Sourcing Rare Commercial Pea Varieties?

[Tarruvi]

I was looking into buying a few varieties, but the states have made it a headache to order anything related to seeds outside the US. I was fortunate enough to have bought some varieties like "Black Eyed Susan", "Crown Pea", and "Swedish Red" a year or so ago before... everything. (Note: I bought these seeds from Annapolis Seeds in Canada.)

At the moment, I'm trying to source more varieties like these with visually distinct characteristics. Foremost among them being "Argenteum", a variety that has silver leaves. Every search brings me to vendors that are in Canada, with one vendor in the US, Seed Savers Exchange having previously sold them but no longer have them in stock.

One more wrench in my goal to obtain these seeds is GRIN, and how wishy-washy it is to get anything from them. One time I was lucky enough to get an accession, all other requests with the same plans laid out were rejected. So, I can confidently write them off as a source.

That brings me to the name of this topic, where can I find something like "Argenteum" in the US?

[Carol Deppe]

What is the problem getting seed from the Grin system?

If the Grin system is cutting farmer-breeders or other independent plant breeders or citizen researchers off from access to its collections, that is something OSSI would want to know and try to do something about. Tell me about it.

Carol

Carol Deppe PhD, Chair
Board of Directors,
OSSI

[William Schlegel]

The Going to Seed group is starting to aggregate germplasm requests. I think that is a good idea- OSSI could do the same thing, or join with Going to Seed in a larger effort. Though international issues are more complex.

[Tarruvi]

What is the problem getting seed from the Grin system?

If the Grin system is cutting farmer-breeders or other independent plant breeders or citizen researchers off from access to its collections, that is something OSSI would want to know and try to do something about. Tell me about it.

In the past few years I made a few requests on accessions, some pea strains with traits I wanted to integrate within my breeding projects. On the GRIN website, they do have a notification saying something along the lines of rejecting requests if there is a conflict of interest with commercial enterprises, or the germplasm that is requested can be bought on the market. I'm not a fan of that former part about competing with commercial enterprises, considering the whole point of GRIN is to accrue and distribute genetically diverse materials. And on the last part, I made sure to request accessions I haven't seen available in any seed catalogues.

I made an outline of using the germplasm in breeding projects I'm currently working on, and sharing the results with peers and the public. That statement worked once, all other and similar statements were rejected. But even then, I think the acception had to do with the timing. Why I say that, is because a year or so ago is when the USDA had that incident with the US government threatening jobs. Not long after that, is when my second and only request to get approved was sent to me.

I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of GRIN or the USDA, so I can't say for certain if my requests were inappropriate uses or not. It all is a big headache, and why I'd rather buy a variety from someone on the opposite side of the earth than have to deal with their system.

[reed]

I haven't gotten anything from them for a while. The first time I asked for a specific corn variety for a specific trait it carried and explained what I hoped to do with it. They asked me to document and photograph and to send them a report, which I did. Next time they just sent the seeds with no follow up requests, but I sent them a report each time. That was for some corn. I've been told that a lot is up to whoever is in charge of the species in question, the corn people, at the time, were easy to work with. 

[Carol Deppe]

The person in charge of the species at the specific branch of the germplasm repository does matter. I got nearly all the renaining stock of three rare native American corns from the head of the corn operation, about a pound of each, in exchange for having them grown in isolated valleys in the Oregon Coastal Mountains and returning five pounds of each. The corns in the depository had to be maintained by bagging and hand pollination, and those varieties didn't work well with that.

In another case, I called Rich Hannan, who was in charge of legumes, to ask for some nunas, P. vulgaris popbeans. He said "Why is everyone interested in vulgaris popbeans, which don't grow here, and nobody is interested in popping chickpeas, which do? The university guys just tell me 'What I'vd got a grant for is P. vulgaris."I don't have a grant for anything", I said. "Tell me about popping chickpeas."  So he did. He knew there were popping varieties of chickpeas because someone from the middle east told him. but didn't know what accessions they were. The result was he sent me all the nunas plus a couple dozen chickpea accessions. I used the nunas to work out how to evaluate the popping characteristic with just a few seeds, a custard cup, and a microwave oven.Then a box with four hundred accessions of chickpeas and a note from Rich Hannan showed up at my front door. Rich had sent me one of the four copies of the core collection of chickpeas.

I figured out which ones popped. One of them grew nicely in Oregon but had maturity ranging from early summer to too late to mature, plant forms very variable, and very susceptible  but variable to all the legume viruses we had. After a decade of simple selection I had nice uniform bushes that were completely resistant to the viruses. I named my new variety Hannan Popbean.
After a few more years, I started getting phone calls from academic vulgaris breeders who had F6es from crosses
they thought should give Northern adapted vulgaris popbeans, but didn't know how to tell which were popbeans. The phone calls would start with "Rich Hannan tells me you are the national expert on popping grain legumes...." So I would pass on my simple method of identifying popbeans.

A bit after that, I observed to Hannan,  mournfully, that "now that that there are two or three other people working on them, I am probably not any longer the national expert on popping grain legumes." "That's probably right," he said. "But you are still the national expert on popping chickpeas."
 

[Carol Deppe]

It is legitimate for the GRIN system to refuse requests for commonly available varieties you could easily buy from a USA seed company. They don't have enough funding to provide free seed for everyone. However, they are supposed to be willing to send seed that isn't readily available to researchers.

Ideally we want an approach that allows you to just order seed when you want, without going through some organization.

Let's try this.

Send your order in. Say "These are rare materials that are not available from commercial seed companies. I am a member in good standing of Open Source Seed Initiative's Open Source Plant Breeding Forum (give link). I need the germplasm in my plant breeding work."

Let me know what happens in the OSSI section of this forum. (Just using the word 'germplasm' may be enough to convince them you are a plant breeder.) If that doesn't work I'll phone the legume curator and see if I can sort things out.
Carol

[Tarruvi]

Chickpeas that can be popped sound super cool, thanks for sharing your experiences. I'll try again with GRIN, maybe it'll go differently.