Two More Weeks This Market Season

21 Reasons to Shop at the Market

20. For preserving plant diversity

Farmers at the Market perform an invaluable function for the world's agriculture. They experiment with old and new varieties of plants, something they do with ease and curiosity because they don't produce for large supermarket chains, which require produce tough enough to withstand shipping, unripe enough to tolerate the ripening room, and sweet in a uniform way.

Old plant varieties at the Market
At the Market, we can taste heirloom tomatoes, old varieties that supermarkets until recently have avoided. We're seeing them more often now in our grocery stores, but they don't compare very well with the luscious beauties at the Market.

New plant varieties at the Market
The fruit sensation this year at the Market was the debut of the new peacotum by Calhoun Orchards. If you didn't try it this year, this is something you definitely NEED to put on your list for next year. This blend of peach, plum and apricot gives a voluptuous flood of flavors. It took 30-years of grueling work using conventional pollinization to reach the point where the trees were available for commercial production.

When the Calhouns decided to buy those new trees, they took a big risk. They couldn't predict whether the peacotum would make a smashing connection with consumers or a colliding failure. Consequently, they started out with only 13 trees, I believe. That made for a small harvest. But oh, what spectacular results. When I brought in a couple (that was all I was willing to share) for a co-worker, she reported back, "This may be the best fruit ever."

In case you are wondering, I'd have to say that peacotums beat pluots, developed by the same California fruit breeder, by a wide margin. Not surprisingly, I don't think grocery stores had any peacotums this summer- their growers usually produce the tried and true.

Plant diversity in the US
Plant diversity is something to celebrate and to preserve. Just since the early 1900s in the US, our crop diversity has dropped from around 8,000 crop varieties to around 600. For multiple reasons, including war, weather catastrophes, climate change, blights, changes in taste, and health concerns, we need to preserve varieties to protect against those rainy days.

USDA seed bank
Today the world has around 1,400 seed banks. The USDA runs our major seed bank, the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, in Fort Collins, CO, in a building equipped with high-tech storage techniques, omnipresent security, and a temperature hovering around -4 Fahrenheit,

With close to a million seeds and with seeds added every year, this bank has a dual function. It preserves seeds and it also sends seeds upon request around the world, particularly to help start crop production after weather disasters, war, and blights.

Shoppers

Seed banks in Seattle and Portland
Other seed banks are scattered across the country. Seattle has the Miller Seed Vault, which preserves the seeds of 320 rare Washington plant species. In Portland, the Berry Botanic Garden has maintained its seed bank for rare and endangered plants of the Pacific Northwest since 1983.

Doomsday seed vault in Norway
Last year, Norway opened a "doomsday" seed vault in the permafrost of an Arctic island just 700 miles south of the North Pole, a place inhabited by polar bears and reindeer. Svalbard will act as a back-up international seed bank. Our Fort Collins bank has already contributed 20,000 seed samples from 361 crop species. With major initial costs paid for by the Norwegian government, Svalbard's operational costs will be funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Funding for this trust comes partly from the Bill the Melinda Gates Foundation. (There, I squeezed in a Northwest angle).

This week, the need to preserve and develop our plant diversity was underscored by the death of Norman Borlaug, one of the real heroes of the 20th century. It's Borlaug who engineered the green revolution in the 1960s that saved millions of lives around the world. Now that food prices are rising once again throughout the world, we can expect to see increasing focus on our plant diversity.