Anthony Leddin's little idea to start a volunteer aid organisation has grown into something much bigger and has the potential to change the lives of millions across the world. KATRINA LOVELL reports.
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He describes himself as the Indiana Jones of the plant breeding world (minus Harrison Ford’s trademark hat).
But in true Indiana Jones style, Yambuk’s Anthony Leddin’s sense of adventure has taken him all over the world in search of treasures of a different kind.
His passion for plants, seeds and a desire to feed the world has now captured the attention of pharmaceutical giant Bayer who has just announced it will sponsor Mr Leddin’s volunteer organisation Plant Breeders Without Borders in a deal worth millions.
Bayer will fund trials in eight countries over three years with the aim of improving the plight of smallholder farmers through breeding more sustainable and underutilised crops.
Mr Leddin’s came up with the idea of Plant Breeders Without Borders when he was studying his masters at university about 15 years ago.
After growing up on a dairy farm at Yambuk, Mr Leddin always thought he would study to be a vet but ended up in agriculture as a plant breeder. “I’m just lucky I found something that I’m passionate about and it’s the mystery of life I suppose, finding what you were made to be here for,” he said.
While at a conference in Germany in 2003, Mr Leddin met a lot of plant breeders on the verge of retirement and, knowing that few in his uni class were interested in it, he realised all that knowledge would soon be lost.
In Australia alone, the number of plant breeders has shrunk by two thirds over 20 years. So Mr Leddin came up with concept of Plant Breeders Without Borders, an idea that marries his two passions: plant breeding and overseas aid development work.
“People know how Doctors Without Borders works by doctors volunteering their time on different projects and this concept is exactly the same,” he said.
“When I first thought of being a plant breeder I wanted to be the Indiana Jones of the plant breeding world and go out there and collect wild seeds, and I got the opportunity to do that. I went to Israel and Spain and collected seeds of the species that I work in.”
Some of plant trials he has run on his Yambuk property have come from seeds he’s collected from overseas, including the battlefields of Gallipoli.
“All the plants that I work with originally have their centre of evolution in and around Syria,” Mr Leddin said.
Mr Leddin’s volunteer work has taken him to many locations off the well-worn tourist trail, from India and Vietnam to Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Civil war and conflict have prevented him visiting other countries to collect seeds.
Mr Leddin said food was very closely related to security around the world.
He said each day 800 million people go hungry, 170 million of them children under five.
The effects of hunger on children were the most obvious during his trips to East Timor and Samoa, where he volunteered for a year as a teacher after university.
He said by 2050, the world’s population was expected to hit nine billion and to meet that growing demand, food production needs to increase by 70 per cent.
“That’s massive,” he said. “Without plant breeders it would be pretty hard to do. I’m afraid for our future, that if we don’t use some of these things we won’t meet those challenges.
“I’ve had such a lucky life living in Australia and now it’s time to give that back to others that don’t have the opportunities that we have.”
Mr Leddin’s vision is proof that from little things, big things do grow.
“I originally thought we needed to get more plant breeders but now it’s growing into something even bigger that Bayer has an interest in, and that’s smallholder farmers and getting them to be able to grow their own varieties that they produce,” he said.
Following the recent merger with Monsanto, Bayer was looking to support sustainability initiatives and Mr Leddin said Plant Breeders Without Borders would be one of their leading projects.
“They’ve committed to having eight projects over the next three years to start rolling out some of the volunteer initiatives,” he said.
The projects would be managed by Crops of the Future in Malaysia, focusing on eight different plant species in eight countries, three of which will go on to become full-scale breeding programs.
“We can teach them how to do the plant breeding and develop their own varieties,” he said.
“We’re trying to bring back diversification into their farm systems so they know they can make money out of these smaller crops.
“It might even develop into a fair trade-type model where Bayer’s interested in trying to get them to start marketing into Europe their specially developed varieties of these different species.”
Following a meeting at the German headquarters of Bayer last year, the company has jumped on board the idea after seeing the success of two trials run by Plant Breeders Without Borders in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
In 2015, Mr Leddin was sponsored by the Crawford Fund to worked on a project in Ethiopia teaching farmers how to create plants that were more suitable to feed to dairy farm animals.
In Indonesia, Plant Breeders Without Borders in collaboration with Bogor Agricultural University helped create a bambara groundnut, which is similar to a peanut, that was less reliant on fertiliser and had a shorter season.
The projects focuses on conventional breeding techniques done out in the field, as opposed to genetically modified plants which was done in a laboratory.
“It’s just a method where you cross two plants, which would have occurred naturally anyway, but you’re selecting which ones to cross and then you evaluate their progeny,” Mr Leddin said.
“Basically every food that we eat has been developed into a variety. It’s not the original wild material that was thousands of years ago that the dawn of civilisation started working with.
“Our goal is that anything that you develop is going to be double the yield of the previous material they were working with. It gives them a lot more diversity rather than just working with one crop.”
The bigger picture is to bring 250 million people out of hunger and poverty by working with some of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers.
“Without Bayer it wouldn’t happen,” Mr Leddin said.
“We’re both there for the smallholder farmers so they improve their livelihoods. In developing countries it’s not about giving them a handout, it’s giving them a hand up.”
Mr Leddin said the project might mean some of the underutilised crops become more mainstream because at the moment 75 per cent of our calorie intake was supplied by four main crops – wheat, rice, corn and soy.
“We heavily rely on crops that aren’t incredibly climate change resilient. We need to create more diversity,” he said.
Mr Leddin, who works as a forage breeder for Valley Seeds, said he had also become the first person to harvest wattle seeds on a large scale.
He sells the seeds from the 5000 wattle trees he planted on his property to restaurants and gourmet food businesses for use in products such as beer and icecream.
He is also teaming up with an Australian company in a bid to attract government funding to do more research on the health benefits of bush foods.
Mr Leddin said that while wattleseed was an underutilised species in Australia, growing international interest meant it had the potential to become the next macadamia.