The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (28 page)

“We catch the flower before it matures and sheds pollen,” says Gardner. “We use a highly technological tool to emasculate the flower.” He grins quirkily and holds up a pair of tweezers. To emasculate means remove the
anthers. “Then we pull out another very expensive, high-tech tool.” He grins again and lifts an electric toothbrush, which happens to be nearby. “This is what we use to shake another plant’s pollen onto the stigma.”

Gardner and I squander a bunch of time looking around and it’s almost sunset when we get out to the fields. Gardner begins moving down rows of tomatoes pendant with fruit. He explains that heirlooms are tastier because they have more foliage to feed the sugars in the fruit, which is why he’s using heirloom germplasm in the development of these new hybrids. More sugars mean more carbohydrates.

“You’re looking for high sugar/high acid,” he said, “and lots of volatile materials for aroma. You want a tomato that has taste and smell at the same time.” Smell enhances flavor through flavonoids, which are phytochemical compounds that serve as defense mechanisms in plants and that are associated with increased health benefits in humans.

I follow Gardner up and down the rows. He picks a tomato, cuts off a slice, offers me a taste, then tosses the rest to the ground.

“When I breed the way I do, it is not to select individual characteristics in plants,” he says. “I look at the plant as a whole, the entire plant. That gets into the art of breeding. Of course, a lot of the art is based on science.”

To get another perspective on breeding, I stopped to visit the trial gardens of Johnny’s Selected Seeds, named after Johnny Appleseed. Rob Johnston Jr., founder, is a breeder who has won six All-American Selections awards. He won in 1993 for Baby Bear Pie pumpkin, in 1998 for Bright Lights Swiss chard (a sensation in my garden), and in 2002 for the Diva cucumber (very rewarding to grow). Almost every year since then he has won national All-American Selections recognition for his work, most recently with squashes—Bonbon Buttercup and Sunshine Kabocha. He specializes in crops for fresh-market growers and big home gardeners, and thus many of his offerings are hybrids.

The day I visited the company’s gardens Johnston was in the field, working with tomatoes. I had not made an appointment, but had simply found myself in the area and dropped in unannounced. Not wanting to bother Johnston, I spoke with his assistant, a young woman on a bicycle. It was a cloudy, cool, August Sunday in northern Maine. Rain looked imminent. At the trial gardens were a couple of buildings, then acres and acres of row crops, healthy and vigorous, greening the rolling hills. Greenhouses lined up one after the other.

Here Johnston and his workers grow commercial varieties side by side to compare them. Here they select specimens for seed saving. They segregate populations. They go to great pains to cross-pollinate varieties. They sometime hand-pollinate. They grow out seeds. They get dejected about a failure and excited about a promising creation.

When creating a new open-source variety, in addition to the seven years required to produce it, Johnny’s Selected Seeds uses the eighth year to stabilize it. In the ninth year they grow stock seed, and in the tenth they farm it out to their seed growers. Then the seed can be sold.

“Do you ever put a lot of work into something and find that it’s useless?” I ask the young woman.

“Not really,” she says. “Usually something good comes out of it.” I ask if I can just walk through the gardens. She says certainly, to make myself at home.

That humans need new varieties of crops is indisputable. As the environment changes, as conditions change, our crops must respond to those changes. The question I am mulling is, How should we be breeding new varieties—at public institutions or in private ones? Normally I would advocate that work on behalf of civilization be done in public facilities, supported by government money, with scientists trained to act on behalf of a country’s citizenry. But when our institutions are controlled by forces outside government and when their products are snapped up by corporate interests and then sold back to us, supporting them becomes more difficult.

I would not normally advocate the development of new products by industry, since it concerns itself only with profit. In this case, however, I think some business interests are doing a better job of breeding new varieties than our public institutions. Johnny’s Selected Seeds, for one, is producing some interesting and useful varieties. Johnny’s is capitalism writ small. Johnny’s employees own 66 percent of the company, with 100 percent ownership expected by 2015.

Who should do our breeding? I do not know the full answer, but I know part of it: the people who care first about life on earth. Will these be public or private? I do not know. For a moment I think we should consider the possibility that people will continue to rise up as they have for centuries, either self-educated or professionally trained, driven by a passion for plants. They will wear a mantle of service. Some of them, like Johnston or Tom Stearns, will start their own small companies. Inch by inch, row by row, they will work toward a true agriculture. They will improve our food increment by increment.

When I teach writing workshops, I often talk about our country’s infatuation with stardom—how a few individuals, deserving or not, are hoisted into the national imagination. I’m talking about the Marilyn Monroes and the Leonardo DiCaprios. The cult of stardom comes at the expense of the entire culture, because civilization is advanced by many stars. Lots of them. When a single story obfuscates the many, the entire culture suffers.

The same is true in plant work, I believe. We need many gardeners, many seed savers, many breeders, in gardens large and small, working to make our relationship with plants more and more beneficial to all.

THE FIRST I THOUGHT
about being a plant breeder myself was at the headquarters of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) in 2008. I sometimes get invited here and there to talk about writing and the environment, and I happened to be in Unity, Maine, the day an evening talk about on-farm vegetable breeding was scheduled.

MOFGA runs an elaborate spread. On-site is a large timber-frame office and meeting space, demonstration gardens, and a complete homestead where some lucky apprentice gets to live for a year. Every September MOFGA hosts the Common Ground Fair, an organic conference, trade show-and-tell, and harvest fest. And it really is an agricultural fair. People still bring vegetables to enter in competition. I have listened to two judges talk about a certain squash not being true to its phenotype (what it’s supposed to look like) and recommending the gardener check her seed supply. These are people who know their stuff.

