The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (20 page)

The previous year, 2004, Schmeiser took a total of 161 flights in an effort to call attention to the hazards of GM seeds. “We’re going to go down fighting for the rights of farmers,” he said. “We don’t want to leave a legacy of our land and our food full of toxins.”

We can blame the wind. It steals pollen from Monsanto’s flowers and brings it over into our fields. Then Monsanto comes after us, as if we were thieves, because it has found its patented genetic material among our crops. We didn’t ask for the monster’s babies to crawl into our arms.

Genetic drift is a handy lever to force farmers to use a corporation’s seeds. And when it decides to whip a farmer into shape, into lining up to buy corporate seeds, it commences with threat. Then lawsuit. Out-of-court settlement. Or court.

By 2005, Monsanto had filed ninety lawsuits against U.S. farmers for patent infringement, meaning GM genes found in the fields of farmers that had not paid for the right, and Monsanto had been awarded over $15 million. I’ll tell you here and now: We have a screwed-up justice system. These lawsuits and seeds are nothing less than corporate extortion of American farmers, said Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for
Food Safety, as reported in the
Seed Savers Summer Edition 2005
.

Not only is the wind responsible for its invisible passenger, GM pollen, but so are the digestive tracts of birds and animals, our own clothing and shoes that attract seeds in crevices and hems, and the cheeks of mice and squirrels. All these spread genetic pollution. We can blame food aid too; somehow Oaxaca, hotspot for maize diversity, became contaminated with GM corn—despite Mexico’s ban on it. By its very nature, pollen travels, and halting the advance of pollen from GM seed is impossible.

Imagine the scenario of transgenic contamination combined with the terminator gene. If you’ve never heard of a terminator gene, let me explain it. To prevent gardeners and farmers from growing out new patented varieties, scientists developed a method of rendering these seeds infertile, further busting up what has been for at least twelve thousand years a self-sustaining food supply.

Let’s say you grow a zucchini. It’s genetically engineered to taste like cotton candy. Every mother in the world rejoices because her kid is going to love this stuff. They go crazy for cotton-candy zucchini. So Mama Cuckoo, let’s call her, saves the seed so she can plant a few hills of zucchini in the backyard. They don’t come up. She plants more. Those don’t germinate either! Little does she know, last year’s plant contained a gene that causes the very seed she’s trying to plant to abort itself, a terminator gene. She’s trying to plant dead seeds. The only way Mama Cuckoo can serve more of the high-class zucchini her child raves about is a) to buy it from the grocer or b) to hurry to the hardware store and purchase some of the corporate seed. Either method involves a purchase. However, if Mama Cuckoo grew open-pollinated seed, she would be able to produce zucchini that tastes and looks and acts like zucchini. She could save their seed, plant the seed, and grow more zucchini—round and round, ring-around-the-rosy, without expenditure. Possibilities for her include Black Beauty, a variety found in seed catalogs from the 1930s; Constata Romanesca, a Roman ribbed variety; Mogango Liso, a round Brazilian one. She could grow Grey, Golden Bush, White Volunteer.

Use of a suicide gene begs a question: If hybrids don’t necessarily grow true, why did companies need terminator genes? Again I turned to my pal Tom Stearns of High Mowing Organic Seeds for the answer.

“Many of the genetically engineered crops are not hybrids,” he said. “They’re open-pollinated. Soybeans, for example. There are millions of acres, billions of dollars. The terminator gene would prevent soybean farmers from saving their GM seeds.”

At any rate, food activists decried the suicide gene. In 1999 the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funneled tens of millions into biotechnology research, asked Monsanto’s board of directors to renounce it. In 1999, Monsanto chairman Robert Shapiro released a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation “making clear our commitment not to commercialize gene protection systems that render seed sterile.” So Terminator was terminated, or at least we hope so. Geri Guidetti of The Ark Institute blogged in 2000 that over thirty terminator-type technology
patents have been awarded and are owned by giant gene companies.

