'Seeds of Change': The Seed Saving Movement

'Seeds of Change':

The Seed Saving Movement

 

Food Forward,episode 3: “Seeds of Change” - Seed Saving from ami capen on Vimeo.

Watch the full Seeds of Change on PBS. See more from FOOD FORWARD

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By Dr. Mercola

Seeds are essential to maintain future food supplies. They are the foundation of life, from fruits and vegetables to grain and livestock feed — without them, we have no food. It's estimated that upwards of 90 percent of our caloric intake comes from seeds, directly or indirectly.

Seeds represent hope and new beginnings. When you save seeds, you're joining a lineage of farmers, gardeners and seed enthusiasts that dates back to the Stone Age — our civilization arose, in large part, due to seed saving.

Early humans selected the best wild plants with which to feed themselves, passing those varieties along to others by saving and sharing seeds.

Sadly, age-old heirloom varieties are disappearing at an alarming rate — 90 percent of the crop varieties grown 100 years ago are already gone. The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership estimates that 60,000 to 100,000 plant species are in danger of extinction.¹

In response to these snowballing losses, a movement to save seeds is sweeping the nation.

The PBS documentary "Seeds of Change" features seed savers who are pursuing grassroots alternatives to GMOs and to industrialized agricultural practices that threaten our health and the health of the planet.

The Disastrous Consequences of Patenting Life

Traditionally, seeds have been saved and shared between farmers from one season to the next. Farmers rarely ever had to buy new seed. Nature, when left alone, provides you with the means to propagate the next harvest in a never-ending cycle.

Today, valuable heirlooms have been replaced by massive expanses of genetically engineered (GE) crops. According to the USDA, 94 percent of U.S. soy and 88 percent of U.S. corn are now genetically engineered.

It's estimated that, since 1970, 20,000 seed companies have been swallowed up by mega-corporations. In 2005, Monsanto bought the world's largest fruit and vegetable seed company, Seminis, for $1.4 billion.

Just four agrichemical companies now own 43 percent of the world's commercial seed supply, and 10 multinational corporations hold 65 percent of global commercial seed for major crops.²

Many farmers are now dependent on patented GE seeds and must buy them every year from companies like Monsanto. Saving such seeds is illegal because it's considered patent infringement.

Farmers don't buy the seed outright anymore — they essentially buy a license to use the seed for a short period of time — typically one season. It's more of a lease, or a "technology use agreement."

For 200 years, the patenting of life was prohibited, especially with respect to foods. But in 1978, all of that changed with the first patent of a living organism, an oil-eating microbe, which opened the proverbial floodgates. One of Monsanto's proxies has a patent claiming 463,173 separate plant genes!

Patenting of life was never approved by Congress or the American public, but as far as the GMO industry is concerned, they own a gene wherever it ends up and however it gets there.

You have undoubtedly heard the argument that GE foods are the only way to feed the world (which is, by the way, completely false). What is often not mentioned in that argument, however, is the inequality of the playing fields.

According to the featured documentary, in one three-year period alone, public funding for the development of GE versus organic crops was 70 to one!

Every Day, Your Food Choices Become Increasingly Limited

Over the course of 80 years (between 1903 and 1983), we lost 93 percent of the variety in our food seeds. According to Rural Advancement Foundation International:³

• We went from 497 varieties of lettuce to 36

• We went from 288 varieties of beets to 17

• We went from 307 varieties of sweet corn to 12

Even the popular heirloom tomato has taken an enormous hit, having lost at least 80 percent of its diversity over the last century. Even more tragic is the fact that many of these precious plants are being replaced by patented GE varieties.

The National Geographic infographic below shows how many varieties of fruits and vegetables appear to be nearing extinction.⁴ This data is already more than 30 years old, so the statistics may be even grimmer today.

