ISSUE 93, REFLECTIONS, Part 6: Practical Thoughts upon the Revival of Landrace Grains and Heirloom Vegetables.

Practical thoughts upon the revival of Landrace Grains and Heirloom Vegetables. [2018 Lecture]

In the effort to revive classic flavors that once characterized cookery, farmers and chefs have sought to restore to fields and gardens old ingredients—those grains, vegetables, and fruits created prior to contemporary plant breeding. These old ingredients are of several sorts.

Landraces: domesticated grains and vegetables that have been shaped by seed selection over many plant and human generations until it assumed a distinctive character

Heirlooms: plants created before the rise of industrial monocrop agriculture, transgenic breeding, the green revolution, and the domination of the task of breed by plant scientists.

Clones. In the case of fruits, what is sought is plant material of an old established fruit variety or vine, since it is the actual plant that is being replicated by cuttings or scion wood, when one plants an orchard of a classic cider apple such as the Newtown Pippen, or lays out a trellis of pinot noir grapes.

In no case can one be assured, when you find and plant the seed of a classic ingredient, that the exact same flavor and plant configuration as an ancestral plant will be reproduced. Plants that are sexually propagated—the open pollinated landrace grains—the heirloom cabbages—are dynamic and variable, introducing the sort of variation that you can observe between generations in your own family. There tends to be strong family resemblance, but there is change too. Even in the cases when one is propagating the same plant asexually—when you are cloning—your grape cuttings of pinot noir—your scion wood from the Newtown Pippen—will not perfectly replicate the scion. Soil and climate trigger certain chemical responses in plants adapting the plant to local conditions. Epigenetic changes take place. Hence grapes cloned from the same mother vine produce markedly different wine in different places—a phenomenon widely termed the “influence of terroir.”

So whatever flavor one is trying to revive is fated to be an approximation. Oft times one is satisfied as long as what you produce does NOT possess the innocuousness of the current commodity grain or vegetables. But if one is a chef or a grower intent on reviving some lost specific flavor, getting landrace seed and growing it is only the beginning of one’s work. If your aim is to create an enduring resource you have to be sure (1) that the revived flavor is reasonably close to what was sought (this takes historical and culinary research), and (2) your manner of growing it is not mitigating its potential for generating flavor and nutrition, and (3) that your handling of seed for the plant improves its virtues in the subsequent planting.

Much could be said about each aspect of the work. Much of my effort in the past several years supplies the historical information about ingredients that enables growers and cooks to know the traditional character of ingredients. Users of course are not bound by precedent. There is much new to be discovered in landraces and heirlooms. For instance, humans tended to consume white oats because spoilage was readily discernable as discoloration. Black oats, gray oats, and red oats tended to be used as livestock fodder. As such, some strains (the Virginia gray winter turf oat for instance) were bred to load maximum energy for race horses, and top out at 24% protein versus the common crop standard of 17%. Now that technology has done away with much of our worry about fungal infestation of oats, why not harness that bounty of energy for human use? As long as our historical information about old ingredients accurately plots their virtues and liabilities, growers and cooks can make do with the knowledge as they wish.

How one goes about cultivation matters greatly in terms of the success of one’s efforts reviving crops. Conventional agriculture usually sterilizes fields and injects a package of soil supplementation to provide nutrition for the plants. This approach does not work with landraces. Ancient grains have elaborate roots to maximize uptake of nutrition from the soil be inviting the greatest range of microbial and fungal interaction with the plant. They depend on living soil in order to thrive and generate the complex chemistry that produces flavor. Sterilizing a field forestalls the way landraces operate. These varieties came into being when farmers maintained the nutrition of their fields by manuring, plowing in cover crops, rotating plants, and fallowing. They did not irrigate on a scale comparable to modern American farming and did not depend on insecticides; they developed plants that had some robustness in the face of pest pressures. At minimum one must have living soil to obtain thee benefits of a landrace’s genetics.

All of the old grains varieties emerged and were nurtured at distinct locales possessing specific climatic and soil conditions. When by trade, theft, or colonization a landrace was transported to a new site of cultivation and confronted a different set of conditions, it underwent adaptative change. One characteristic of landraces is that they are more genetically diverse than present day crop varieties. This diversity imbues the plats with an inbuilt capacity to adapt. The plant might change in stature or shape to some extent; it might have only 20 % of the seed planted make; but taking the seed of that surviving twenty percent gives the next plant generation greater attunement to the new conditions. And selecting the most flourishing of the plants for seed in subsequent generations enabled the phenotypic plasticity of the plant to shape itself to a new home. A landrace that has moved and shaped itself to new growing situations is called an allotochthonous landrace. In significant respects it differs from what it had been in its place of nativity.

