The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (29 page)

“From the time I was a tiny child, I was gardening,” Glenn told me—first with his next-door neighbor and then in his own plot. By nine years old, he had a plant business and was showing vegetables at the county fair. During high school Glenn worked on his first breeding project, a watermelon suited for short growing seasons, a development that is still on the market: Blacktail Mountain watermelon (available from Glenn himself, 70 days.) During his senior year Glenn came across an ad for the Seed Savers Exchange and sent away for information. “It was a whole new world,” he said. “Now I was able to spend time with university specialists, which I hadn’t been able to do before, to get my questions answered.” Glenn went to Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, where he continued to pursue his love of plants.

The summer he graduated from college, with a degree in biology and a certification to teach, Kent Whealy invited him to Decorah, Iowa, home of the Seed Savers Exchange. “You’ll love it here,” Whealy said. And Glenn did. “I fell in love with the fact that it was mile after mile of soil.” Soon he had taken a teaching job and in 1988 bought land three hours south of Decorah, forty acres of a highly erodable sandhill made affordable by the fact that everybody who had tried to farm it had gone bankrupt. “It was solid sandburs, horse nettle, and blow sand,” he said. A quarter-century later, with liberal treatments of manure, compost, and green manure, “it’s like night and day different.”

Glenn has cut back on the number of seeds he maintains. “When I moved to Iowa in 1984,” he said, “stuff was disappearing so rapidly.” Now many wonderful seeds are being grown and saved by gardeners and seed companies, and the safety net for these heirlooms is strong. “There are a few other things I still want to do in life,” he said.

“Like?”

“More plant breeding. I’ve always wanted to do plant breeding,” he said.

“Why?”

The answer to that question harkens back to Glenn’s childhood and his strange madness to garden. “I grew up as a child wanting to grow a butternut squash,” he said. “In Idaho there wasn’t a long enough growing season. There were varieties I didn’t know were available and couldn’t find.” That was in the days before the Internet.

“How do you get an idea for a cultigen you want to develop?” I ask.

“I ask myself, how can I make two good things into something better?” he said. “Or more adaptable?”

“Give an example, please.”

“I keep working on an open-pollinated sweet corn for cold climates. I’ve developed one that produces in forty-six days, which we’ve trialed as far north as Alaska. A gardener in Fairbanks got sweet corn.”

“Have you named that one?”

“Yukon Supreme,” he said. “I’m not that good with names.”

“Sounds like a fine name to me. And besides the corn, what else?”

“I keep trying to improve the earliness and productivity of tomatoes,” he said. “In addition, I’m working on a smooth-skinned version of the wrinkly Jimmy Nardello peppers, which are sweet and productive, but hold dirt when harvested.” Jimmy Nardello Sweet Italian peppers appear on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste. In 1887 they were brought to Connecticut from Basilicata, Italy, by Jimmy Nardello.

“I tend to get a few more projects than I can manage,” Glenn said.

“Do you sell your developments?”

“No,” he said. “And I never would. If I create something that makes the world a little easier, then I’m happy. My goal is to get as many unique things in the hands of people who’ll benefit from them.”

Glenn’s greatest joy comes when he gets letters from people thrilled to have his seed. One woman ordered thirty packets of a pepper and Glenn called her to ask if he could simply send pepper seed in bulk. “Oh, no,” she said, “I want thirty packets because we’re going to give them out at our family reunion. The pepper is an old family heirloom and I’m excited to see them still available.” People are charmed to locate varieties they grew in their home countries. One man ordered five packets of a tomato that his great-grandfather, now in a nursing home, had developed in Texas.

An hour and a half passed quickly. Glenn worried that I was paying long distance charges and I told him that I had unlimited calling. I only had a couple more questions. I asked him about hope, were things getting better, were young people coming online who will keep food alive.

“I think that’s the case,” he said. “Otherwise, why would I keep beating myself up with a grueling schedule?”