Five Important Reasons to Save Seeds

There are many advantages of saving seeds, but four of the most important are the following:⁵

1.    Seed Security: By saving your seeds, you control your seed and therefore your food supply — you aren't depending on seed stores or catalogs for difficult to find seed.

Hundreds of excellent plant varieties have been discontinued as big corporations have consolidated the seed industry and focused on more profitable varieties. Half of the vegetables grown today have no commercial sources — they must be obtained through seed trades.⁶

2.    Regional Adaptation: Most commercially available seed has been selected because it performs fairly well across the entire country if given synthetic fertilizers. But when you save seed from your own best performing plants, on your land and in your own ecosystem, you gradually develop varieties better adapted to your soil, climate, and growing conditions.

3.    Consistent Quality: Large seed suppliers rarely "rogue" the fields to pull out inferior or off-type plants, so the open-pollinated (OP) seeds they sell have inferior specimens in the mix.

You can select your own seed for uniformity and quality. You can control the gene pool for optimal germination, ripening time, flavor, storage, disease resistance, color, or other traits. After a few seasons, more and more of your plants will have all of your personally selected traits.

4.    Better Nutrition: Consuming a wide variety of fresh, whole foods prevents nutritional deficiencies and increases your overall nutrition by exposing you to a broader range of nutrients. Loss of food diversity compromises your health by narrowing your food choices.

5.    Preserving Your Heritage and Biodiversity: Today multinational corporations select seed varieties according to their own financial interests; they control 82 percent of the world's seed market, which includes 75 percent of the vegetable seed market. It's up to small farmers and home gardeners to preserve thousands of years of biodiversity.

How Seed Libraries Preserve and Improve Seed Quality

The basic operational principle of any library is that you borrow something and later return it. Many seed libraries work on a slightly different principle: the seeds are returned slightly improved or not at all. The program established by the seed library at Hampshire College is a good example.⁷ They will loan you packets of seed only if you promise to plant them, and you're allowed to return them only if you managed to grow thriving plants.

This means there's a good chance the seeds you borrow will never be returned, and they'll have different DNA, as the result of natural mutations. Unfortunately, these stipulations mean the number of seeds returned can be very low. For example, after one season at the Concord Seed Lending Library, only five out of 270 people returned their seed.

Besides functioning as a "lending library," seed banks have another important mission: archiving and preserving knowledge. Seeds in libraries are largely locked away, not reproducing but rather sitting in a drawer waiting for the next plant scientist to retrieve them for study. According to The Boston Globe:⁸

"The mission of cataloging and saving seeds has fallen mainly to big seed banks and academic researchers. There are 7.4 million seed samples conserved in professionally managed seed vaults worldwide; the biggest — the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean — holds seeds for more than 770,000 distinct plants."

The fact that seed libraries like Hampshire College are actually getting those plants into circulation is a vital part of promoting diversity and creating new and superior strains. According to Stephen Brush, a master adviser for international agricultural development at the University of California, Davis: "The more seeds you can get out in the field, the broader the base of conservation. In a gene bank, evolution is frozen, there's no more natural crossing."

Not long ago, there were only a handful of seed banks scattered around the U.S. Now there are more than 200, typically housed in public seed libraries, but also attached to farms, greenhouses and other local facilities. Going forward, seed libraries will continue to fulfill important roles in preserving and often improving local plant strains and allowing communities to refine seed lines tailored to their regions. The more seeds are exchanged and grown, the better the seeds will become.

The World's Greatest Seed Vaults

The world's greatest seed vaults⁹ are hidden away in some amazing places, a type of "apocalyptic insurance policy." If the world were to fall victim to a serious environmental disaster — particularly one of global proportions — our survival could depend on seed vaults.

Some are placed in remote locations, far from civilization and seismic zones in some the coldest regions of the globe, as seeds here would have the best chance of survival in the event of total power failure. And most are the pinnacle of security.

