In Zemo Alvani, a village nestled in Georgia’s Caucasus mountains in the north of the country, Natia Matcharashvili carefully handpicks the ripest wheat grains from her fields. As a first-generation farmer, she takes pride in every harvest that will soon be milled into flour.

Natia and her husband Shota moved their family back to their village from the capital, Tbilisi, to be closer to nature, especially for the sake of their children. In fact, Shota had longed to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a farmer. He felt it his calling to bring native wheat varieties back in use, as they were slowly disappearing from Georgian fields.

“It’s our responsibility to protect these traditional wheat varieties that have adapted to our soil and climate over generations,” says Natia. “We wanted to share our traditions and live in harmony with nature,’’ she explains about moving back to Zemo Alvani.

For Natia and Shota, growing these traditional varieties of wheat, which are used in the fresh bread and cookies sold in their bakery, is a way to share their heritage with their customers.

“What started as a simple desire became our livelihood. Now we’ve grown a few [native varieties] and tasted them, and we want to keep going, discovering more of these forgotten Georgian varieties and bringing them back to life, ” Natia explains.

Living heritage at risk

Georgia is home to remarkable wheat diversity. Of the fourteen wheat species grown in the country, five originated from Georgia itself.

Yet, without action, this living heritage risks being lost forever.

Native wheat varieties have nearly vanished from Georgia’s fields, replaced by modern varieties developed by professional breeders. Decades of centralized agriculture in the Soviet era left large, state cooperatives instead of small private farms that used to be tended to by generations of farmers.

That’s where Tamriko Jinjikhadze, an agricultural scientist at the Scientific Research Centre of Agriculture (SRCA) of Georgia, stepped in to reverse the troubling trend of genetic diversity loss.

“Some of our country’s most important crops varieties are quietly disappearing,” Tamriko explains.

With international support, Tamriko’s team launched seed collecting missions to remote areas, identifying local varieties still cultivated by small-scale farmers.

It was on one such mission that she first met Natia and Shota. The couple knew that they were growing a local wheat variety, but they did not know its name or its specificities. Tamriko’s team collected seeds found on Natia and Shota’s field for identification at the SRCA.

Local varieties are important to Georgian farmers because they generally perform better in their place of origin, having adapted to specific conditions through generations of cultivation. For instance, native Georgian wheat varieties have higher resistance to fungal diseases and higher productivity than other varieties.

Georgian wheats are genetic treasures, carrying invaluable genes for local adaptation. “They serve as initial breeding material to develop resilient wheat varieties that can survive climate change and new pests and diseases,” Tamriko explains.

Journey to the Arctic

The journey of these ancient seeds didn’t end in Georgian soil. More than 200 samples of seeds of traditional Georgian varieties, such as Lagoedkhis Gdzeltavtava and Dolis Puri, the two local wheat varieties found on Natia and Shota’s fields, traveled with Tamriko from the remote Georgian mountain villages to the Arctic Circle, where the world’s largest seed reserve is based.

Located in northernmost Norway, about 2 000 kilometres north of the country’s capital, Oslo, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault maintains a constant temperature of -18°C to ensure long-term seed viability. This Vault holds seed duplicates from around the globe, safeguarding the world’s future food supply.

“It’s very comforting to know that our local varieties are safely preserved in Svalbard,” says Shota. ” This makes me feel confident about the future.”

This security couldn’t come at a more crucial time, as climate change and environmental challenges are eroding genetic diversity. As a result, preserving crop varieties through methods such as secure storage in gene banks and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has become more important than ever.

“The journey of these seeds begins in the hands of farmers—their knowledge is as vital as the seeds themselves,” says Tamriko. “We, as scientists, are here to support them—not just to conserve seeds, but to ensure they can be used for livelihoods.’’

For Natia, this work represents both her heritage and her future. “By growing these local wheat varieties, we’re ensuring both their survival and the transmission of our knowledge,” she concludes.

When customers bite into fresh bread at Natia and Shota’s bakery, they’re tasting ancient seeds recovered by scientists, duplicated and safeguarded in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and conserved by farmers in Georgia, ensuring that the past continues to nourish the future, one seed at a time.