Schmeiser visited Vermont at a perfect time. The Farmer Protection Act, a state bill addressing farmers’ property rights concerning seed, had just passed the Senate and had moved to the House. It had three tenets:

1. Seed companies wouldn’t be able to sue Vermont farmers for genetic drift.

2. In the event a Vermont farmer was sued, the court case would take place in the state. (Monsanto had been forcing farmers to trek to their headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, for court cases, at great expense.)

3. Most important, the person who owned the seed would bear the consequence of that seed. In Vermont at least, Monsanto would be responsible for genetic drift.

The Vermont legislature passed the Farmer Protection Act, but it was subsequently vetoed by the Republican governor at the time, Jim Douglas. However, many other states and municipalities also began taking local charge of GMO (genetically modified organism) contamination and also creating GM-free zones. In 2004, Mendicino County, California, inaugurated a ban on the propagation of GM crops and animals. Montville, Maine, banned GM cultivation in 2008. The movement gained so much traction that Monsanto began convincing states to pass preemptive legislation that prohibits such bans.

In 2005, the Schmeisers sent Monsanto a bill for $660 to sweep up more genetic contamination they had discovered. In 2008, Monsanto settled out of court and paid the costs of cleaning up the contaminated field.

The issue is bigger than the property rights of farmers. Genetic meddling is humans playing God, and GM technology was forced on America without us taking the time to fully understand its ramifications. For now, in this country, GM foods are among us, governed by companies that appear to be above the law.

Remember Percy Schmeiser. Put out of business by a little pollen floating on the wind, he lost almost fifty years of his farm’s legacy. “There’s no such thing as coexistence,” I heard him say. “The GM gene is the dominant one. If you introduce GMs, there is no turning back.”

We have not only introduced GMs, we have fallen heedlessly and haplessly into their traps. Are we going to be able to save the diversity of food? In this David versus Goliath battle, do the bad guys win?

TOMATO MAN HAS A BIG GARDEN
in a filing cabinet. He’s got a little garden in the yard. He grows only tomatoes in his garden. He’s got yellows and reds, oranges and streakeds. He’s got stuffers and dryers, plums and cherries, currants and purples, grapes and pastes.

The garden in the filing cabinet is in little brown manila packets, tucked in file folders, everything labeled. It is tidy and well-organized, probably because Tomato Man is Dr. Charles Case, professor of sociology at Augusta State College, who has one foot behind a desk and the other behind a rototiller. In and out of the lecture hall, Dr. Case is a big believer in trimming the suckers. He even grades his tomatoes, and sometimes they flunk.

Although he should be expecting us, Dr. Case is not home when Raven and I arrive at a small, vinyl-sided house on one lot of land near Augusta, Georgia, 115 miles from our home. Beyond are first-growth woods. Soon Dr. Case pulls up. We’re standing beside the real garden, looking. He says he’s been to the store for Sevin dust, a chemical insecticide. His gardener, whom I’ll call Jolene, is with him. This is her day to work.

“I bet you’re amazed at how small this is,” says Dr. Case. “When you wrote that you wanted to come see my ‘operation,’ I snickered. I don’t have an operation.” His blue T-shirt says
AUGUSTA STATE STUDY ABROAD
. On his face is a significant amount of gray stubble. He wears a Carhartt hat.

I read about Dr. Case in the
Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook
, where he was offering 312 varieties of open-pollinated heirloom tomatoes. The purpose of my visit is to see how he grows his tomatoes and get advice on which varieties to plant. The previous season I tested 22 open-source varieties of tomatoes in my hot, humid south Georgia garden. With the exception of cherry tomatoes, we did not harvest one fruit, mostly because of diseases—Southern blight and wilt—which are destroying our ability to grow our sweetheart vegetable.

“Since 1985, I have grown more than one thousand varieties of heirloom tomatoes,” says Dr. Case. “Over three hundred of these have been highly successful. Well, let me show you around.”

The operation is three different plots—one in the front yard, two in the back, the largest about thirty by sixty feet. One garden is shaded. Each tomato plant is from 2.5–5 feet tall, staked to a 5-foot-tall PVC pipe. The ground is completely weed-free, the bare dirt sandy and gray.