A prime example is Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. Tucked away on a frigid island near the North Pole, Svalbard is described as "the mother of all seed vaults," serving as backup for 1,750 seed banks all over the world. Currently, approximately 840,000 samples (4,000 plant species) are preserved in Svalbard, but the facility has the capacity to store 4.5 million samples!

If other seed collections are damaged or lost in a global crisis, the Svalbard vault is the place we'll go to begin rebuilding the earth's vegetation. A great deal of thought and planning went into its construction:¹⁰

"The vault is set nearly 400 feet into a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen Island. Although no permanent staff are assigned to guard the vault, the structure has an impressive security system that would foil even the most nefarious of seed stealers.

When an organization deposits seeds, only they are able to access the boxes containing those seeds; the organizations retain ownership, making Svalbard simply a storage and preservation facility for the good of the planet."

 

 

Image source: weburbanist.com

Other impressive seed vaults include England's Millennium Seed Bank, which houses between 60,000 and 100,000 endangered plant species — an impressive one-fourth of all of Earth's plants — and the Australian PlantBank, which now houses a staggering 100 million seeds.

In South America, Camino Verde Living Seed Bank has a special mission to preserve medicinal and otherwise useful trees. There's even a World Vegetable Center, housed in Taiwan, dedicated to improving nutrition and eliminating hunger worldwide. For more information on these vaults and others, this article in Web Urbanist is truly amazing.¹¹

Why Choose Open-Pollinated and Heirloom Seeds Over Hybrids?

As a gardener, one of your more important decisions is whether to choose open-pollinated, hybrid, or heirloom seed varieties — but which are best? According to Seed Savers,¹² for seed saving purposes, the most significant distinction among these types is saving true-to-type seed from open-pollinated and heirloom varieties, and avoiding hybrids. Open-pollination seeds are pollinated by insects, birds, humans, wind or other natural mechanisms.

According to Seed Savers:¹³

"Because there are no restrictions on the flow of pollen between individuals, open-pollinated plants are more genetically diverse. This can cause a greater amount of variation within plant populations, which allows plants to slowly adapt to local growing conditions and climate year-to-year. As long as pollen is not shared between different varieties within the same species, then the seed produced will remain true-to-type, year after year."

An heirloom variety is a plant that has a history of being passed down multiple generations within a family or a community. An heirloom variety is by definition open-pollinated, but not all open-pollinated plants are heirlooms. Hybridization is a controlled method of pollination in which the pollen of two different species or varieties is crossed (usually by human intervention, although it can happen in nature), usually from a desire to breed in a particular trait.

Hybrids are typically unstable and less vigorous, producing fewer of those desirable traits with each passing year. However, hybrid seeds can be stabilized by open-pollination — by growing, selecting and saving the seeds over many seasons. Choosing open-pollinated and heirloom seeds helps preserve genetic diversity and prevents the loss of unique varieties, including the ones that contribute to our long-term survival because of special hardiness and disease resistance traits.

Biodiversity is our best insurance in times of vulnerability, such as extended periods of drought. A profound example of this is what's currently occurring in drought-stricken California, where experts say the state's drought-related economic losses are on track to reach $3 billion in 2015.¹⁴ Genetically engineering plants for pest or disease resistance is unnecessary because the same resistance can be accomplished through classical plant breeding, and good cultural techniques and field practices.

Support Seed Diversity — Ditch GE Food Forever

I encourage you to support the seed saving movement by borrowing seeds, and by purchasing open-pollinated or heirloom seed varieties for your garden — but don't stop there! You can take back control over our food supply with the choices you make about your food and personal products. Several suggestions are provided below — but these are just starters. You can change the system daily, bit by bit, simply by voting with your debit card.

1.    Stop buying non-organic processed foods. Instead, build your diet around whole, unprocessed organic foods, especially raw fruits and vegetables, and healthy fats from coconut oil, avocados, organic pastured meat, dairy, and eggs, and raw nuts that are low in protein and high in fat like macadamias and pecans.

