Read The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food Online
Authors: Janisse Ray
WE EARTHLINGS FIND OURSELVES
at a crossroads, with our lofty ambitions grappling with environmental limits. The limits are so imminent that author and contrary farmer Gene Logsdon predicts that the most popular vacation spot of the future will be the backyard. The time is perfect, then, to become part of a beautiful uprising to maintain all options for feeding ourselves.
Every day I get news of resistance, not just the thousands upon thousands of gardeners who are quiet revolutionaries but the activists. For one thing, grassroots seed banks are springing up across the country and world. Most operate with a membership that grows out a plant, saves its seeds, and with them replenishes the bank’s supply.
Charlotte Hagood and her friend Dove Stackhouse started the Sand Mountain Seed Bank in Alabama. Their bank is a collection of seeds that either originated in or naturalized to the Sand Mountain area of northeast Alabama and the tip of northwest Georgia. Bonnie’s Best tomato hails from Union Springs, for example. The Sand Mountain Seed Bank, like most others, is not only a repository of the seeds of aging gardeners; it’s a source where gardeners can get a start of legendary bioregional, open-pollinated varieties. Membership is inexpensive, ten dollars a year, because this is a homegrown operation. It’s a labor of love.
Hagood laughed with me recently about her home state. “Alabama is so far behind,” she said to me, “it’s gonna be ahead when things crash. It has sort of a culture still here.” She has been busily gathering up the remains of that food culture and keeping it alive until it is needed. The
hope of Hagood and Stackhouse, who lead seed-saving workshops, is that
once again White Half-runner beans and Choctaw Sweet Potato squash will be commonplace on the dinner table and that Alabamians will be
proud of their food heritage. The seed bank provides a place “where the
legacy of our ancestors can literally be kept alive,” Hagood said.
On a larger scale, the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association has started One Seed at a Time, an organic seed bank devoted to Southeastern biodiversity. In addition, Southern Seed Legacy, currently housed at the University of North Texas in Denton, is banking seeds for the region. Southern Seed Legacy is the brainchild of two University of Georgia professors, Virginia Nazarea, anthropologist and author of
Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers
, and her late husband Robert Rhoades. It too is a member-driven organization; a third of a member’s seed harvest is returned to the bank and a third is passed along to another person.
For years Southern Seed Legacy operated out of the University of Georgia and was run mostly by graduate students. Every year they advertised a seed swap. One autumn Saturday, Raven and I traveled to one in steady rain four hours north, almost to Athens. We kept hoping that rain wouldn’t be falling in Crawford, Georgia, where the swap was to be held at the Nazarea-Rhoades farm, Agrarian Connections. There, before his death, Rhoades collected historic farm buildings that were in different stages of restoration.
But it was raining, and in the deluge the swap was a bust. A few people erected colorful but soggy canopies and had small handfuls of seeds out to trade or sell. I walked around once, huddled under an umbrella. I walked around again. I perused Southern Seed Legacy’s collection and watched an old couple drive up in a rickety truck and drop off sprouted garlic. I bought six tomatillo plants and we got back in our cars and drove the dismal four hours home.
In many ways, however, the seed swap was a gigantic success. At least a hundred people, many of them young, had come to check out the scene. Despite the nasty weather, some hardy believers were grilling barbecue for lunch. A band called the Roughbark Candyroaster Band was supposed to play. Everybody there was excited about genetic preservation. They braved even winter rains to be there.
Across the country, in state after state, bioregion after bioregion, the same thing is happening. People are standing up to guard seeds.
Seed banks have been given a novel twist in some areas of the country. These are seed
libraries
. Local seed groups deposit packages of seeds in racks or card catalog file drawers at public libraries. Library users are allowed to “check out” the seeds, the same way they would check out books, videos, or magazines. The check-out time is a growing season, and at the end of the season the patron “returns” seed to the library.
In some cases there are branch libraries at farms and at community centers. Volunteers stock the seed shelves and raise money to buy new varieties of seeds. They hold seed-saving orientations for new library patrons, not to mention seed-starting workshops and farm workdays. Some of them are part of the Transition Town movement and some are people who understand that systems we have relied on are collapsing. Some of them are stockpiling, others are attempting to identify varieties that do particularly well in their locales.
There’s the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) in San Francisco and a very organized and impressive one in Richmond, the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, to name two.
When scientists at New Mexico State University announced plans to genetically engineer chili peppers in an attempt to make the industry more profitable, students organized a group called Occupy Green/Red Chile. The students are smart and well-spoken. They are determined. They’re organizing petition drives and marches. “Everyone cares about this because in New Mexico chile isn’t just a food, it’s your culture,” student Jessica Farrell told a reporter in 2011. “To secure the long-term protection of the farmers and the protection of consumers in terms of culture, there is no room for a genetically engineered seed.”
Since March of 2011, residents of five small towns in Maine—Sedgwick, Blue Hill, Penobscot, Trenton, and Hope—voted to declare “food sovereignty” in their villages by passing “Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinances.” State regulations favor industrial agriculture and have forbidden the sale of certain foods, like fresh milk or locally slaughtered meat. One ordinance proposed that “Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing.”
“Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance,” resident Mia Strong told a reporter. “I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food.”
The resistance takes many forms and the resistance grows. Way back in 1996, Greenpeace protestors sprayed milk-based paint on soybean fields near Atlantic, Iowa, where Monsanto research was taking place.