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The Svalbard Global seed bank was established in February 2008. It was designed to store seeds for hundreds or even thousands of years in the event of a global disaster. But now, only seven years later, the Syrian civil war made it necessary to withdraw seeds from this doomsday vault.

Svalbard Norway: It would have been easy to imagine the end of the world here surrounded by glaciers, polar bears and the long dark winters of the high arctic. But like Noah’s ark, the global seed bank was designed to preserve life.

Related: The Noah’s Ark Seed Bank for Coral Reefs

The blueprint for Noah’s Coral Ark

Specifically it was designed to preserve the seeds necessary for our food crops and our survival. The doomsday vault is located deep within an ice-covered mountain on Spitzbergen Island, far above the expected sea level rise in centuries of climate change and only 800 miles from the North Pole.

Even if the vault’s electrical power supply is interrupted,the vault won’t thaw for hundreds of years. The vault is designed to survive a missile attack or even a nuclear war. The preserved seeds will also protect us against the possibility that GMO crops damage the gene pool of the global food supply, or create an unsustainable plant monoculture.

The doomsday vault designers thought of nearly everything, With each year the seed bank grew more and more deposits from around the world until it reached nearly 865,000 varieties of seeds. Some of these seeds were from the International Center for Agricultural research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) which was located in Aleppo, Syria.

The Syrian war forced ICARDA to move to Beirut, Lebanon. Some of the seeds were lost or destroyed before or during the move, so now, only seven years after the seeds were deposited, the first withdrawal is being made to replace the seeds destroyed in Syria’s civil war.

A spokesperson for the seedbank said that while withdrawing seeds from a doomsday vault appears to be very bad news, it actually shows that the vault works and is a valuable resource for our violent and troubled world.

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As climate conditions in European countries increasingly resemble those of their southern neighbors, European farmers are seeking new strains of staple crops that can adjust to the new climate. A pan-European research project, EASTBRED, brought European agronomists together with ProGen to start selecting the new crops and introducing them to fields in central and eastern Europe.

Resistant to extreme weather

Climate change is starting to visibly alter European agriculture.

It’s affecting the atmospheric conditions of Europe, increasing the frequency of intensely cold winters and hot summers throughout the continent. Agricultural pests and diseases from southern Europe and Africa are also spreading north. Plant varieties normally confined to southern Europe are following the trend as well, often replacing other species indigenous to northern Europe.

Although Turkey is facing its own internal agricultural production shortage due to climate change, companies such as ProGen have honed the development of crop varieties that can survive the Mediterranean region’s ecological and weather conditions.

In the EASTBRED project, ProGen researchers crossed central Europe’s best barley and wheat varieties with especially resistant Turkish ones using conventional breeding techniques (no genetic modification, in other words).

Turkey: Source of super-resistant crops for the future?

It will take 2-10 years to get the full results, but ProGen has already joined another  European crop breeding research program, GENOWHEAT, with similar goals:  reintroducing to European fields especially resistant varieties of wheat that used to be grown widely across the continent but now are only found in Turkey.

ProGen specializes in the research, production, and distribution of cotton, corn, wheat, soy, sunflower and canola seed types, and currently exports to more than 15 countries.

Turkey’s agricultural laws have been conforming more and more to European ones recently. In 2006, Turkish Parliament passed a law forcing all commercial farmers to only use seeds that were tested, registered, and certified by the state. Meanwhile, “high quality” seeds were defined by the state as those with the highest productivity and lowest diversity of products.

Such measures haven’t hampered the work of groups like ProGen, however. The company looks set to become a leader in the effort to prepare European agriculture for increasing climate change.

:: CORDIS

Read more about climate change in Turkey:
Turkey’s Wheat Exports Decline Due To Climate Change, Says Industry Official
UN Launches Climate Change Resilience Project in Balkans, Western Turkey
Plumbing the Mud in This Turkish Lake to Explain Climate Change

Image via ProGen

The post Turkish Seed Developer Helps European Farmers Adjust To Warming Temperatures appeared first on Green Prophet.

