The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (3 page)

Third, there’s another scary reality to this. All the lost varieties did more than liven up the table and keep farmers independent. Varietal decline threatens agrodiversity. We know this—the less biodiverse any system is, the greater the potential for its collapse. In shriveling the gene pool both through loss of varieties and through the industrial takeover of an evolutionary process, we strip our crops of the ability to adapt to change and we put the entire food supply at risk. The more food varieties we lose, the closer we slide to the tipping point of disaster. We are gazing already into the abyss. Maybe you haven’t seen it yet, because maybe you were looking the other way. You were focused on grocery shelves stocked with an overwhelming selection of breakfast cereal.

And the cereal aisle looks pretty diverse, with flakes and puffs and charms and squares. But how diverse is it, really?

Three crops account for 87 percent of all grain production and 43 percent of all food eaten anywhere—wheat, corn, and rice. As Edward O.
Wilson writes in
The Future of Life
, these three foods stand between humanity and starvation. “The world’s food supply hangs by a slender thread of biodiversity,” he wrote. In fact, 90 percent of the plant species recognized as edible come from 103 plants, out of 250,000 plant species known to exist. A small number of plants are feeding a lot of people. Wheat alone meets 23 percent of the world’s food energy needs.

When you read the fine print, most of our breakfast cereals contain wheat. I’m walking down an aisle with so many choices my head is spinning and yet it’s wheat. We haven’t even arrived at the bread aisle.

Let’s look more closely at wheat. Traditionally, there were thousands of distinct wheat varieties, as many as 100,000, in fact: Reward, a Canadian heritage wheat; Ethiopian Blue Tinge; Einkorn Gotland, an old Swedish variety; Crimean; Red Fife, a landrace likely of Ukrainian origins; on and on. (A landrace is a local variety of a domesticated species, one with a lot of variety, largely developed through natural means and not through industrial breeding.) Now, half of the wheat grown in the United States is nine varieties. Not only is the breakfast aisle heavy on wheat, it’s genetically homogenous.

Crop sameness leads to vulnerability, and not only because it’s risky to have everything ripen at once. Ireland’s potato blight in 1846 illustrates what can happen in monoculture agriculture; it led to the Great Famine and the emigration of an entire people. About 90 percent of the potatoes eaten by the Irish were a variety called Lumper. It was prolific and an acre could feed an entire family. When a late blight began to wipe out potatoes in Ireland, the Lumper had a slight resistance in the leaves but not in the tubers, which basically rotted in storage.

Think of the consequences if a wheat blight were to descend.

In a way, however, a wheat blight has descended. As Montana farmer and food activist Bob Quinn has said, “Wheat was once known as the staff of life, now we can’t even eat it.” Modern, industrially bred wheat has been associated with a steep rise in gluten intolerance and with structural changes in wheat proteins that lead to obesity and many other diseases. (Dr. William Davis, author of
Wheat Belly
, has been especially vocal on this subject.)

Not only have our diets become more industrialized, they’ve become less diverse. Michael Pollan calls corn, soy, and wheat the “building blocks of all processed food.” In a talk given at the Georgia Organics annual conference in 2009, he said our diets have changed more in the last one hundred years than in the previous ten thousand. “Monocultures in the field lead to monocultures in food,” he said. Diversity of food crops has been dwindling worldwide, and untold numbers of human foods are going extinct. What are at risk are our seeds, especially ancient breeds, and our crop biodiversity. And our health.

Historically, seeds were everyone’s responsibility. First they had to be collected. Then they couldn’t get wet. Mice and birds couldn’t be allowed to trespass against them. Winter was like a river our ancestors had to cross, loaded with waterproof and mice-proof packets and bags.

Furthermore, between growing seasons, the seeds had to be traded, because traditional societies understood that, as in human reproduction, plants do better by outbreeding. To swap seeds is to keep a variety strong and valuable—a genetic currency, the exchange of priceless genetic material. How interesting that the agrarian within us understands that to survive, to keep our food crops viable, we have to be openhanded. Seeds have a built-in requirement for generosity. Otherwise they suffer inbreeding.

Throughout history, if humans up and left a place or a country or a home we had to bring with us the future of food. We have been carrying our food supply with us for at least the past twelve thousand years, kernels tied in leather bags around our necks or sacks stored in large warehouses—a bit like the Japanese Buddhist monks at Daisho-in who’ve kept a flame lit for twelve hundred years. We’ve had gigantic winds blowing through the monastery hall, and the fire isn’t as big as it used to be, and it isn’t so bright. As with most of the biota of earth, we’ve lost some of the kindling.

PEOPLE GET TIRED
of carrying crosses. We want to put down our burdens, and the burden of feeding ourselves, as a species, has been our heaviest cross to bear, because if we fail, we starve to death, and because cultivating is full-time, year-round, joint-popping work.

So when somebody came along and said,
I’ll do that cultivating for you. I’ll save the seeds. You do something else
, most of us jumped at the chance to be free. It was fun and games for a while. While the slaves with hoes, then sharecroppers and mules, then tractors and eight-row cultivators, and now migrants and Lexion 590Rs (80 bushels of corn a minute) toiled in the fields, some of us were back at the house, rocking on the porch swing with a glass of tea, listening through the window to Frankie Laine on the phonograph.

Okay, I’m lying. We were not on the porch. We were not even in the house. We were at the blue-jean factory, double-stitching pocket to leg, pocket to leg, pocket to leg; or on the assembly line, popping screws into automobiles, lawn mowers, and TVs.

