'Seeds of Change':
The Seed Saving Movement
Watch the full Seeds of Change
on PBS. See more from FOOD FORWARD
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
Today, valuable heirlooms have been replaced by massive expanses of genetically engineered (GE) crops.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
- 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
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
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
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
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?
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
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
- "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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through ‘Older Posts’ at the end of each section
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