THE Scientific Research Council (SRC) has broken away from the reliance of seeds and cuttings to reproduce plants using the science method of tissue culture.

As a way to promote backyard farming, the SRC has used this modern farming method to generate planting materials to be sold.

“Tissue culture is just a method through which you can produce or multiply a lot of planting material in a single step,” explained Dr Charah Watson, executive director of the SRC, in an interview with the Jamaica Observer.

The process involves taking any part of any plant and essentially cloning that plant, multiplying it and getting many from a few plants, using very small pieces of a plant.

“For example, you have a banana tree in your backyard that gives you the softest green banana you’ve ever eaten, and you want to give that to your entire family, all one thousand of you. How do you multiply that one banana tree into a thousand? Do you have to wait until you have a thousand suckers? Do you know how long that will take?” she asked rhetorically, emphasising the convenience of the process. “You can take a part of the plant, a leaf, a part of the stem, and you can cut that up into a thousand pieces, and each of those small pieces will generate a new plant.”

The SRC has been responsible for supporting the agro-productive sector and agriculture in several ways and is more known for value addition to translating produce into value-added products. It is also utilising different technologies to support agriculture, providing clean planting materials, scaling up, and giving mass production to engage different farming communities, one of which is tissue culture. It’s a soil-less mechanism through which you can replicate more plantlets. The SRC has been promoting backyard farming for years and has supported it through several initiatives. Now the SRC is reminding the public that they can get plants at a low cost at the SRC, some of which were developed through tissue culture.

Watson acknowledges that many might be cautious, mainly due to a lack of understanding, as many may be more familiar with cutting a bud and subplanting, and tissue culture might seem intimidating. The SRC also recognises that it will be challenging to divert people from the traditional way.

“New doesn’t always mean better, but in this case, fortunately, that’s the case,” she said encouragingly.

According to Watson, the process makes the plant more resilient, and once purchased, it’s ready to be transplanted or placed wherever its end home will be.

“The plants that you’ll get from the SRC that would have been initiated through tissue culture go through a process of acclimatisation where they are removed from the lab and placed in our shade house, into an environment where they can get more acclimatised to the outdoor environment. That process is called hardening. The next step is to go right into the field or your backyard or the pot that you’re going to plant it in,” she explained to the Business Observer.

Through backyard farming, she says, in the context of the quality of food available, you will be more aware of exactly what you are putting into your body and have greater control over your health, feeling a gratifying sense to reach into your own yard to find a snack or a whole meal.

“It’s important that you are able to know what it is that you are consuming and to have a role in that,” said Watson.

Watson, who also participates in backyard farming with her pineapples in a relatively small space, stressed that a large space is not necessarily needed to start, dispelling the common misconception that people will need a large space.

“I plant some of my pineapples in pots, and those are growing as well as the ones that are growing alongside the lawn as hedges in my front yard,” she shared.

For others, she suggested growing herbs, using the home, balcony, and kitchen window, utilising the space and even hydroponics to grow various food materials. She encourages seeking information to guide the process to ensure the plants can thrive, as different plants have different needs. In recognising not everyone is plant-savvy, Watson says the SRC does offer guidance on how to care for the plants. They also have an ongoing initiative providing plant materials for protecting Jamaica’s food security and ensuring Jamaica has high-quality food to sustain it.

For other plants outside of tissue culture, like Irish potatoes, a different technology is used called the total submersion system, submerging material in a liquid medium filled with nutrients that encourage the material to produce seeds which can then be planted. Currently, the SRC has a gene bank with over 100 different varieties of planting materials as part of its role in ensuring resilience. Its gene bank is to reserve key strains of planting materials that are of importance to Jamaica, known as priority crops, such as yam, pineapples, banana, plantain, dasheen, and ginger.

“The ones that we choose to multiply to make available for sale would be the more common of typical food crops or ornamental plants that people have a keen interest in,” she says.

She also sought to erase misbeliefs about the plant materials produced through tissue culture: the belief that once science or technology is involved, people tend to think it’s unnatural or genetically modified, she stressed.

“There’s nothing unnatural, there is nothing artificial about it; it is cutting up that plant and giving it all the nutrients that it needs to encourage it to generate a root, stem, and generate a new plant. Tissue culture is as natural as a seed growing,” Watson reiterated. “When you hear tissue culture and technology, people might be thinking, ‘Wow, you put a lot of science in that so it might be expensive!’. Not the case at all,” she clarified.

The plants, some of which are grown through tissue culture, are affordable, ranging from $100 to $250. Last year, 27,000 plant materials were sold through contract and direct sales, and this year they are aiming to sell their current inventory of 25,000 plant materials within the next three months. Though an ambitious goal, the main reason is to facilitate renovations of its shade house for its plants.

“It’s a temporary structure which has been battered by environmental conditions, heavy rains, heavy winds, so we’re now in the procurement to build out that shade house, make it bigger,” Watson explained.

The expansion will facilitate the SRC to increase its capacity to 60,000 to meet the demands of larger farmers. To fill the gap of lack of understanding and to encourage more small farmers or producers to participate in tissue culture, workshops are being held by the SRC to teach tissue culture. Its last workshop was held on Monday, but it’s held every financial year for those interested in learning tissue culture.

With the SRC’s primary focus on ensuring food security, Watson disclosed ongoing scientific research aimed at revitalising sweet yams, currently facing scarcity. The research involves producing planting materials that can withstand the diseases affecting them. Similarly, ginger is grappling with disease challenges, prompting research to develop materials either resistant or tolerant to these issues, especially given its status as a high-value crop.

“ The development is true collaborative research with the International Atomic Energy Agency, what we are trying to do is to use what would happen naturally in nature but over a very long time to speed that up by using low-dose irradiation to speed up those natural mutations to render the plants tolerant or resistant to the disease that is affecting them,” Watson revealed.