2.    Buy most of your foods from your local farmer's market and organic farms

3.    Cook most or all your meals at home using whole, organic ingredients

4.    Patronize restaurants that serve organic, cooked-from-scratch local food. Many restaurants, especially chain restaurants, use processed foods for their meals (Chipotlé is a rare exception)

5.    Buy only organic, open-pollinated and heirloom seeds for your garden, which applies to both decorative plants and edibles; they're obtainable from seed swaps, seed libraries and exchanges (see next section for sources)

6.    Boycott all lawn and garden chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.) unless they are "OMRI Approved," which means they're allowed in organic production. If you use a lawn service, make sure they're using OMRI Approved products as well

7.    Join the Organic Consumers Association's new campaign, "Buy Organic Brands that Support Your Right to Know"

Seed Saving Resources

If you want to begin saving your own seeds, there are four basic steps: Choosing the right plants, collecting their seeds, cleaning the seeds and storing them appropriately.¹⁵ Below are some excellent seed saving resources, as well as suggestions for where to purchase open-pollinated and heirloom seeds.

• "Seed to Seed: Seed Saving Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners" by Suzanne Ashworth (March 2002) is an excellent and widely cited book about seed saving
• Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA): National non-profit organization committed to protecting, promoting, and developing the organic seed trade and its growers
• Seed Savers Exchange: Organization whose mission is to promote saving and sharing of heirloom seeds and plants
• SeedSave.org: Online seed school with free downloadable book about the basics of seed saving
• Hudson Valley Seed Library: Featured in the movie, Hudson is much more than a library — it's also a place where you can order heirloom seed
• Mother Earth News article¹⁶ about their picks for top 15 vegetable seed companies

From Dr Mercola @ http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/01/23/saving-seeds-movement.aspx

For more information about sustainable agriculture see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/sustainable%20agriculture  

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Norwegian Secret Bases Update

Norwegian Secret Bases Update

By Bill Ryan and Kerry Cassidy

 

Since our recent post of the letter we received from a Norwegian politician about underground bases and that country's preparation for a future disaster, our mailbox has been full of messages from all over the world.

We have been completely unable to reply to them all, but we have carefully read everything we have received.

After a week's silence, we heard from our source again a few days ago. He is well, but is keeping his head down for understandable reasons. He has invited us to forward any relevant correspondence to him from others, and we will do that on a selective basis. He has also promised that he will draw the 'alien' symbols he saw, and fax them to us.

To those who have asked understandable questions about his veracity: we have done everything we can to confirm his identity and authenticity and are certain he is exactly who he says he is.

Independent Confirmation

Many friends and correspondents in Norway and Sweden have been in touch, some offering intriguing details. To many of them, this information was not new and confirmed what they had known from other sources. We received specific confirmation from two scientists and one ex-intelligence source that these facilities exist (and that both Sweden and Switzerland have the facilities to take their entire population underground if need be). A number have asked to be put in touch with the politician who wrote to us.

One correspondent confirmed a great deal of detail. His message is so important that we have published it here in full (having edited out personal information which may have identified him to the authorities). His family has first hand experience of the facilities which our source reported.

Dear Project Camelot team,

I just read your article about the Norwegian politician and his letter and information to you regarding underground bases, 2012, etc.

I must say I found this quite fascinating. I already know of the Svalbard storage place, which when it was announced made the signals go off for me thinking it had to be some specific reason for this for something they know will happen soon.

Regarding the rest, I am also Norwegian, I am from a military family, and have been told by my mother who served a long time in the military and other governmental institutions about these underground bases.

I know the location of one of these bases and have seen it myself. It's within a big mountain in my old city where I used to live and grew up before I moved from Norway a couple years ago. The place is called Baneheia.

My mother refused to tell any details about it, except for that it is created for an emergency. Only specific personnel will be allowed, such as herself and other military people, and other important people, politicians, scientists and other civilian people they consider important.

