Ripe Opportunity in Our Back Yard
As Charles Dudley Warner put it more than 120 years ago in “My Summer in a Garden”: “To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life--this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.”
So why shouldn’t a bit of biotechnology help amplify that satisfaction? By twiddling with their DNA, those grassy lawns could be greener and more drought-resistant. Beautiful flowers might blossom a little more brightly and durably. Those back yard beefsteak tomatoes might ripen a bit more succulently. So, when will biotechnology move from agriculture into horticulture?
“The answer is never ,” insists Roger H. Salquist, chairman of Calgene, the Davis-based agricultural biotechnology pioneer that engineered the world’s first rot-resistant tomato. “It’s too difficult to make any money out of the consumer market, and the engineering process is too expensive.”
Salquist asserts that re-engineering plants can be so costly and difficult that “of all the fruits and vegetables to choose from, we didn’t think any were worth doing but tomatoes at this time.” Forget the garden market, he says. “I don’t see any plant that would be worth it.”
Actually, this may be an example of an industry leader missing a new market opportunity. “I’m a little surprised that someone would say that biotech wouldn’t find its way into horticulture,” says Bruce Butterfield, research director for the National Gardening Assn., “because people have the same problems in their back yard that farmers have in the field. . . . It wouldn’t surprise me to see biotech in the seeds that people use at home.”
Retail sales in the lawn and gardening market topped $20 billion last year, a 27% increase over 1989’s $16.3-billion level. As plant biotechnology becomes cheaper and more diffuse, market opportunities will grow like crabgrass.
“Home gardening will be affected by the advancements that are now occurring in plant technologies,” says George Ball, chairman of the Burpee seed company. “There’s been an explosion of interest in the application of plant biotechnologies. . . . We’re now beginning to see some breakthroughs.”
Ball, whose company is already doing biotech research, points out that cross-breeding plants has always been an intimate part of horticultural history. Using genetic engineering “to aid in accelerating traditional (plant breeding) processes or short-cutting obstacles,” he says, isn’t impossible--it’s inevitable. By the end of the decade, thumbs will be a little greener thanks to seeds tweaked with biotechnological design.
“I think you’re going to see trees that are bred to resist pollution and survive hostile cityscapes,” the NGA’s Butterfield says. “You’re going to see plants that don’t require as much fertilizer or maintenance.
“Think of Southern California with all of its water restrictions; it’s a desert environment,” he notes. But what if grasses could be engineered to stay greener longer? What if the genes that controlled the thirst for water were fine-tuned in ways that made a drizzle the equivalent of a downpour?
For all the excitement about xerascaping--landscaping with desert flora--for drought conditions, it’s foolish to believe that technology won’t be used to help plants adapt to hostile environments. Burpee’s Ball observes that “cold tolerance is a very desirable goal” and speculates that tropical plants might be designed to be more comfortable and robust in cooler climes.
Naturally, there are all kinds of plants that could be engineered to create new markets. NASA studies show that some plants can help remove noxious pollutants from the air: an enhanced version might fit well in that Los Angeles living room. Why not a plant engineered with the natural toxins that repel household insects? Perhaps a Venus Flytrap will be genetically rejiggered to gobble up those nasty urban cockroaches. We will see a generation of plants that are as functional as they are aesthetic.
“Biotech should come to the garden if it is thoughtfully managed,” asserts Michael Pollan, author of “Second Nature,” a popular book about cultivating a garden. “It’s not about the ability of a laser beam to shoot a gene into a plant; it’s where you aim it and what you do with it. . . . I don’t automatically assume that this is an evil technology.” Indeed, he acknowledges that “many of the great plants in my garden were created by human design.”
Nevertheless, Pollan stresses that gardening, unlike agriculture, isn’t about boosting yield per acre. It’s about having a dialogue with nature.
Bringing biotech to the garden will inevitably change our sense of what’s “natural” and what’s not. If genetic manipulation will bring new aesthetics, functionality and interactions into our back yards and window boxes, there’s no question that horticulture will become a field of mass-market dreams.
