Plant breeding for organic and sustainable, low-input agriculture

On-farm conservation of cereal landraces on the Outer Hebrides, Scotland – is
participatory crop improvement the best approach?
Maria Scholten
Scottish Agricultural College, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
The Outer Hebrides off the North West coast of Scotland are the largest remaining area of cereal
landraces in the UK, possibly in north-western Europe. Bere barley, a local rye and Avena
strigosa, have been home seed saved over generations and their cultivation forms a low-input
low-input system on the nutrient deficient light and very alkaline soils. Because of the high
freight costs, fodder cereal production is locally still important as cheap home produced
winterfeed. Cereal producers deliver an important ecological service in the maintenance of the
machair coastal grasslands habitat, an Annex 1 habitat on the EU directive, important for the
conservation of threatened bird species such as corncrake and corn bunting. Several bottlenecks
in crop and seed production have been observed over the last decades. Seed crop failures caused
by adverse weather or diseases have been recurrent in the history of the islands. In recent
decades an additional problem in the form of a large greylag geese population has shown up,
which attacks and destroys the (seed) crop. Associated with the threat of geese is the increase in
the use of silage. Smut has been a persistent disease problem while ergot was frequently
observed in rye fields. As with other landraces for example in Italy, the landraces are grown by
an ageing and declining farmer’s population.
On farm conservation projects in Europe, more specifically the UK, are rare. Some forms of
indirect conservation are however in place, funded and managed by wildlife conservation
organizations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Scottish Natural
Heritage (SNH). These projects aim at maintaining traditional cereal cropping methods as means
of maintaining the Machair grasslands as a bird habitat. This strictly conservationist approach
tends to focus on tradition. Is landrace conservation based on a participatory approach such a
better approach for local seed management to safeguard continued cereal cultivation? This option
will be discussed in the poster.
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