The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (19 page)

“I taught myself to hand-pollinate when I was eight years old,” he says to the group. “It’s easy.”

Why would a person want to know how to do this? Because hand-pollination allows a gardener to grow many varieties of squash and at the same time maintain the purity of their seeds by eliminating (or at least reducing) the chances of cross-pollination. Hand-pollination allows the gardener to become a very discerning bumblebee.

Cavagnaro begins with the basics. “What we call squash are not just yellow squash and zucchini. By squash we mean the entire genus of cucurbits.” (The cucurbit family includes many other plants, including watermelon, cucumbers, and luffa.)

He says squash are divided into four main species, plus two minor additions.

1.
Cucurbita pepo
has prickly stems and leaves, and its stems are five-sided: summers, crooknecks, scallops, zucchinis, spaghettis, acorns, cocozelles, Delicata, vegetable marrows, small gourds, jack-o’-lanterns, and many pie pumpkins.

2.
Cucurbita maxima
has the longest vines and spongy, hairy stems: bananas, buttercups, Hubbards, turbans, Delicious, Hokkaido, marrows.

3.
Cucurbita moschata
is tropical, with large, hairy leaves and a widely flaring stem next to the fruit: butternuts, cheese types, sweet potatoes, Kentucky Field, Tahitian, tromboncinos.

4.
Cucurbita mixta
has slightly lighter leaves than
C.
moscata
and the fruit’s stem is less truncated—it includes most cushaws.

A fifth species,
Cucurbita ficifolia
, is a white green-striped pumpkin known as Malabar gourd or chilacayote from Oaxaca’s mountains. Seeds of
Cucurbita foetidissima
, the sixth, known as buffalo gourd, are made into oil, but the fruit is not eaten.

Different varieties of squash within a species will cross-pollinate, meaning that a Hubbard will cross with a banana. That can be exciting if you’re a plant experimenter or breeder. But in order to keep varieties pure and save their seed, a gardener either must choose to grow one squash from each species or hand-pollinate.

The sun was climbing up the forehead of the sky. “Well, we better get moving if we want to catch the flowers,” Cavagnaro says. He looks around. “They definitely start to go limp at this hour of the day.”

We acolytes trail him to the squash patch, where Cavagnaro teaches us to hand-pollinate. I had to watch him to learn how. But you don’t have to. You can read and learn.

First, you plant some seeds of a squash you want to keep going. Then you watch the growing plant and note when it starts to put out flowers. Squash flowers are yellow. They are substantial, as flowers go—about four inches long and six inches in diameter, for the most part, at their zenith, about the size of a lily. There are two kinds of blossoms, female and male. The female flower has a small replica of the squash at one end. The male flower is plain.

The first bloom on a plant is usually not a female; squash put out a lot of male flowers before the first female opens. (Who knew that? Not me.) Exceptions can be prolific bush summer squash, Cavagnaro says, which may make a few female blossoms before any males appear; those won’t set fruit and can be picked with blossom intact and eaten young and tender. (Okay.) There’s a male or female blossom at every leaf node. Once the plant starts flowering, this is usually the lineup on a stem: male, male, male, female, male, male, male. (Cavagnaro is obviously not just book-smart about plants. He’s spent a lot of time paying attention in the garden.)

You go out and watch for the first female flower. You wait until it starts to turn yellow and looks as if it’s going to open imminently. This is important. On the female flower, the stigma is not receptive until she opens. Recognizing an imminent blossom is not easy at first. Over time you’ll figure out how a blossom looks the night before she opens.

On the night before the blossom should open, go out and tape the female flower shut, a chastity belt, and then tape shut a few male flowers, so that they can’t open. To ensure greater genetic diversity, choose male flowers from different plants of the same variety. You will be hand-pollinating the next morning.