About thirty thousand people show up to attend talks, visit booths, tour alternative energy projects, learn how to do things, and (not least of all) eat good food. No junk food can be sold by the purveyors. You won’t find fried candy bars at Common Ground.

To not be cutting-edge would be difficult for a group of people as mobilized and organized as Maine’s organic farmers. And the year I was there, they’d organized a workshop on vegetable breeding.

Jim Gerritsen of the Organic Seed Alliance, which works with farmers to grow high-quality seed, stands up. “We’ve got to be independent in our seed resources,” he says. “We have to breed varieties designed to work under our local ecological conditions. What we want are locally adapted varieties suitable for organic growers.”

There’s that word
local
again. Locavore, local economics, and now locally adapted seed. This also means that if you’re a seed saver, you’re a seed selector, and thus a plant breeder, more or less, growing seed adapted to your locality. And as the seed adapts to soil, I heard a gardener at the Rodale Institute once say, the soil adapts to seed.

Gerritsen speaks for only a few minutes before introducing Bill Tracy, a plant breeder from the University of Wisconsin. “The astounding diversity of life on earth is directly related to natural selection,” Tracy says. “This results in all the variations we see around us.” A fundamental axiom of nature is that it creates diversity, and if growers select or breed seeds, they have contributed to diversity. Someone who’s a seed saver is a minor deity. Tracy talks about the creative power of selection and applying selection pressure.

“This is so different from genetic engineering,” he says. He said that selection is extremely powerful, usually remarkable and predictable, and is precise; seven cycles of selection can easily change a population significantly. To prove his point, he took a corn and produced from it a field corn, then while selecting from the same corn, produced a super-sweet corn. “The biochemists say that this is impossible,” he says. “Fortunately I’m not a biochemist. All this variation we see around us is the result of selection giving us unexpected types.”

Selection pressure is the difference between forcing a child to read or creating an atmosphere where a child wants to read. It’s the difference between using maple syrup to sweeten pumpkin pie or using pumpkin-pie mix. It’s two people talking at the edge of a field as opposed to them sending text messages via satellite Internet. Application of “selection pressure” is a grower easing a variety toward an imagined outcome, instead of forcing the outcome. It’s human-scale—not industrial-scale—technology.

Tracy shows slides of work with a field corn he’s developing with Martin Diffley, a Minnesota organic farmer (Gardens of Eagan). Diffley wants three traits—early vigor, weed competitiveness, and flavor. “The biggest thing you have to worry about with plant breeding is selecting for multiple traits,” Tracy says.

I am truly astounded at the number of folk plant breeders in this country. It’s like a national pastime. We earthlings are true plant lovers and no wonder. Diffley is one. Frank Morton of Oregon’s Wild Garden Seed, who is also working with Tracy, is another. He calls seeds “the best deal in nature: dense nutritional matter with a self-organizing program and energy array. For cheap.” He developed and introduced Wrinkled Crinkled Crumpled cress by crossing Persian and curled cresses and selecting from this gene pool. Morton also developed an open-pollinated, fast-maturing, vigorous sweet corn that germinates well in an Oregon spring’s cold soil.

All this talk of the gardener participating in plant breeding led me to one of many agricultural epiphanies. Many people will disagree with me on this and in many ways I know they’re right. What I realized, for myself, is that I don’t have to grow a seed just because it has unique genetics. What I grow also has to produce and thrive. It seems hard-hearted, but one seed is lost forever and another is recovered or created. Sure, Will Bonsall was right, that I can’t play God—but my personal job is to garden well, feed my family and community, and make a bit of a living at it. Someone else can save the genetically diverse but functionally weak cultivars. If an heirloom isn’t working well, I believe, turn it into something that is.

Perhaps the most famous folk seed saver and plant breeder of our time is Glenn Drowns of Iowa. If he’s not the most famous, he’s no doubt the hardest working. I thought I was a hard worker until I learned Glenn’s schedule. He works three full-time jobs. One of them is teaching middle- and high-school science, including chemistry and biology, in Calamus, Iowa. Another is running a mail-order business selling heirloom poultry and seeds, with a hundred-page catalog. The third is keeping those varieties and breeds alive at Sand Hill Preservation Center, outside Calamus.

I wanted to go visit Glenn, but I could not fathom using the fossil fuels to do so, and so I caught up with this busy man by phone on a Sunday, a rainy winter evening in Iowa that happened to be chilly but clear in Georgia. During our long and relaxed conversation Glenn explained his schedule. He’s up at four thirty every morning to tend the poultry. A weather buff, he types in data about the day’s conditions around seven o’clock, eats breakfast, and leaves for school at seven thirty. At four o’clock in the afternoon, when he’s home again, he focuses on farm chores until dinner at six thirty. Evenings are spent filling seed orders, grading papers, and working on projects.

You have to hear the numbers to truly understand the dedication of Glenn to the diversity of food. He has single-handedly rescued poultry breeds from extinction, and now not only keeps alive 235 breeds but also raises and sells poults and chicks. Over the years, he has had as many as 2,000 plant varieties in his care, and even now he keeps many hundreds going—including 185 sweet potatoes, 200 corns, 150–200 squash, 700 tomatoes, and so on. The numbers are mind-boggling.

During the growing season Glenn is apt to spend two to three hours a day hand-pollinating squash, a crop about which he’s passionate. “It’s only work when it’s not enjoyable,” he said. “I’ve never been a person who can sit still.”

A love of plants seems to have been born in Glenn. His mother found him planting seeds in her flowerpots when he was two. Plants were coming up everywhere, she later told him. By the time he was five she had to forbid him from bringing in citrus trees that he had planted in pots and cans all over their Salmon, Idaho, front porch. If Mrs. Drowns turned her back on Glenn in a store, she would find him at the seed rack, studying it.