“I was pure organic,” says Dr. Case. He must know by the way I look that I’m antichemical. “I tried various stuff. Texas Pete bug spray, soap. None of it worked worth a damn. So I’ve resorted to insecticides. We don’t use herbicides. The weed control is rototilling and hand-weeding. And we use manure from the horses next door.”

The plots are fenced to keep out deer, posts of PVC pipe strung with twine. Tied to the twine is a bunch of trash—large plastic bags, folded rectangles of tinfoil, and Styrofoam plates drawn with faces. Jolene—less than five feet tall, with plastic clogs on her feet—points out that each face is different.

“That’s what you call a bored professor,” she says. She is about fifty. Dr. Case looks to be in his late sixties.

“I know. I’ve got the summer off,” he replies. He is trying hard to relax.

“So you have over 300 varieties of tomatoes here?” I ask.

“The secret to our 312 varieties is that we grow just a quarter of the collection, 80 varieties, each year. I’ve found that four-year-old seeds germinate about as well as new seeds.”

“We grow four plants of each variety every fourth year,” Dr. Case says. “Since they are self-pollinating, we’re not so worried about gene pools.”
(He refers to the need to grow a minimum number of plants in order to
maintain genetic diversity.) “Cross-pollination happens anyway from time
to time. They claim bees will even force a blossom open to get at it.”

Each plant is marked with a name; labels are plastic detergent bottles cut in squares, lettered with enamel paint that comes in a marker. One variety is already ripening. It is Red Alert. “This one is about fifty-five days,” says Dr. Case. “For the first week that’s your pride and joy.” We walk along verdant rows, reading labels:
GOLDEN QUEEN, BLACK MOUNTAIN PINK, COUSIN ROY’S STUFFING TOMATO, JITOMATE BULITO.

Either Jolene or Dr. Case has a story about each. Phyra has hundreds of cherry tomatoes. Napoli is a prolific paste. Liberty Bell is a stuffer. Reisentraube, “giant bunch of grapes” in German, is a drying tomato. Little Pink is a great tomato but it’s yellow, not pink, although it blushes slightly.

The professor gives us a quick lesson on the two growth habits of tomatoes, determinate and indeterminate. “Determinate stems end with fruit and blooms,” he says. “The fruits all ripen at once and then the plant dies. That’s their strategy. They get done in a big hurry and die. At least that’s the way they work for me here.” He looks around and moves to a plant nearby. “Tip Top slicer, this is a prototypical determinate. And Wayahead here is perfect example of determinate too. Indeterminate stems end with shoots. They sprawl and tend to keep setting fruit until frost.”

Not to be confusing, but it turns out that tomatoes are also delineated by the kind of leaf they have. Most tomatoes, like Eva Purple Ball and thousands of others, have the leaves we associate with tomatoes, flat and serrated. But others, like Prudens Purple, have foliage that closely resembles their cousins the potatoes—darker green, thicker, and somewhat puckered. Dr. Case tells me that potato-leafs have to be grown in isolation, because they will cross with regular-leaf tomatoes. They need one hundred feet between varieties to not cross. So he grows one potato-leaf variety per year. His darling is Brandywine.

“I’ve tried over one thousand varieties. I only keep the best,” the professor is repeating. “It’s my claim that I am offering the 312 best. If a tomato fails two or three years in a row, we don’t try it again. This happened with Paul Robeson, for example. It would get to a certain point and die. We really wanted it to work.” He says this because he’s a race scholar; he wrote his dissertation on attitudes toward race equality.

It’s hot out, very hot; in July Georgia is practically uninhabitable. Midway through the tour Dr. Case excuses himself and goes inside. Jolene is explaining that they start seeds of each variety in round pots, which they keep on the porch and move back to the dining room table when there’s a chance of frost. These are planted two per two-inch pot. “We wait
to transplant outside until we’re positive there’s no frost,” she says.