In southern Iowa, Glenn is surrounded by the huge research farms of Monsanto. He is the only farmer in his county who is certified organic. The other day in the teachers’ lounge at school Glenn brought out his lunch, which included broccoli. Monsanto had just announced that it had developed a broccoli with many times the nutrients of standard broccoli grown under similar conditions.

“Is that the new broccoli?” a teacher asked.

“No, this is definitely not super-broccoli,” Glenn had said.

“I try to influence as many people as I can,” he tells me now. “I tell people, agriculture doesn’t have to be the way it is. There’s a way to farm that’s not destructive. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

MAYBE IT’S THE ASHES
that did it. Something turned Stephen Jones into a radical wheat breeder.

The ashes are those of William Jasper Spillman (1863–1931), the fifth wheat breeder at Washington State University, whose cremated remains were scattered in the fields where he labored. In his lifetime, Spillman warned against the industrialization of agriculture; as early as 1915 he wrote that tractors were too large. He coauthored
The Law of Diminishing Returns
in 1924, which said that if one input is increased while others remain static, overall returns will decrease over time. Fertilizer is one input. In terms of fertilizer, Spillman’s law means that yield will not continue to climb with successive applications.

Stephen Jones, wheat breeder, has spent years of his life in wheat that grows from the ashes of William Jasper Spillman. Spillman is Jones’s hero.

But the story is even more odd and complicated.

Spillman was born the exact month and year, maybe the same day, that yet another famous wheat breeder, Cyrus Guernsey Pringle, was being tortured for refusing to fight the Civil War. Pringle was drafted for service in July of 1863 and that fall was tortured for refusing to carry a weapon. Spillman was born in October.

Pringle was born in East Charlotte, Vermont, in 1838. As a young
man he became intrigued not only with plants but with the nonviolent doctrine of the Quakers, and in 1863 was faced with a terrible test. Follow
ing his conscription into the Civil War, Pringle refused to perform all
military duty. He was imprisoned and tortured, including being staked to the ground with his arms and legs outstretched in the form of an X. After a day of pain he reportedly wrote in his diary, “This has been the happiest
day of my life, to be privileged to fight the battle for universal peace.”

Pringle also wrote in his diary, upon entering Virginia, forced to carry a weapon he would not use: “Seeing, for the first time, a country made dreary by the war-blight, a country once adorned with groves and green pastures and meadows and fields of waving grain, and happy with a thousand homes, now laid with the ground, one realizes as he can in no other way something of the ruin that lies in the trail of a war.”

President Lincoln personally petitioned Secretary of War Edwin M.
Stanton to parole Pringle. After his release Pringle returned to his
botanical work as a plant collector, nurseryman, botanical surveyor, and plant breeder. The first variety of wheat he developed he named Defiance.

When I first heard of Stephen Jones, I was listening to the panel of “On-farm Vegetable Breeding” experts at MOFGA. The minute this guy stood up I sat straighter in my seat. Jones is tall with bright blue eyes and a smile big enough to cause charley horses in his face. He stands up with a big, happy smile and tosses a little bomb in the room, which is full of growers who have just partaken of the most amazing potluck in the history of hippiedom, sitting comfortable and well-fed in our seats.

“Right now agriculture is centralized, globalized, and completely screwed up,” Jones said. Not that Maine farmers didn’t already know that. But this language isn’t what they expected from a college man.

He switched on his slide show. “For ten thousand years on this planet we’ve had the right to save seeds for replanting,” Jones was saying, “and now the biotech industries are working day and night to take that away. That’s criminal and mind-boggling.”

“Biotech is about ownership,” he said. “That’s all it’s about. Owning the seed.”

Jones is a dryland wheat breeder (“dryland” meaning not irrigated) formerly based in the Palouse, thousands of acres of what was once native prairie and what is now the rolling wheat fields of the Northwest, encompassing parts of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. Jones comes from Washington State University (WSU), a land grant university that—like most land grants—typically and historically favors Big Ag.