She has also been to another base in an area called Evje, and this underground facility is very huge, she said, much bigger than the Baneheia facility. She also said there is a base in the Stavanger area that she knows of.

She also supplied me with a photo of a base in Sørreisa, and said this is another underground base but she is unsure of the size of this base. I attach the photo here. This is the top of the mountain base, and she told me these 'spheres' are probably powerful radar systems that monitor a huge area.

She told me other interesting things, such as that that the big electronic corporations of the world in reality are run by the same people at the very top level, but they just create different names and brands and 'packaging' of the same products, or rather products that are developed and owned by people high up in society that run these electronic manufacturers with total control.

Regarding Baneheia, my mother said that the rest of our family would NOT be allowed to enter there in case of an emergency.

She also said she could not say any more about what was inside or how it looked, as she had sworn and promised to her officials to not tell anything more, and she is a woman of her word and keeps to her vows.

On another occasion, I briefly got to talk to another person from the military who had also been there. He gave me a little more details. He said the facility is huge and has many separate rooms with different purposes, but he was not allowed to enter these rooms and was confined to a specific room where he worked with computer related systems for the military. But he said that, from what he could see, this facility could house several thousand people, and it was extremely huge and highly technological.

It was also reported that of seven men who worked together at some project in this facility, four of them died of cancer. This was published in Fedrelandsvennen, a Norwegian newspaper from the city of Kristiansand in 2001. Unfortunately, the article is no longer online.

One of my friends, who worked for NSA for several years, has also provided me with some great and astonishing information regarding underground bases and other activities of the governments.

He confirmed that there are plenty of these bases around and that in some of them they are doing some very strange experiments and research, related to things such as time travel, journeys to other dimensions, alien technology etc, and he himself was in the process of recreating a spaceship and working on computer simulations for this purpose, and he showed me complex computer generated material related to this as well as illustrations of this spaceship.

He said that at the moment the governments are in contact with Mars, and even have such 'Stargates' connected with Mars so that they can travel there in a few seconds instead of using spaceships. He also claimed they are currently working on terraforming Mars - this means making Mars a suitable and possible place for humans to live. At the moment, Mars is more or less dead on the Surface, though there seems to be some life underground.

He suddenly disappeared and for the last couple years I've been unable to locate him or get in touch with him.

I can mention however, that he was adopted, and according to himself raised up and being prepared to work for the governments since his early childhood due to his high intelligence and other 'abilities'. He was indeed an extremely bright individual, personally I would say a genius, and he was involved with extremely complex mathematical and scientific material that he showed and discussed with me on several occasions.

I will first of all present you with some maps and photos of the area where this main facility I've mentioned is located.

The photo on the top right of the composite image below is what is called Gimlemoen, which used to belong to the military and was restricted for unauthorized personnel. I was there several times due to my mother working for them.

Recently they officially closed down the military operations in Gimlemoen, and turned it into a university campus instead.

However, some of the old bunkers and underground systems still remain in that area. I have personally visited some of them and been deeply underground. At one point I ended up in a large room that had a huge iron door with a big metal wheel on it and several locks. I could not open this door so nor do I know what was behind it.

There is also an aerial photo of Baneheia, where the current underground base in the mountain is located. This is at the top left of the image below. I've made a purple circle at the location of the entrance.

This rectangular structure is the entrance which leads into the mountain. The white structure to the right of it is some other buildings I assume is related as they got tons of antennas on top and satellite dishes etc and other strange devices.

As you see, it's a large mountain, with lakes on top, so how deep inside it goes into the mountain can only be speculated.

http://www.projectcamelot.org/Gimlemoen_Baneheia_lg.jpg

[Google Earth or Acme Mapper N 58.16, E 8.00]

Also notice that Gimlemoen and the Baneheia mountain are very close, only separated by the river. If any underground connection ever was established between the facilities in Gimlemoen and the facility in the Baneheia mountain below the river I have no idea, but as I mentioned I did find a 'bunker' going deep down underground leading to that room with a huge iron door that it was impossible to open. This was in Gimlemoen, and the room was covered with half a meter of water on the floor.

