Georgia has been a place of social struggle for two centuries since its annexation by the Russian empire in 1801. Although the state declared independence in 1918, during the Russian revolution, the Soviet Union moved in after three years. In fact, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was born in the Georgian city of Gori. But he didn’t do the country any favors, executing thousands of Georgian nationalists. A statue of the dreaded dictator still dominates the city center.
Georgia finally became independent after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Independence didn’t ease the country’s situation. Today it has a struggling economy and is still troubled with groups that want independence from the central government.
A view of the small village of Chobisjhevi, Georgia, south of Borjomi. Last summer scientists Fred Muehlbauer and Walter Kaiser hunted for wild pea and lentil plants in the mountains above the community.
Bordered by Turkey and Armenia over mountains to the south, the Black Sea to the west, Russia over mountains to the north, and Azerbaijan to the east, Georgia is a place of mountains and valleys where many of our modern cereal and legume crops were domesticated as long as 10,000 years ago. This region is rife with the wild ancestors of barley, wheat, peas, lentils, and chickpeas, all of great interest to plant scientists for their potential for providing genetic material that could improve their cultivated cousins. In many cases these ancestors have genetic traits, like physical structure and disease resistance, that are lacking in our conventional crops. Crossing the wild species with our domestic plants could transfer those characteristics to our field crops and possibly increase yield or cut down on chemical inputs.
However, seed material from the Caucasus region has been missing from the U.S. Plant Germplasm Collection and has been unavailable for crop improvement research projects like ours. Walt and I had long wanted to visit Georgia to rectify that, but until recently, the country’s political problems had made it nearly impossible to travel there to collect plants for use in our research.