The next morning you go back out, untape the flowers, and pollinate by brushing the anthers onto the stigma. Go early. Squash blossoms are done by noon. Watermelons, which also attend family reunions with the cucurbits and are pollinated in the same manner, open later. The flowers of cukes, another member, last one day.

Cavagnaro leads us to a
C.
maxima
. Sweet Meat squash is the variety, not a very exciting name. We crouch around the vines.

“Yesterday afternoon, around 5 p.m., I came out to the squash patch and located male and female blossoms,” Cavagnaro said. “I sealed them shut with masking tape.”

“I always open my males first,” he continues. “Those bees can get in and out in a jiffy.” He means that if you open the female, a bee can pollinate it with pollen from another variety of squash before you get the males opened. He picks a leaf like a surgeon and smooths it on the ground. Then he plucks three male flowers and lays them taped shut on the leaf. With each male flower, he carefully peels off the tape and tears off the hoop of petal. What’s left are three small yellow rods an inch or so long in a row on the leaf.

The female flower Cavagnaro leaves on the vine, of course. He untapes it and parts its petals tenderly, until the stigma is visible. Then, very gently, he brushes each anther across and around the stigma. “Some people use a paintbrush to do this,” he said. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. This is a gentle process.”

He uses three males for the one female. “This ensures some diversity, if there is any,” he says.

Once pollinated, he tapes closed the female flower all the way to its base. “Use masking tape, don’t get painting tape,” he says. “You need good, sticky, firm drafting tape.” Of course the tape damages the delicate petals, but it doesn’t matter because the flower will fall off when it sets fruit.

Last, Cavagnaro labels what he’s done. He ties a length of marking tape around the plant stem—loosely, so as not to constrict. On the tape is written the squash’s identification number and the date, then 3
♂
1
♀
, which is Greek for three males and one female blossom. The symbol reminds a young woman who is watching about something she’s heard—that the sign for female, a cross topped with a circle, means “rooted in earth.”

“If you don’t have masking tape,” Cavagnaro says, “you can use a male blossom to cover the pollinated female. Turn the female petals inward, then cover the whole thing with a sheet of male petal.” He demonstrates the process. Turning the female flower’s petals inward makes it look like an ice-cream cone rather than the bell of a trumpet. To create a limp sheet of petal to use as a roof, Cavagnaro picks a male blossom and tears off the calyx. Now it looks like a crinkly funnel. He slits the petal and opens it to make a small rectangle. He utilizes the opened petal to cover the female flower, a bit like a diaphragm. As the petal-wrap wilts in the sun, it will more tightly cling to the female flower, barring admission to insects.

“If a blossom fills with rain, it will be ruined,” Cavagnaro says now. “Try to get the first blossom of a plant pollinated before a rain.”

Cavagnaro moves to another set of taped blooms and begins the process anew. “There’s not a remote chance that all of these we’re pollinating today will set fruit. The first successful pollination on a plant will take. Then the others fall off.”

In fact, the odds of success with pollinating by hand increase by pollinating the first female flower and removing any fruit that chances to set afterward on subsequent female flowers. In some melon varieties, only a small fraction of pollinations set fruit. Sometimes you can pollinate a dozen female flowers before one sets. Sometime it’s much easier to isolate than hand-pollinate.

Then the pollinator waxes philosophic. “Squash plants are smarter than people,” Cavagnaro says. “They only take on one project at a time. The plant says, ‘I’ve got enough to do.’ If it’s a big squash, like a Hubbard, it may only make one fruit per vine. “The squash says, ‘I’ll make a helluva squash.’ Or it finishes one squash and then says, ‘Now I can make another.’ That’s the psychology of squash.”

ONE DAY IN 1998
, a letter carrier stuck an envelope in Percy and Louise Schmeiser’s mailbox. The return address was Monsanto.

The Schmeisers were not expecting mail from Monsanto, the multinational responsible for 90 percent of the world’s genetically modified seeds. They had never planted Monsanto seed, nor had any other dealings with the company.

