One of the big questions I got asked when talking to potential investors for Manzanita Cooperative was why in the world we were working with wild plants instead of already domesticated plants like every other agricultural research company in the world? The short answer was that genetic diversity in our food is critical to human survival. Buckle up for the longer answer.
1: There’s a huge opportunity for new genetically diverse crops.
There are a few cases of successful modern domestication efforts: the wonderful folks at theLands Institute in Kansas successfully domesticated and brought Kernza to market in recent years and it can now be found in bread, beer, and more. Blueberries are a billion dollar industry, and were domesticated in Maine between 1890 and 1916 by Elizabeth White. Jojoba oil was domesticated by a coalition of universities. Other historical examples took even longer – it took thousands of years for Indigenous people in the Americas to painstakingly domesticate crops like corn and tomatoes, a truly monumental feat.
In other words, domestication has been rare because it’s hard and it’s slow. But modern breeding technologies and rapid genetic testing can take all the guesswork out of the process, dramatically accelerating timelines. When the National Science Foundation agreed to fun our work, this is the opportunity that made them sit up and take notice.
The opportunity here was – and is – huge. The climate is changing and the world desperately needs crops that can thrive in the climates of tomorrow. Broadening the genetic base of farming by adding new species with unique climate adaptations is a powerful way to address this crisis.
2: Agriculture is facing a crisis of biodiversity
Genetic diversity has drastically declined in our current food system. Of the 30,000 known species that can provide food, only 174 are grown commercially around the world. This concentration dramatically limits our society’s ability to adapt as the climate changes, because all 174 of those crops are adapted to the climates we used to have. 3 of them (wheat, rice, and corn) contribute more than half the calories consumed by humans and a fourth (soy) is 3/4 of plant based protein consumed by humans and animals alike.
That’s a real problem.
Based on the latest peer reviewed science, around half of global farm lands will be unsuitable for many current crops at 2 degrees of warming. We’re already past 1.5 degrees, and not slowing down.
The business model of giant corporations selling seed to farmers instead of farmers saving their own seed has further reduced diversity in a process known as genetic erosion. Genetic engineering where whole regions grow genetically identical crops utterly destroys it.
Some existing crops will adapt, a few may even thrive, but many will be unable to adapt. Unfortunately the available genetic diversity that might have allowed them to adapt is mostly gone. This is a catastrophe.
I did a learning session for the Nature Tech Collective recently, and included a case study on US wheat production as an example of this. A century ago there were a hundred varieties of wheat grown in the US; now there are 6. While standardization has allowed large companies to easily sell a product with consistent flavor across large markets, it has destroyed the genetic diversity that modern breeders have to work with.
This process has played out in almost every commercial crop – and is one of the reasons why Bayer and other companies that use genetic engineering have bought up the rights to virtually all the “heritage” varieties of common agricultural plants that are commercially available: the adaptations in the genes of those varieties are their toolbox to create new GMO crops. And that toolbox is shrinking.
3: Because diversity is everywhere if we open our eyes
Even with all the heirlooms the big ag corporations have bought up, there are hard limits on the genetic diversity available in conventional crops. All soy is a single species. 95% of cultivated wheat is a single species. All corn is a single species, all domesticated rice grown in the world is one of two species, all commercially grown wild rice is one of 4 species, and the list goes on.
For comparison, there are 25 native species of rice-analogues within California alone – and they’re adapted to a much wider range of climates than existing species. With time and breeding, many of those could produce commercially viable varieties that dramatically expand the resilience of our food system, while – equally importantly – providing habitat and avoiding the harm to ecosystems from conventional farming. Rice provides more calories to humans than any other single food – and existing species and varieties are already under strain from climate change.
By developing our proprietary process for rapid domestication, we’ve changed the rules of the game for earth’s largest industry. Our technology and approach are critical to human survival, because modern crops are failing fast. While Cargill and Bayer are struggling to genetically engineer climate-adapted soy from a tiny number of ancestral lineages, we have 120 species of wild lupines in California alone. It’s not just private industry with this blind spot – in 2023, the Canadian government dumped $73M into adapting domesticated European lupine species to Canada, and failed; ignoring the wild lupines growing all across North America. We’re taking the opposite approach and starting with native wild lupines that are already adapted to grow here.
4: Because diversification is one of the most powerful risk management strategies
A mutual fund manager who had half the fund’s money in 3 businesses would be fired for negligence, but that’s exactly where the entire world has ended up with our food system. More than half the calories consumed by humans on this planet from from wheat, rice, or maize (corn).
Climate change is complex, even the most sophisticated projections have margins of error. We don’t know what the world will look like in a hundred years, but we do know it will change. For centuries, western leaders have foolishly believed that it was possible to dominate and reshape nature. In fact, the “failure” to do so is one of the often-repeated justifications for the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans and indigenous people everywhere. But natural systems are far more complex than colonizers realized. We see that first hand in California as salmon face extinction, aquifers collapse, and forests burn while 80% of our water is used to irrigate non-native crops that are not adapted to grow here.
At the same time, many California-native species have adapted to thrive where existing domesticated crops cannot, and have evolved robust heat, drought and salt tolerance mechanisms not found or less effective in conventional crops. As the climate changes, these adaptations can play a critical role.
Everywhere humans are, there are local native species that fed their ancestors for millennia. Our radical idea was simple – improve what already exists and is locally adapted. Instead of turning the world into one vast monoculture, we wanted a resilient radically diversified web of local foods, each adapted to local climates and with a wealth of internal genetic diversity that allows them to continue thriving even as the world changes.
5. There’s still an opportunity here!
Manzanita Cooperative was not the only good initiative Donald Trump killed when he took a wrecking ball to American science funding, but the idea doesn’t have to die with our company.
The process of finding locally native and appropriate foods where you are and planting them is one that any farmer or local seed producer can act upon. If you have oak trees on your property, you can learn to process their nuts the same way hominids (not just modern humans) all over the Northern Hemisphere have for more than 700,000 years. When Elizabeth White set out to domesticate the blueberry, she did it on her own farm.
For Universities and researchers with access to more sophisticated equipment and greater resources, wild cousins and analogues of domesticated crops can be a treasure trove of biodiversity and resilience.
The world desperately needs solutions. This is a good one. I hope others will carry on what we started.
This article was adapted from a post I originally wrote for the Manzanita Cooperative blog and amended to include perspectives on the opportunity going forward after Manzanita was forced to shut down.