When grain farmers seek old genetics to bring back classic flavor, they often go far afield in searching seed, and expect that somehow it will do what they wish by just planting it in their land. Sometimes it takes; sometimes it doesn’t. But even when it takes, it has to be adapted to local conditions by several plant generations of seed selection. That is why it is best practice to seek out the landraces that once flourished in one’s region. Sometimes one finds it already growing, kept alive by some farmer who defied the tides of fashion and kept a variety viable because it worked just fine for meal, for fodder, for alcohol, or for eating fresh. Sometimes one finds that a regional variety was collected in the historic past and kept in a germplasm bank. These once returned to growing conditions that had shaped its genetics will adapt more quickly to an approximation of its best historic form.

Dr. Steve Jones grows thousands of wheat landraces out in a valley in Washington State. The breeders there judge the virtues of the plants based on how they do in that Northwestern clime and soil. So there is a kind of indifference to the historical forces and conditions that shaped the plants and their qualities are judged de novo on how they perform in their growing situation one that is standardized per scientific protocol. Perhaps this is not the way to arrive at the best expression of the plants. They bespeak different sites and soils and some effort to link them to places commensurable gives the plants their inbuilt best destiny.

The seed legacy of the earth is archived in several dozen centralized locations. The freezer vaults and sometimes the circumjacent fields have given seed a place of continuance. It is not a home. No the home is only in the soil that suits it. It flourishes only in expressing, repeatedly expressing, even in the face of whatever stresses and alterations disturb its home locale.

As climate changes, as conditions in the field become volatile, the plants with the best capacity to endure change are those possessing enough genetic diversity to enable change. Modern cultivars are too genetically bottlenecked to do so. Landraces, even if selected to F4 or F5 will have a percentage of a crop make even in the direst circumstances. The plants possessing that resilience will be the progenitors of the adjusted form of the plant that will thrived in the changed landscape. Plant breeders think that editing the genetics of a plant be vesting it with traits from hardier wild relatives is the path forward. It is the path which is more costly and less assured of results freed of unintended consequences than letting landraces adapt in the face of stress.

There is another path: I call it the overgrown path. Some farmers are collecting as many landrace grains they can obtain and mashing them up. Planting the together to cross pollinate and what “makes it” in the growing locale will the landrace of that place in the future. Since often the growers don’t do the several generations of seed selection needed to insure that most adapted forms of the various lines have been established, the mash up approach risks just getting the most generally adaptive corn variety, rather than that which might be more specifically adjusted to a place or soil condition. I have yet to see a variety that has become

significant when produced in this way—but some of the persons pursuing the overgrown path are homesteaders not greatly interested in projecting the benefits of their work to a community.

The forced cross-pollination of grains in these mash ups is a kind of Thunderdome Darwinian transformation of genes. There is, given the breeding scenarios, a favoring of quick responsiveness over durable qualities. And brute viability matters more than flavor, which is scarcely a trait being registered.

Sometimes populations have resorted to this kind of dense polycropping of the same species—particularly in situations when a people has been displaced from a homeland are are attempting to adapt to new situations. Some evidence exists that upland rice farmers in Trinidad polycropped their famous Moruga Hill rice with other varieties to insure that something came up no matter what the conditions on the island. But for most populations over most history, this was not the path followed. Rather one variety of a grain was settled upon and it was rigorously policed, and seed selected. Improvement was the path.

What was being improved? The size and shape of the grain head—the speed of maturation—the productivity—the quality of straw—and flavor. When one looks at the landraces of wheat famous in the 18^th century in Europe one sees beautiful conformation of grain.

The flavor of ancient cereals had been shaped by hundreds of generations of seed selection, always seeking a greater quality of wholesomeness. All animals detect what is edible and nutritious in their environment by chemical signatures—taste. Humans, like ants, can alter chemically the things they eat to make them more flavorful more nutritious. Human possess memory and judgment and can manipulate good food to make it taste better. Or to be more precise in the case of cereals, more wholesome.

Wholesomeness is a curious category of flavor. It is different from taste sensations of bitter, sour, salty or sweet; it is more like umami. Or perhaps the whole body registration of heat from capsicum. It is as much about the body’s reaction of satiety as the immediate pulse of flavor. So it is an experience of longer duration including the beginning of the body’s registration of the absorption of carbohydrates. It is a quality recognized in myriad language sIt is a gestalt triggered by retro nasal smelling tasting of certain chemicals found in food. When grain growers milled and prepared their own grain, they tasted it in whole grained or crushed grain porridges. Sometimes in griddle cakes.