Percy Schmeiser was a farmer, yes. Since 1947, he’d been growing canola on the Saskatchewan plains of Canada. But Percy Schmeiser was more than a canola farmer. He and his wife were seed developers, saving the best of their crop year to year, slowly breeding seed adapted to the Canadian plains and to the microclimate of their own thousand acres.

All of that ended with the surprise letter.

The letter stated that, following an investigation, Monsanto had good reason to believe that Schmeiser had planted Monsanto’s patented seed, a GM canola, without a license on 250 acres of land and that this violated Monsanto’s proprietary rights. To avoid legal action, Percy and his wife would have to pay the world’s largest producer of GM crops for use of their product. At $115 per acre, Schmeiser owed Monsanto $27,850. There were three additional dictates: Monsanto had the right to take samples from Schmeiser’s crop for the next three years in order to test for their canola; Schmeiser was forbidden from disclosing the terms and conditions of the agreement (if it could be called that) to any third party; and Monsanto, at its sole discretion, had the right to disclose the settlement terms to third parties.

Surely there had been a mistake. Schmeiser had never planted Monsanto canola. He saved and planted his own seed. But Monsanto had came along and tested some canola growing out by the road, and the canola contained their patented genes. The Schmeisers had been afflicted with something known as “genetic drift,” the billowing of seed-matter by wind from neighboring farms onto their own.

Percy Schmeiser explained this. Monsanto didn’t care. Its patented genetic material had been found on Schmeiser property and the Schmeisers should pay. Refusing to be coerced, Schmeiser said no, sorry, and the case went to trial. Meanwhile, Schmeiser turned around and sued Monsanto for $10 million for libel, trespass, and the contamination of his fields with Roundup-Ready canola. That lawsuit did not proceed through the courts.

In 2001, the Federal Court of Canada ruled in favor of Monsanto, determining that patent law supersedes the rights of farmers to save and grow seed and setting legal precedent. One of the key factors in the decision was that Schmeiser “knew or ought to have known” about the GM canola in his field. In other words, a corporation like Monsanto that cannot control how its gene is spread is not responsible for it—farmers are. If Monsanto plants were found on the Schmeiser’s farm, then the Schmeisers were guilty of patent infringement. By this time, costs in damages and legal fees were in the hundreds of thousands. Percy Schmeiser, a hapless farmer, had fallen victim to the strategy of multinationals to gain control of our seed supply. Farmers in the United States have faced similar legal battles, one against Indiana soybean farmer Vernon Bowman, in which Monsanto won a similar ruling.

Schmeiser didn’t back down. His appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal was heard in May of 2002 in Saskatchewan. The appellate court upheld the earlier ruling, so Schmeiser asked to put his case before the Supreme Court. In 2004, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that Monsanto’s patent was valid but that Schmeiser did not have to pay penalties to Monsanto, because the farmer did not profit from the GM canola.

I heard Percy Schmeiser tell his story in 2005 when he traveled to Vermont at the invitation of State Representative David Zuckerman—a young Progressive Party member, organic farmer, and chair of the House Agriculture Committee.

Percy Schmeiser was a soft-spoken, seventy-four-year-old, unassuming man. He wore glasses and his hair was thinning. He stood on a low stage in the concrete-floored social hall of First Congregational Church in Brattleboro, before a card table that held his notes and a plastic cup of water. He spoke of the tremendous stress his family had endured, the debt they had incurred, and the breakdown of their rural social fabric as neighbor farmers who stood up for the Schmeisers received the same Monsanto letter.

“The whole issue for Monsanto is contamination,” said Schmeiser. “It’s like secondhand smoke.” He adjusted the sweater he wore over a collared shirt. “Contaminate and people don’t have a choice.”

“The right of farmers to use seeds from year to year should never be taken away,” he said, in a clipped Canadian brogue. “Some of the best wheat we have in Canada is developed by farmers, not companies.”