seek new food
plants but one of our mam
thrusts today is improving
our existing plants,” White
said.
“You might look at it as a
type of warfare. We’re
always trying to upgrade our
plants to keep up with pests,
which always seem to be a
jump ahead of us. Insect and
disease organisms change. A
plant that might have
resisted a harmful pest a few
years ago might not be able
to resist it today.
“We’ve bred our present
plants-tomatoes for m
stance-to have high quality,
flavor and other things we
like. However, to get the
genes to. make im
provements in our tomato
plants, we still have to go
back to Central America, the
world origin for the tomato.
We locate wild ‘ancestors’ of
our modern tomatoes and
bring them back as seeds or
plants to cross breed with
our commercial varieties.
A plant resists insects, for
instance, in a number of
ways, said White. It may
have “hairs” or a tough
“skin” or even a chemical
compounds that discourages
insects from eating it.
Available now at
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od plants are native to U.S.
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Today’s environment
places new stresses on
plants. Plant explorers
search for useful plants that
can tolerate those stresses,
such as grasses to grow in
strip-mined areas and in
sewage sludge, fast
becoming a disposal
problem. “These plants
often have to grow on such
soils without accumulating
metals, so cattle can eat the
plants without being harmed
by them or without then
metals ending up in our food
chain.
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.tam plants being driven to
extinction’
“We need to think of the
future, too. Improved
varieties of some crops are
gradually replacing the wild
species that have been
evolving for hundreds of
years. We’ll have less access
to the ongmal species and
their genetics later as they
are overrun by man. So we
go after them now. We brmg
them back and store them in
seed form--we have a
national seed bank at Ft.
Collins, Colo.--until the
future when we’ll need their
genetics,” White said.
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“We want to continue to
breed in characteristics that
improve flavor, nutrition or
some other qualities and
enhance machine har
vesting. Bread always looks
about the same but the
wheat m it may have
changed considerably over
the years. An average of
about 15 new wheat varieties
were developed and
registered in each of the last
three years, for example,”
White said.
The improved relations
with China, which decades
ago gave us one of America’s
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top cash crops-the soybean
has opened an area of the
world long denied us, said
White. He and his colleagues
have already begun ex
changing plant material
with the Chinese.
The department’s plant
introduction stations have
kept records of the crops
they’ve introduced, starting
with a Russian cabbage
introduced in 1898. It holds
the plant introduction
number “1” among some
433,000-plus introductions of
various species that have
been documented since 1898,
said White.
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