Somewhere in the genetics of the landraces lay the wisdom of entire cultures about taste and nutrition. When the landraces have lain dormant in a deep freezer, when they have moved from their homelands, or when they have been grown out without being improved with any intuition of what they might taste like, the genetics holds the flavor in recess. It has to be drawn out. Only practical field knowledge gained in specific places can unlock the wholesomeness and rightness. If one, for instances, tries to blow up the modest measures of heirloom seed to commercial levels, the genetics sometimes breaks into a multitude of grain ancestors losing the shape of the improved form. Sometimes flavor vanishes. Field knowledge trumps the genetic suppositions of crop scientists.

But when genetics and field knowledge and good growing conditions combine, then flavor can be a revelation.

Old grains in germ plasm banks is stripped of the field knowledge of the growers who gave rise to the form. Instead one has a catalog of traits, chemistry, resistances, vulnerabilities, and uses. While seeds do embody the culture of the peoples who gave rise to it, they do not explicitly tell you how it was grown. Was the seed soaked and coated with clay before planting? Did they broadcast or dibble? Did something get put in the soil besides the seed. Was there a planting day indicated by a lunar cycle? Was it co-cropped? Since flavor is taken up from the soil to some extent, and since the soil’s qualities are shaped by what grows in it, how a companion crop shapes soil chemistry or microbial populations or inhibits weed production may be of the first importance. Oral history provides that. More than the origin story of a variety (the stories the Seed Savers Exchange collects), one needs the growers’ trade secrets.

Because of the imperative to preserve biodiversity, seed savers have organized into a network of exchanges. They operate with the directive to put seed in the hands of as many people as possible, and so it is dispersed across the continent. There are certain geographic constraints to where it goes—the growing zones—but it is put into the hands of which amateurs or professional growers wish them. Necessarily they will express themselves in many forms in many soils. And if the grower collects seed his or her private aesthetics will determine what qualities will be favored in the next generation. The common vision of what a strain should be, or what the genetics will be, is dispersed. Exchange by its very nature insures the genetic degeneration of a form in the absence of a community that articulates a sensus communis about flavor, morphology, taste.

Improvement rather than exchange should be the path forward with landraces and heirlooms. When the world of the market began to control seed in the 19^th century in the United States, the great improved varieties—the Danver Yellow Globe Onion, the Acme Tomato, the Early Rose Potato, the Burpee Self Blanching Celery emerged out of a world of growers-breeders and market gardeners organized into agricultural societies, and the exhibitions certified the emerging ideals for plants. Seed for the winners was commercialized by professional seedsman. The seedsman because of their competition felt compelled to experiment themselves to improve offerings to preserve market share. Some varieties became steady sellers. Others were offered and the buying public determined whether they constituted a durable good. To the extent that home gardeners were the clientele making the choice, there was a community whose taste worked. But when commodity growers drove seed purchases and creation, the eclipse of flavor for productivity, transportability, and processability became institutionalized. This happened in some crops as early as the 1880s.

Improvement is an idea that took on a strange wideness in plant circles. What began as the common ideal of the experimentalists who sought a diversified and sustainable agriculture in the face of extractive and exploitative cash crop farmers who ruined agricultural landscapes, became a kind of project of altering certain individual traits of plants to targeted qualities that were commercially advantageous for mass growers. Improvement began as a gestalt sense that was intuitively grasped. The corn farmer mass selecting his seed by seeking out big, regular deep kerneled cobs, made selections in an instant and could in fifteen seasons make a variety uniform and impressive. But when monocropping vast landscapes took place and corn covered entire counties of America, disease came—and something one couldn’t see—resistance to disease—became needful if corn were to remain a crop. Breeding transferred from farmers to specialists at experiment stations, and entomologists, and plant pathologists. They viewed desirability in plants in terms of problems that could be overcome by isolated traits. Flavor or lack of flavor was not a problem per se until the end of the 20^th century. Intolerance to dry climate was. Perishability was. Variable ripening or seed shattering was. A variety became less a whole than a collocation of traits.

So when we say a landrace should be improved in 2018, what that means can be quite different depending on the community of people espousing improvement. The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation formed to operate as a community that would guide the improvement of the southern landrace grains. It has chosen to abide by the old concern for wholeness and flavor, while also engaging the genetic understanding. The traditional ingredients we brought back are available as genetic resources for those who wish to breed traits into the next variety of corn, oasts, rye, wheat, and rice. They are also available to the chef, the home cook, and the farmer who cherishes food with optimal flavor. And we seek, as the growers a century ago, or a millennia ago, did to enhance the wholesomeness of these ingredients. Sensory testing is the inviariable practice at every stage of what we do.