Jones, however, who now directs the Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, located in the magnificent Skagit Valley just north of Seattle, believes in Small Wheat, small enough even for a sickle and hand-threshing. He also believes in local, in sustainable, in organic. (He attained organic certification for eleven acres on the WSU campus.) He’s breeding wheat for low-input ag, organics, and nitrogen-use efficiency. Jones, who is on the board of The Land Institute, is also involved in converting wheat to a perennial crop.

He is not the kind of plant breeder who develops a variety and sells it to a company that then promotes it to farmers and returns a royalty to the breeder’s institution. No, Jones takes seriously the idea of a public university and a public breeding program. He believes in the farmer as breeder, practicing what he calls evolutionary or participatory plant breeding. Defiance is his middle name.

The Washington Wheat Commission was pissed that Jones and colleagues went directly to wheat farmers and asked what traits they wanted in a wheat. They were so perturbed that in 2003 they staked Jones to the ground, metaphorically. The commission threatened to end its $1.66 million support for Jones’s projects, mainly winter wheat development. He came under pressure because he refused to introduce herbicide-resistant wheat. The herbicide-resistant trait, called Clearfield, was owned by the firm BASF, which touts itself on its website as the world’s leading chemical company.

“No, I don’t enter into contracts with for-profit corporations,” said the lone crusader. “I have a problem with public breeding programs not being public.”

The story of wheat growing in this country has been the story of industrialization wildly triumphant. At MOFGA, I learned that in 1880, Maine, for example, grew forty thousand acres of wheat, producing 14 bushels to the acre. In the decades that followed, however, wheat-growing became chemical-intensive, concentrated, and machine-driven. The crop centralized in the Midwest and Maine fell off the USDA chart for wheat in 1946, when its production dipped below one thousand acres. Vermont went off the chart in 1931.

Washington produces the second-largest wheat harvest in the United
States. In the 1920s and 1930s the Palouse of Washington produced high-yielding wheat, 100 bushels per acre—nonirrigated, nonchemical.
The average chemical farm in Kansas today produces 36 bushels per acre.
“We’re gonna starve if we keep growing wheat in Kansas,” said Jones.

According to him, growing wheat is easy (harvesting is not). Field trials these days are proving high yields in organic varieties. Madsen, for example, yielded 92 bushels an acre organic compared with 87 per acre chemical. Eltan grew out 115 organic and 105 chemical.

“Nobody can tell me we can’t feed the world on organics,” said Jones.

His credo is:

1. Organic agriculture needs separate breeding programs. (In field trials he’s found that the very worst wheat in organic can be the very best in chemical and vice versa.)

2. Farmers can breed their own damn varieties.

3. We need to diversify our fields and our science.

“Breeding takes time,” says Jones. “But basically wheat breeds itself.” Here are the steps.

1. Evaluate historical varieties. Not all made good bread or pasta.

2. Create variation. Select for it or let the environment select for it. Most important, utilize farmer knowledge and encourage farmer participation in the selection process. “I’m working with genetic wheat anarchists,” says Jones. He means the farmers.

3. Harvest, replant, select.

One of Jones’s success stories of evolutionary participatory plant breeding is young Lexi Roach, the granddaughter of Jim Moore, a organic wheat farmer in Kahlotus, Washington, whose farm receives only eight inches of rainfall a year. Lexi first became interested in wheat breeding when as a middle schooler she listened in on conversations that Jones had with her grandfather regarding breeding his own wheat. A few years later, she and her grandfather went to Western Washington University, where they crossed two varieties of dryland wheat that performed well on the Moore farm, producing new variation. For the next six years, they planted and stabilized the population. Lexi and her grandfather walked the rows together, pulling out weak plants and those with traits they didn’t want. In 2007, yield from the Lexi 2 variety beat the farm’s other top varieties by eight bushels per acre and in 2010 beat out fifty-nine other wheat varieties grown in a university-conducted trial.