ARTÍCULO 321 EXCAVACIÓN EN ZANJA, POZOS Y CIMIENTOS

The amateur seed conservationist will find the seed-saving idea a lot more complicated than when he or she anticipates. The problems of categorization, outplanting, characterization, storage and quality control are all essential to a systematic effort; yet, they are time-consuming and, unfortunately, require financial resources.

The NGO or amateur conservationist will first have to limit the collection based on priorities, e.g., vegetables, cover crops, trees, fruits or rice. It is a common mistake to try to collect everything because it soon becomes overwhelming, difficult to manage and expensive. With cooperation, it is conceivable that each NGO could focus on one crop and then exchange the collected and tested materials with other partner NGOs.

The planting-out of collected seeds is another important step -- probably the most expensive. Human labor is needed for this, as long as the crops are in the field. Seeds must be planted and observed for two to three seasons to ensure that the characteristics (e.g., planting season, flowering habits, pest susceptibility, etc.) can be recorded. Here we are not talking of sophisticated data but very simple but essential information without which the gardener or farmer receiving the seeds could get the wrong conclusion, i.e., indigenous varieties are not good. Many traditional varieties are season-bound and, if planted in the wrong season, give very poor results. Others do badly if fertilized and do well only under low fertility conditions.

The collection of seeds is labor-intensive and time-consuming. The next step, that of drying and then depodding or cleaning, is also labor-intensive. However, all activities mentioned so far can be easily learned and require systematic effort rather than expertise. The storage of seeds and maintenance of viability is probably where the most problems will occur and where guidance from a seed technologist in the design of a technical strategy is important. Seeds can be dried too much ar not enough. They can get infested with fungus while in storage, affecting their viability, or the seedlings can be damaged soon after germination. The seed moisture content in storage is the single most important factor. But the storage temperature and humidity often critical determinants of how successful the seed production effort has been.

The importance of labeling seed packets with information on the place of origin, local name and the date of collection cannot be over emphasized. Any observations from the gardener or farmer will be very helpful in future characterization of accessions, e.g., some cultivars store better than others, an important

characteristic of old cultivars of beans and a trait lost in the new varieties. If this information is not recorded one might not know it by observing plants in the field. Another attribute of traditional legumes that farmers know well and use to describe their collections is the versatility, for instance, some legumes can be sold as green vegetables but are also equally good as dried legumes. This knowledge is best collected from the original growers themselves.

An institutional effort to conduct seed collection missions is justified (as opposed to farmers collecting the seeds from their own area for in situ conservation) if seeds are rare and must be brought from other parts of the country and exchanged in order to reinstate the original diversity and variability. But such efforts are only useful and relevant if the seeds collected, tested and multiplied are returned to the communities for them to plant, try out and conserve. The sooner the materials are moved out, the better. The ideal approach is to give farmers a diversity from within each crop, e.g., six kinds of mungbeans, so they can choose from

75 Saving Seeds Through Gardener Curators

a range. Some retain what others will not. So somewhere in every village the materials will get preserved.

Unless the program is backed up with an elaborate

conscientization strategy, one should not expect farmers to understand the philosophical or aesthetic dimensions of genetic resources conservation program. Their agenda may be different from that of the organization: they conserve the varieties for a host of reasons, the last of which may be conservation for conservation’s sake. So, the idea of getting growers to continue to raise seeds only for purpose of saving them, as is being done in some Western countries, is a bit unrealistic. There is need to focus on seed accessions whose attributes will in themselves result in their being conserved. The genetic resources agenda then become a hidden one and need to be integrated with other activities, such as family food production through improved agricultural technologies for farms and gardens, or health and nutrition interventions.

It seems clear that conservation will not result from workshops on the topic of genetic erosion, even as we admit these are important at certain stages of the campaign. Nor will it result only from storing seeds in national or international germplasm banks, because of the need for these plants to continue their process of evolution and adaptation. Seed conservation is everybody’s concern and not an activity limited to geneticists and breeders. We still have time to do something about this--only if we start today.

76 Integrated Community Food Production (IIRR/NAPC)