I've discovered something that seems like air vents in the middle of the woods on top of this mountain, which I assume provides air into the base below. The vents are placed in rather inaccessible areas and far away from any paths. They look like this, except that they are more modern.

I have on several occasions seen heavily armed military personnel outside the entrance of the mentioned facility. And this is strange, as Norway is not a country where the military or police normally walk around with guns. In fact, they are not allowed to carry guns unless it is an emergency situation. It's actually the only time I've seen the military carry guns in public while I lived in Norway.

Things should be pretty safe over here, I mean Norway is not exactly like Iraq having any specific needs for such bases and military work unless there is really something they know that is coming that the rest of us do not know.

Bill Ryan and Kerry Cassidy
support@projectcamelot.org

http://projectcamelot.org/norway_update.html
 

See Letter from a Norwegian Politician


top image - http://tomasnygren.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/svalbard_interior2007.jpg

New Illuminati comments:

Following the bunker mentality of World War Two’s blitzkriegs, the old Cold War presented many opportunities for governments, intelligence agencies and other clandestine groups to construct bases and bunkers beneath many cities. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, very few people had any idea of what was literally going on right under their noses. Other survival bases were located in sparsely populated areas, for very good reasons.

 

A global construction project named ‘Project Noah’ was begun during the administration of John F. Kennedy, to create a dozen ‘American’ bunkers on the six inhabited continents of the planet. Each was to be a deeply buried complex which could withstand nuclear war, asteroid strikes or climate catastrophes, and were designed to be self sufficient. They were sited by deep aquifers or large underground river systems and powered by nuclear reactors (see Pine Gap near Alice Springs in central Australia, for instance – and when you look at the site on Google Earth, note the extraordinary geological formation in which it is situated).

These remote prototype survival bunkers were designed to house at least 2,500 people for no less than five years. The programme was completed during the administration of Gerald Ford, and the concept was subsequently expanded in scale and scope under later administrations.

 

Many nations have developed fully disclosed underground warrens that can house the bulk of their populations in emergencies. China, Switzerland and Sweden are well situated to survive a major catastrophe, while most nations have bunkers for their politicians (and far more essential privileged members of their communities). Many cities have bunker systems to ensure that governments and critical personnel can survive the demise of the rest of their local population.

 

Where nations aren’t completely controlled by military-industrial complexes, many of the essential support personnel who will be required in an emergency have to be drawn from the civilian population. I have known a few nurses and doctors who have to keep a card on them at all times, and must be ready to be picked up or report to a designated location when they get the fateful call. Many politicians, military personnel and interested journalists are aware of these bases, along with the many support personnel who are waiting for their call. It’s amazing how easily such things can be hidden from distracted populations.

I have seen underground complexes constructed under various cities during the Cold War; nowadays the entrances are patrolled by military personnel and carefully monitored by surveillance equipment. The original purposes for their construction have been subsumed in many cases, and redirected to other ends entirely.

Until a generation ago most people had no idea of the fragility of our civilization, or of the many possible events which could easily send Humanity back to the Stone Age or beyond. Now that governments are aware of the precariousness of global civilization they have far more numerous reasons to construct survival bunkers than possible nuclear wars or winters. In the last few decades underground construction has become something of an art form, and a substantial proportion of the black budgets of military and clandestine organisations has been invested in this direction.

 Having been offered a place in a bunker back in the ’80s, I can assure you that Ben Elton was spot on when he pointed out that being locked up with the worst control freaks and egomaniacs on the planet isn’t where you’d want to be when the sewage hits the air conditioner. As I remarked at the time, I’ve chosen to take my chances outside their ‘safe havens’; thanks all the same.

 

- R.A.

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