Two things happened. First, in that mind-numbing line, when the sight of another motor mount swinging toward us became nauseating, we began to dream ourselves back into the garden and into the fields, where we could hack off the end of a watermelon and reach in, pull out the sweet heart, and lob the rest to the hogs. Second, when Sister boiled up the beans, everybody noticed they didn’t taste as good as leather britches, the dish our mamas made using the Cherokee Trail of Tears bean. Or the bunuelos that our grannies made with Eye of the Goat beans. We lusted for the pies our great-grannies made with Pink Banana squash and husk tomatoes.

Wishing ourselves back to the garden wasn’t going to change a thing. While we let ourselves be seduced by the dream of ease and plenty, industry was busy salting the fields so we couldn’t go back. During what is misnamed—unless you think of the algae from field runoff—the Green Revolution, agribusiness began to woo farmers toward a new dawn. The Green Revolution, which in this country was an entire narrative in itself—a beginning, middle, and end—cemented a slide from agrarian to industrial life. Chemical fertilization, standardization, homogenization, mechanization, and commercialization were catchwords of the new agriculture. It promised an end to world hunger and although it did for a time coincide with the production of more food per acre and worker than ever before, one billion people in the world are still hungry. As Jules Pretty writes in his essay, “Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People?” industrial systems “only look efficient if the harmful side-effects . . . are ignored.” Agricultural industrialization rode into town with a skulk of sidekicks: a shift from the local to the global; from the small to the large; from the nutritious to the filling; from the storied to the acultural; from purity to toxification; from independence to victimization.

In order to serve the model of continuous progress, which may not correlate with profits for the farmer, tractors began to take the place of living, breathing workers. My friend Angus Gholson remembers when his father got his first tractor. “I like it okay,” the elder Mr. Gholson said, “but nothing comes out the back.”

Industrial agriculture also forced specialization, larger areas planted with a smaller number of varieties, as well as more acres planted in annuals and fewer in perennials. Its mania was monoculture, a few dependable, high-yielding varieties that ripen at the same time. “In south Georgia,” a farmer told me, “we’re trying to major in corn and soybeans.” Diversity, in fact, is an
impediment
to efficiency and productivity, as is small or human-scaled agriculture. A diversified small farmer who saves her own seeds is not only of no use to a corporation, but a threat. The basis of diversity—which brings with it possibility, stability, hope, and power—is small and differentiated.

Recently I enjoyed a stint as a visiting writer at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina, which has a working farm. The college requires each student to work fifteen hours a week, anything from library support to computer repair to blacksmithing to beekeeping to farming. One day I walked into a classroom to teach, and notes from a previous lecture remained on the marker-board. I was midstream in their erasure when I began to read the phrases and imagine the lecture that had taken place.

mechanization of agriculture
gospel of progress
loss of mules
the spectral trace

I knew the story by heart. The words formed a kind of ghost life I never knew as my own but to which I have longed to return. I have been walking in the spectral trace.

Industrial ag went after seeds themselves and with appalling swiftness took over the seed supply. They began to hybridize, a hybrid being the offspring of a genetic cross. Hybridization is simply plant breeding sped up. The pollen from one plant with desirable characteristics is rubbed on the stigma of another similar plant with desirable characteristics. This flower produces a seed that, when grown, exhibits a combination of desirable characteristics—excellent productivity and growth—called hybrid vigor. Because of this and because new varieties are often bred to be disease resistant, hybrids are tempting to grow.

In the mid-1920s, the first hybrid seeds reached the market in the United States. The first hybrids were two varieties of corn. In 1924, the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station introduced Redgreen, and Henry A. Wallace introduced Copper Cross. (Wallace was a corn breeder who would go on to start the Hi-Bred Corn Company, the world’s first hybrid seed company, which would come to be owned by DuPont and allied with Syngenta.)

When farmers planted hybrids, bluntly put, they made more money. The bad news about hybrid seeds, however, is that although they often perform better, a farmer can’t save them for another year’s crop. The offspring fail to “grow true”—to produce fruit similar to the ones from which they came. When a gardener plants seed saved from a hybrid, he doesn’t get the same beefsteak tomato or supersweet corn but a hodgepodge of the ancestral strains used in breeding.

Using science to improve food production is not intrinsically bad. Science is worrisome when it only serves the interests of mercenaries and their employees in the long run. Seed companies patent F1 hybrids and have proprietary control over them in an attempt to achieve monopolies on genes. A farmer, then, is forced to return year after year to the company that produced the seed, infecting our food supply with greed.

Increasing numbers of farmers, those that didn’t die or quit, went with the new schema—abandoning vintage, traditional, mom-and-pop, place-adapted, planter-bred, hand-saved, carefully guarded seeds. Before 1932, hundreds of corn varieties were grown across the continent, including Stanley corn. Or the grits corn I got from another neighbor, Lewis Snowden, which came from his stepfather, Mr. Gore, who got it from a Mr. Ogden. Or Keener corn, which I can’t wait to tell you about.

The year 1932 was the tipping point. This was the year Golden Cross Bantam, the first hybrid maize that became popular, was introduced in US fields and gardens. Stewart’s bacterial wilt had plagued farmers; the early 1930s had seen it in epidemic proportions. Golden Cross Bantam, developed by pathologist Glenn Smith of Purdue University, was resistant to the wilt; when put on the market, the seed flew off hardware shelves everywhere.

A sea change happened in the blink of an eye. In 1935, less than 10 percent of Iowa corn was hybrid. Four years later, 90 percent of it was—specifically Golden Cross Bantam. In the slip of time between 1935 and 1939, an interval during which both my parents were born, the face of our agricultural landscape forever changed. Trusting the advertisements, not knowing long-term consequences, not understanding the loss, and wanting to survive, farmers stuck their canisters of homegrown seed-corn on back shelves in sheds and went to town for Golden Cross Bantam. By 1946, according to Jeff L. Bennetzen’s
Handbook of Maize
, Iowa was 100 percent hybrid; 90 percent of the corn belt as a whole grew hybrid corn.