The surest way to ensure failure is not to try.
This is not a case of people with sufficient resources and detailed knowledge of the repositories not trying.
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I think you’re sorely underestimating the amount of expertise the paid staff has, and how much effort it takes to train and manage volunteers for even pretty basic tasks.
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The expertise. Yes I will do everything to preserve and provide Georgia origin Germplasm. But expert? Well that is not me. I might be a journeyman at best. Just a highly motivated one who is passing the interest down the family line.
Which turns out getting the kids into it is not that hard. The girls like a lot of it. But enjoy the meeting people and sharing the plants the most.
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You’ll have to forgive me if I offer to volunteer my time anyway.
Which repository is closest to you?
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We have no idea what will happen with things very rapidly changing. Anything could happen right now. We don’t know if some of these groups will be consolidated with other departments, people could be rehired, programs could be analyzed for efficiency or who knows. Did your people talk with Brooke Rollins herself?
Who knows what the plans are right now. I doubt Brooke Rollins knows exactly what the plans are. I know for sure none of us here knows.
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I don’t want to come off overly harsh. But this statement signifies your 100% missing what plant repositories do.
Their not a dumping ground for backyard gardeners random seedling culls. They often save wild species, that often might have gone extinct in the wild. We don’t know what disease resistance genes these plants have. Or value as rootstock or other uses they might have in the future.
They also store cultivars, but almost always these at least at one point where “found suitable” as you call it.
Not just harsh, more like ignorant or misunderstanding of what these institutions do.
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This is wildly inaccurate.
A lot of progress has come from backcrossing to wild species or really old cultivars. (most of the recent breeding projects)
the “keep the best and cull the rest” is a subtractive prosses. That keeps culling genetic information. The goal of breeding is to cull the genes that don’t matter for your specific goal, and preserve the ones that are most useful. You however always loose some useful genes along the way. (think of inbreeding over multiple and multiple generations, this is an extreme example of what happens in a purely subtractive system)
backcrossing to old cultivars or wild species is a valuable almost essential part of most modern plant breeding.
And even if you want to go the GMO route. You still need cultivars or species that have the genes you want to transfer.
These germplasm centers store those. Loosing them will have long lasting and permanent effects.
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If only it worked that way.
Just have Einstein train the next 4 Einstein’s, and have them train 4 more. and soon we’ll have a planet of exclusively genius people.
Training people takes time, money, effort and talent. All these things where applied and filtered for during education and hiring and people building their careers in these germplasm centers.
replacing all that expertise, knowledge and experience with a few volunteers that are trained a few hours is ridiculous.
would you go to the hospital for your elective surgery if all surgeons where laid off, except for 1 who was only there to train the volunteers?
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Of the 10 example cuts, was this a single position+salary?
1. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Onboarding Specialist: $374,000
Mentions some probationary employee terminations. As long as those people were doing real and valuable work, I’m hopeful they’ll be re-hired or otherwise land on their feet.
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It is very unlikely they will be rehired. More important, at least 50,000 people with unique skills will be searching for jobs at a time when their skillset is not in demand. No universities are currently hiring. Low level techs and field/seasonal workers are also being cut. “Hopium” is not going to help.
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I can say from personal experience (not from USDA but other fed) that the lay offs are affecting way more than just “DEI folks”. Several people who have worked with me for nearly a decade are being laid off. I am not sure how long or if the US will ever recover from this.
My heart goes out to all impacted by this. My only hope is we recover eventually, and find ways to ensure such irresponsible actions don’t reoccur.
Is there something similar to the global seed vault for rootstocks, etc.? An internationally funded organization?
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I believe we have more misunderstanding than disagreement. I was talking about culling out of a group of seedlings produced from a cross. You may need to make an intentional backcross to an old variety or even wild specimen. Will you keep each and every seedling from that cross? Not likely. You’ll almost invariably keep the ones that show promise only. I doubt enough agricultural land exists to house all of the seedlings that didn’t make the cut throughout human history. We are prodigious breeders always looking for something new.
I definitely agree with keeping older varieties alive and available. I believe I mentioned the reality that some may fall out of favor because of misalignment with modern goals, but be useful because of other traits (diseases resistance being one obvious example of something we may need) I both believe in keeping historic varieties around and would be willing to participate on my own land at my own expense and propagate them to make available to the public. I’m advocating trying to organize to preserve any heritage varieties that are at risk. If a group was organized to systematically preserve and make available such varieties I’d like to join. That said I lack the website skills to do it myself. Participation in a forum takes me to the edge of my technical skills. Need to build a shed? I’m your guy. Need to build a website? Somebody else will have to do it.