Outside the United States, a number of places, including Europe, require labeling. When GM foods are labeled, we’ll know if people get sick after consuming them. States, including California and Vermont, are working to pass labeling laws. In the absence of labeling, activists design labels to attach illicitly to GM foods.
In 2006 Prince Charles set up the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, a charity that works to end farmer suicides in India. Mother Seeds in Resistance of Chiapas, Mexico, is protecting indigenous corn from contamination by GM seeds. The Clif Bar Family Foundation awarded $375,000 in grants to three doctoral fellows pursuing organic plant breeding.
Guerrilla gardeners transform empty city lots overnight into gardens. Others make seedbombs, tight balls of wildflower seeds, and launch them onto highway medians, shoulders of sidewalks, and vacant lots in order to beautify their surroundings. Millions of people take seriously Patricia Klindienst’s notion that “we eat our history and our politics every day,” and they nourish themselves with organic, local, sustainable food.
The list goes on and on. This and more is what happens when we take the stewardship of food crops into our own hands.
Extinction is not an event, but a process. Extinction does not occur when the last germ of a certain seed loses its vitality. No, extinction occurs when a species can no longer evolve, a point called a genetic bottleneck. The loss of genetic resources—genetic erosion—both pauperizes and threatens human civilization. We are losing the plants that we have traditionally depended on, that built human society as we know it. Our food supply is in crisis, and to guard against catastrophe, either quick or prolonged, we need a good insurance policy. We need a bank account. We need a library card. We need quick action.
MOST MODERN PLANT BREEDING
takes place at government-funded experiment stations like the one where Randy Gardner worked for over thirty years. The guy’s name makes me chuckle. I once knew an ichthyologist named Bass, and a chef named Baker. I’ve wondered about this, whether influence is at work here, or simply chance. When I visited, he had just retired as a tomato breeder at the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research Station, out on the interstate ten miles south of Asheville, North Carolina, a sprawling conglomeration of greenhouses, office buildings, and fields. Gardner doesn’t seem to mind meeting me at the experiment station during late afternoon on a Sunday. He’s still reporting to work as if he hadn’t retired.
“I never had much aspiration that I would ever become anything in life,” he said. “I planned on going into farming, since I was raised on a subsistence farm in Virginia.” But he found himself at Cornell studying pomology, or fruit cultivation, and after graduating in 1976, Gardner took a job in North Carolina, four hours from home. Western North Carolina farmers were suffering from the wane of burley tobacco as a cash crop in the mid-1950s and were looking for another. The region’s farmers were trying summer vine-ripened tomatoes, as opposed to tomatoes harvested when green. Breeding efforts for varieties adapted to green harvest centered in Florida and California. But North Carolina needed varieties bred specifically for its climate—days with temperatures in the mid-80s, nights in the 50s to 60s.
Six years after his arrival in Asheville, in 1982, Gardner released his first F1 tomato hybrid, a variety he named (as carefully as he named his children) Mountain Pride. “I get in mind what I want in a hybrid and then I develop parent lines and then I cross these two together,” he said. “The first wilt resistance was developed in the 1950s. I went back to varieties from Florida and California that had wilt resistance and started there.”
The work itself was done in large, sterile greenhouses and also in immaculate fields in the valley of the French Broad River. Mountain Pride, Gardner told me, was released openly to any seed companies that wished to produce seed. Castle Seed Company picked it up. Mountain Pride is still produced in limited quantity.
After Mountain Pride, funding for practical breeding programs got slashed and public research programs were forced to come up with their own budgets. “There’s little grant money available to us researchers,” Gardner said. “So there’s no more open releases of hybrids. We give a hybrid exclusively to one company, with a royalty payback of 10 percent.”
The exact parentage of the hybrid is usually a trade secret. Developing a new plant variety, then, is a bit like writing a book. The author’s take is royalties. So what does this say for the future of food? I’d say it speaks to the need for public institutions to develop varieties with growers and eaters, not corporations, in mind.
What I couldn’t understand was this: Why would a variety bred at a publicly funded research station by government breeders be sold to a private company? What is paid for by the public at public universities is then being patented and sold for profit. What does that do to the state of democratic and open scientific inquiry?
We know what it does.
Over his career Gardner developed twenty principal varieties. “That’s a lot of breeding lines,” he said. The two most popular cultigens are Mountain Fresh, for the main season, and Mountain Spring, for the early season. In 2003, Gardner released the grape tomato Smarty, which became instantly popular, to the Harris Moran Seed Company. He developed Sun Leaper, which sets fruit even at high temperatures, named after the late Paul W. Leeper, a Texas plant breeder. Gardner also released a series of plum tomatoes, including Plum Dandy, Plum Regal, and Plum Crimson.
Although retired, Gardner is still breeding, which is why he can’t go fishing instead of showing up at work. This new project is a tomato with the positive attributes of an heirloom, like superior taste and nutrient content, but one resistant to early and late blight. This will allow, he said, the tomatoes “to have better shelf life so they can be marketed more widely than the local tailgate markets or for home garden production.” He escorts me through a greenhouse to show me the current work. The greenhouse is large and contains potted tomato plants, all maybe a month old. Each of the plants is labeled. It’s a different language, one I don’t understand:
X 056X 66
and
0 81 12 X 195
. I’m curious how he pollinates tomatoes, I say, since they usually pollinate themselves before the flower even opens.