Seed Storing and Sharing: Preserving and Sharing Through Community Seed Collectives

Images courtesy of Amy Bradstreet

Our ancestors have given us so much in terms of our seed heritage.  They have shared their tips, tricks, and best practices developed over hundreds of years of trial and error. They have shared their experience by saving and handing down seeds from fruit and vegetables that tasted the most incredible, from trees that grew the fastest, tallest, and strongest, and from hand-crossed specialties of all varieties that won awards at county fairs, and so much more.  Yet, throughout the world this knowledge is being wiped out along with our natural environments, and natural farming techniques. We are losing the veritable cornucopia of abundance that our ancestors throughout the world cultivated by practicing selective breeding. We have replaced indigenous farming practices with modern industrialized agricultural practices that use patented, hybrid seeds that have been bred to grow plants that tolerate heavy application of pesticides and fertilizers, ripen almost simultaneously and allow fresh food to be shipped thousands of miles before being consumed.

We are also experiencing a homogenization of cultivated plants; today just 4 crops provide 60% of the worlds food.  We need to return to a more diverse agricultural system.  Diversity provides resistance to disease—one bug can’t just wipe everything out. For a significant portion of human history, amateurs did seed saving and breeding.  We then decided to leave it to the experts and big corporations.  The danger in leaving the cultivation and seed saving to the experts is that the experts are choosing to breed a limited selection of crops for maximum profit instead of flavor or nutrition. We should take this power back; cultivated biodiversity is one of the most important elements of our heritage as human beings. Seed saving is the first thing we can do to increase genetic diversity; it is one of the easiest ways to add value to our ecosystem.

When seeds are saved year after year and replanted in the same soil environment the crops will be particularly adapted for that environment and have better resistance to local pests and diseases—this is how diversification of species happens naturally. We can select for resiliency, flavor, and high nutrition.  Seeds are particularly well adapted to passing through intestines so we can always enjoy the best fruits then deposit them in the garden later!

For U.S. or Canadian residents who are interested in preserving non-hybrid heritage seeds should send for the “Garden Seed Inventory,” compiled by Seed Savers which lists all of the non-hybrid seed varieties available by mail in the U.S. or Canada. Just think how many different kinds of seeds you could be collecting in your shed, garage, or basement and sharing with your neighbors!

A SHORT note on genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

One of the most perverted products of biotechnology is the development of hybrid seeds that are patented by corporations, and must be purchased year after year. Today hybrid seeds dominate the cultivation of corn, sorghum, soybeans, onions, spinach, tomatoes and cabbage.[2]  These are the same seeds that multinational corporations are giving to developing nations as aid, which is laughable when you consider the implications of this type of “aid.”  This problem is compounded when you consider the natural genetic mixing in nature, which could potentially render all seeds property of a corporation.

We are increasingly treating food as a technology instead of a sacred requirement for our sustenance, nourishment, and energy. In fact, some of the main goals of GMOs are to engineer foods to:

• Be grown, frozen, and shipped thousands of miles, then thawed at some later date without being mushy. 
• Ripen simultaneously
• Tolerate the application of the herbicide glyphosate or produce their own insecticide with the idea that these modified crops would require less pesticide application.  (Unfortunately, the top three genetically modified crops require more pesticides than their non-modified counterparts—during a nine-year study genetically engineered crops required an additional 122 million tons of pesticides.[3])

Some advocates believe that GMOs are the only answer to the rising world food demand, but numerous studies by experts throughout the world is proving this to be a fallacy.[4] There is little reason to believe that these new seeds will produce more food and better varieties than traditional breeding techniques and other technologies such as better farming practices. For instance, we can revitalize land isn’t currently suitable for growing food and go vertical with the number of uses for each acre of land, e.g. pastures, orchards and vegetable gardens can be integrated into a robust, productive system.

Those who oppose GMOs are concerned with genetic drift, which may infect non-GMO seeds, and safety of new varieties for human consumption.  There are hundreds of genes from industrial crops and the pharmaceutical industry that were never intended for human consumption that might drift into traditional seed varieties during the process of field testing. Even more frightening is that “many of the field-tested genes are not available to the public because they have been declared confidential business information.”[5]

In fact, “most biotechnology foods in the United States are not formally approved for human consumption. Products pass through a voluntary system at the end of which the Food and Drug Administration states that it has no furthers concerns. In addition, the U.S. government oversight of environmental risks is weak and almost none of the existing biotechnology regulations specifically address the need to protect the seed supply.”  This is scary in terms of the government establishing acceptable tolerances for contaminating DNA; how can we adequately establish limits if we don’t know what genes are present?[6]

The problem with GMOs is that the science attempts to decontextualize nature, and examine it in a laboratory—but given the limitless combinations of variables in nature, a lab situation will never behave exactly like it does in nature and once GMOs are released to the natural environment there is no chance for recall. We can start by buying organic food in order to avoid encouraging more widespread use of GMOs.[7]  As a global culture, if we do not intervene, this is what we will continue to support.