A previous poster was lamenting about the potential loss of unreleased varieties from previous crosses. My point is that, while potentially a loss, it isn’t likely to have as much impact. I would wager a majority will never be used for anything anyway. One could get discouraged by the sheer number of varieties maintained by USDA and think preservation would be impossible in private hands. My point is that a private group could produce 90% of the benefit by maintaining the heritage varieties and most valuable wild selections etc.
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Losing a job is a gut wrenching experience. My heart goes out to the good folks who are passionate about their work that won’t be able to easily continue to do what they love.
I also love large collections of plants. Keeping a large number of potentially very useful in the future genetics sounds great.
The problem that is far more likely to effect the average citizen is the U.S.'s national debt. There is currently $107k worth of debt for every citizen in the U.S. It is virtually unanimous that U.S. citizens want the government to not waste tax dollars. Any productive cutting of spending is going to be difficult to do, and large groups of people are going to cry foul no matter how it is done. Even some good programs with great people are likely to get cut. Anyone that has personally had to go into “storm mode” because of a very difficult financial situation understands this. When you go into “storm mode” you have to quit doing some “good” things (donating to charity for example) along with the “bad” things (eating out at expensive restaurants every night for example). Once you are financially stable again, you can try to resume the “good” activities again. Obviously it’s more complicated than that when looking at the size and duration of the repository programs, but the average bear citizen wouldn’t even notice the loss of the whole collection of grapes, aronia, figs, or even pears for an extremely long time, if ever. Are the programs good with great people working there? Absolutely. Has humanity survived the vast majority of it’s existence without these repositories in the U.S.? Absolutely.
While it might hurt us somewhat as fruit growers to see these programs get cut or eliminated, the majority of citizens around us will never notice.
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Superior under current conditions. The problem is that as environmental conditions change, we dont know what qualities will turn out to be superior. Rainfall, fire, heat, bacterial pressure are changing and a quality that is useful in 15 years may be lost because it’s not useful right now.
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If they can learn Mandarin, im pretty sure China will take them for research positions. Im only partly joking. I personally think this is awful, but in a USA where the philosophy is that the government is a problem, its easy to see that the logical end point is the removal of all government agencies and organizations.
For those of us near one of the research stations, it might be worth it to see what germplasm we can access to at least have pieces as a backup.
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That is possible, though in all honesty, even if we had an ice age level change in climate, in any direction, there is almost no chance the climate would shift so drastically that we would see conditions over any significant portion of the country that aren’t already present somewhere in the USA. We already have deserts, swampland, near tropical regions, arctic regions, etc. we could see a climate shift way beyond what anyone is predicting and most of the US would still be cooler than south Florida and Texas are now. We could hit an ice age and most of us would stay warmer than the far north is now. We have 11 climate zones represented and most of them occur both in dry and wet versions somewhere.
Obviously diseases on the other hand, are truly anyone’s guess. We have historically seen novel diseases arise and decimate a crop type. Sometimes the solution does come from unexpected places. I could easily see a previously unnoticed variety suddenly standing out when the rest of the repository takes significant damage. And at that point the survivors would be valuable even if low yielding and inedible.
Either way, I wouldn’t even try to argue that there is no value in having a huge collection of plants with no present value “just in case”. I’m a “better to have and not need than need and not have” type guy. My point is I wouldn’t panic if USDA does face cuts. I think private collections, especially if networked, could replace most of the benefits. Not all, but most. Potentially such a network could be of more practical use if it were accessible by amateur breeders. Sometimes geniuses are too disagreeable to work in an institution, and sometimes dumb luck gives good results if enough people are experimenting.
Once again, I’m not even trying to argue AGAINST USDA collections, rather I’m arguing FOR the utility of private collections. I just don’t like the “sky is falling” mentality when in reality it’s just a little rain and we could probably just put on a raincoat.
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There is also no incentive for a private enterprise to take up the altruistic work that isn’t driven by profit motive.
My picture from the pear repository is just a small portion of the planting.
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Maybe not, but it’s wild to assume governing agencies operate via altruism.
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