As we learned when fires raging through Russia destroyed wheat crops, countries all along the food chain, including Egypt, feel the pinch, though climate change is not all that puts at risk Israel’s tomato, cucumber, and melon supply. Lack of biodiversity also threatens agriculture as much it does any ecosystem.

As rising food prices, growing populations and natural disasters increasingly put pressure on food production, governments and scientists are focusing on preserving the world’s agricultural biodiversity through seed and gene banks.

Seedy savings

“Crops are resources that are renewable as long as you can conserve them,” Cary Fowler, executive  director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust told IRIN from Rome. “In this sense, seed and gene banks are the libraries of life.”

Gene and seed banks, by storing food varieties, prepare the world for food crises by acting as a “savings account.” Just as one saves money for emergencies, scientists are saving seeds in case certain crops die out or are destroyed.

These stockpiles can be used to feed a growing population, which the UN predicts will balloon from seven billion to nine billion by 2050.

Adaptation

Scientists also hope to use genetic features of these stored seeds to create crops that can adapt to various weather conditions.

“Different varieties have different traits which are suitable for different climates, diseases, soils and markets,” said Rory Hamilton, head of the T.T. Chang Genetic Resources Center at the International Rice Research Institute. “If we lose those traits, then we lose our ability to respond to challenges.”

According to Diverseeds, a food security project of the European Commission, the world’s diet is primarily comprised of only 30 crops. Of those, wheat, corn and rice account for more than half of the world’s food consumption.

IRIN lists some of the most important crop seed and gene banks around the world:

Pavlovsk Experimental Station (Berry Bank) – Russia

What: Established in 1926, the Pavlovsk Experimental Station has one of the oldest collections of fruits and berries in the world and the largest in Europe. It contains more than 5,500 seed varieties of blackcurrants, apples and strawberries. Despite the fact that 90 percent of the station’s collection is unique, it is currently facing demolition plans by the Russian government. Sixty percent of the blackcurrants in Russia – the top producer at $400 million per year – originated from this research centre.

Where: Built outside St. Petersburg, the station earned a special place in Russian history during the World War II siege of the city, when 12 scientists chose to starve to death rather than eat the precious seeds.

International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) – Philippines

What: The oldest and largest international agricultural research institute in Asia, IRRI has more than 109,000 types of traditional, wild and ancestor rice. Rice farms cover 11 percent of the world’s arable area, and almost half the world depends on rice as a major source of food and income. It was established in 1960 by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, in cooperation with the Philippine government.

Where: Los Baños, about 60km south of the Philippine capital, Manila.

International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) – Mexico

What: Established in 1971, CIMMYT manages the most diverse maize and wheat collections. Each year the centre ships several tons of seed to more than 100 researchers in dozens of countries. The centre has some 140,000 samples of wheat seed from more than 100 countries, and 27,000 samples of maize.

Where: Mexico City.

International Potato Center (CIP) – Peru and Ecuador

What: CIP conducts scientific research on potato, sweet potato and other root and tuber crops, and examines ways to improve natural resource management in the Andes and similar mountain climates. Established in 1971, CIP has 5,000 samples of potato, 6,500 samples of sweet potato and 1,300 samples of nine species of Andean roots and tubers.

Where: CIP has experimental stations in a variety of climates in Peru and Ecuador, including in an irrigated coastal valley in La Molina, outside Lima, Peru’s capital; in the high Andes in Huancayo (Peru); on the eastern, rainforest-covered slopes of San Ramón (Peru); and Quito, Ecuador, in the high Andes.

Svalbard Seed Vault – Norway

What: Managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen) and the government of Norway, Svalbard is the largest seed vault in the world. Built in 2008 as a safety net in case other collections are destroyed, the vault cost US$9 million to build and holds 526,000 seed samples (500 seeds per sample).

Where: Dug out of an arctic mountainside nearly 1,000km north of the Norwegian mainland, the vault is located in the Svalbard Archipelago, near the town of Longyearbyen. For nearly four months a year, the Svalbard islands are enveloped in total darkness. Permafrost and thick rock ensure that even without electricity, the samples, which are stored at -18 degrees Celsius, remain frozen.

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