> I would also mention, in response to Jim Quinton's rememberance about his
> grandfather's day, that we don't know exactly which ears of corn the workers
> were looking for. My eyes were opened to new ways of doing things during an
> interview that I conducted with an 89 year-old relative in the late 1980s. I
> was working for a corn breeder at the Univ. of Nebraska as an undergraduate
> and considering an agronomy career. My elderly cousin told me that "people
> laugh about that open-pollinated corn and they are all excited about hybrid
> corn. Well, we just didn't plant 'any' corn -- we saved the best ears from
> each load of corn and put them in a separate place. They were the ones used
> for planting the next year. And we got good yields." As I understand it now,
> this was a preferred method of crop breeding from the gentleman farmer era to
> today in true-breeding crops like wheat and soybeans. In other words, those
> old geezers had a lot of 'practical' knowledge about agriculture that perhaps
> we ought not to sniff at.
A somewhat similar story is told by Dr.Richaria who probably has the
largest collection of traditional rice varieties. While visiting an
adivasi (Indian indigenous people) village, he found that after harvest,
the head of the adivasis, in consultation with other people selects the
best seeds to save for sowing next season. When Dr.Richaria wished to take
a sample from what he observed to be one of the best varieties, the head
of the village tried to dissuade him saying that it simply will not yield
any grain. As a scientist of repute, Dr.Richaria thought that he knew
better than the ignorant tribal people, and ignored the advice. He planted
the seeds and found that the plants did not yield a single grain. It was
then he realised that these were male sterile lines! And we think that
male sterility is a trait that was obtained through years of research by
plant breeders using modern science!
D.Parthasarathy
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