Food from the edge

Published on Friday 9 May 2008 21:00

CLOSE to Edinburgh airport and sandwiched between railway, canal and motorway lies Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (Sasa), home to 150 scientists and support staff whose work is vital for Scotland's agricultural economy and for the quality and security of the Scottish food supply.

My first visit to Sasa was on a blustery February day, searching for information on what plant specialists call landraces – varieties of food crops that have adapted to the natural environment in which they grow with minimal human assistance. Some 50 years ago such crops might have been found in an Angus glen, but are now only grown on crofts in the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland. Centuries ago, the ancestors of these same plants were being cultivated by the ancestors of those same crofters. The landraces, hardy survivors in marginal lands, are produced by farmers with inherited skills, interacting with the plants as they evolve in their unique settings of soil and microclimates.

Sasa houses a remarkable collection of crop varieties, including landraces collected under the auspices of the Scottish Landrace Protection Scheme (SLPS) which was set up in August 2006. In March, the scheme won a Scottish Government Excellence Award and it has been strongly commended by the environment minister, Mike Russell.

Explaining why these crops had proved to be so hardy, Niall Green, head of herbage and vegetable crops at Sasa, says: "The genetic variability of the landraces, grown in several localities, enables them to rapidly adapt to changing environmental pressures."

The main problem he and other plant curators throughout the world face is that so many of these traditional crop varieties have gone out of cultivation and are lost forever. This genetic loss matters, especially as climate change appears to be beginning to have a drastic impact on the world's agriculture.

Professor Karl Hammer is one of Europe's leading landrace specialists and head of the department of agro-biodiversity at Kassel University in central Germany. He believes that landraces are the most valuable component of our gene banks and an intrinsic part of the 10,000 year history of agricultural development, and thinks that the SLPS should be followed as a model by other countries.

"Many landraces have developed that are highly variable and full of useful characters," he says. "Genetic erosion threatens these invaluable crops as they are replaced by a smaller number of modern varieties."

Over the last couple of months I have found out about four of the Scottish landraces: bere barley, small oat, rye and Shetland cabbages.

Research into bere barley by Cathy Southworth has shown that it is both genetically and morphologically distinct from modern barley varieties. As Cathy cycled and drove around the islands, she saw that the crofters persisted with the traditional crop that grew relatively well in poor soil, and that they do this not only for commercial reasons but also out of regard for tradition. Yet the long-term trend is for a reduction in cultivation.

In the Hebrides, most bere barley is grown as winter feed for cattle in a mix with small oat and rye. In Orkney it is also grown as a food crop.

Rae Phillips is the miller at Barony Mill at Birsay, Orkney. As a young man he worked at the mill before leaving to serve a 30-year stint as a lighthouse keeper. Soon after the Stroma light closed in 1996 he went back to working at Barony. In winter he grinds the bere that is grown in fields within a mile of the mill. The creamy white flour is used to make bere bannocks and scones and – in combination with wheat flour – bread. The grain is also sent for making speciality whiskies.

DNA analysis in Sasa's laboratories of the samples Cathy took from the crofting fields revealed that there are distinct, if varied, plant populations in each of the three island groups. There is not one standard type of bere and each of the different gene pools for Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides has to be separately protected so that genes that do not appear in any of the modern varieties will not be lost.

In early April I went to the Uists to visit Dutch researcher Maria Scholten and investigate rye and small oat. She had first visited the Uists "too briefly" in early 2004 for a national study on landraces. Not satisfied with the results, she returned in 2006 to walk and cycle from the southern tip of South Uist through Benbecula and North Uist right up to Berneray, checking the crops growing in the sandy fields of machair along the coast. This journey proved that there were hundreds of hectares of landraces on the Uists.

Her new project, which is based at the Scottish Agricultural College, looks at how to safeguard the local seed production of landraces against the threat from geese and a shifting climate, taking into account the ageing of the crofting population and ongoing changes in agricultural practices.

On a sunny day soon after Easter, near the church at Howmore, Maria showed me some rye and small oat that had dropped from a trailer when a crofter had gone to feed his cows. The corn had been stripped out by the birds that soared overhead.

Later I went to the bird sanctuary at Balranald and met Alastair MacDonald who combines his work for the RSPB with being a crofter. Crofters' support for the bird population of the islands takes different forms, but can be as simple as harvesting the crop from the middle of the field outwards towards the margins, giving the corn buntings escape routes. As Alasdair Allan, MSP for the Western Isles, remarked, the machair lands of the Uists are a unique place where conservation and crofting can work hand in hand.

The question remains: why do the crofters grow the mix of rye and small oat that they call corn? Lawrence MacEachen, a crofter in South Uist, explained that rye and small oat each have nutritional value for the cattle, the small oat rather more so. With the mix you get a yield season by season and whatever the weather brings, even in the driest of springs. So the crofters continue to cultivate on the machair, always thinking about what grows best and using the natural fertiliser, seaweed, which the winter storms cast up on the shore. And the crofters continue to rear the fine cattle that are so prized on the mainland.

Finally, on a wet April day I returned to Sasa and went out to see the numbered rows of Shetland cabbages growing. These huge, multi-hued vegetables contrasted starkly with the uniform modern varieties.

George Campbell, vegetable trials manager, spends much time in the 140 hectares at Gogarbank Farm. He values the "patriotic" aspects of landraces, by which he means the intense pride crofters have in locality – the island landscapes in which the crops grow, the people there and the colours, textures and shapes of the vegetables and cereals.

The island growers, says George, have an acute sense of the crop boundaries that for them are fixed by what their fathers and grandfathers told them the cabbages should look like. He picked for us some tender shoots of the Shetland cabbages. Now they are grown as cattle feed, but were once a mainstay of the island diet. Later I cooked and ate the cabbage – a delicious contrast to the bland vegetables in the supermarkets.

The SLPS is precisely what is needed to protect the agricultural biodiversity represented by landraces in ex-situ collections. Kevin O'Donnell, head of rural scientific services at Sasa, points out: "Scotland's cultural history is not just castles and works of art. There is also our biological heritage in the form of these ancient crop varieties."

A lot is already being done to link up the SLPS with the growers but there also need to be measures to protect the work that is done by these experts – the crofters themselves – in the gathering, selecting, storing and exchange of seed as well as in their continuous experimentation. This is what is meant by in-situ conservation, that is, on the farm or in the immediate vicinity. Crofters told me that they regard support for what they do as crucial and as a proper concern for the Scottish Government. I do not doubt them.