Failure™ Magazine

The Viking in the Wheat Field

Bent Skovmand’s struggle to preserve the world’s harvest.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Science & Technology

Who was Bent Skovmand?
He was a wheat breeder—an expert on wheat. He came from Denmark and went to work with the late [Nobel Peace Prize-winning agriculturalist] Norman Borlaug developing improved varieties of wheat. Over time he realized the importance of preserving all the varieties and relatives and ancient progenitors of wheat, and how important these were to breeders trying to improve the crop, fight off disease, and meet the challenges of global warming. If you were looking for a new variety to fight drought or resist some horrible plague, you would go to Skovman and his seed bank and look for genes to put into your wheat.

A couple of years before Skovmand died, he went to work at the Nordic Gene Bank [now called Nordgen], and was one of the people involved in the building of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault [in an abandoned coal mine in Svalbard, an archipelago on the edge of the Arctic Circle], which contains a collection of the world’s crop seeds. It’s pretty depressing that the nations of the world have to save the seeds of their crops inside [a mine] because there is the possibility that agriculture will be destroyed.

A significant portion of your book is devoted to Ug99. What is Ug99?
It’s a new race of stem rust, discovered in Uganda and named in 1999. Stem rust is a terrible, intractable plague on wheat—a fungal disease spread by microscopic spores that blow on the wind—and Ug99 kills [almost] all the varieties of wheat. It started in Uganda, then moved into Kenya and decimated the wheat crop there. Then it jumped the Red Sea, reached Yemen, and started moving up the Arabian Peninsula. Now it’s in Iran, and scientists from countries that don’t speak to each other—like the United States and Iran—are working in cooperation, trying to come up with sources of resistance. Those few varieties that are resistant have to be developed, multiplied, shipped and distributed. It’s a huge danger, and there’s a big project at Cornell University—the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project—to develop resistance to rust in wheat.

Why haven’t we heard much about Ug99?
Why haven’t we heard much about the National Plant Germplasm system? Why haven’t we heard much about the International Agricultural Research Centers? Why haven’t we heard much about agriculture? It’s all one question. The New York Times has been heroic in trying to cover agriculture for an urban population that has no interest in it. There’s a group of writers—myself included—who have been trying to get people to understand how very important this is.

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