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Abby Quillen

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Agriculture

Why the Most Powerful Thing in the World is a Seed

By Abby Quillen

As promised, here’s my review of The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
by Janisse Ray.

Why the Most Powerful Thing in the World is a Seed

“The Seed Underground” is a love letter to the quiet revolutionaries who are saving our food heritage.

by Abby Quillen

Janisse Ray celebrates the local, organic food movement but fears we’re forgetting something elemental: the seeds. According to Ray, what is happening with our seeds is not pretty. Ninety-four percent of vintage open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished over the last century.

Ray begins The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by explaining how we lost our seeds. Feeding ourselves has always been a burden for humans, she explains. “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.”

The Seed Underground Cover

But, according to Ray, when the dwindling number of farmers who stayed on the land gave up on saving seeds and embraced hybridization, genetically modified organisms, and seed patents in order to make money, we became slaves to multinational corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, which now control our food supply.

In 2007, 10 companies owned 67 percent of the seed market. These corporations control the playing field, because they influence the government regulators. They’ve been known to snatch up little-known varieties of seeds, patent them, and demand royalties from farmers whose ancestors have grown the crops for centuries. The result is that our seeds are disappearing, and we miss out on the exquisite tastes and smells of an enormous variety of fruits and vegetables. More alarmingly, “we strip our crops of the ability to adapt to change and we put the entire food supply at risk,” Ray writes. “The more varieties we lose, the closer we slide to the tipping point of disaster.”

However, The Seed Underground is not a grim story. It’s a story about seeds, after all, which Ray calls “the most hopeful thing in the world.” Moreover, it’s a story about a handful of quirky, charismatic, “quiet, under-the-radar” revolutionaries, who harvest and stow seeds in the back of refrigerators and freezers across America. Sylvia Davatz, a Vermont gardener who advocates that local food movements produce and promote locally grown seeds, calls herself the Imelda Marcos of seeds, because she has a thousand varieties in her closet. Yanna Fishman, the so-called sweet-potato queen, toils over a wild garden in the highlands of western North Carolina, where she grows 40 varieties of sweet potatoes. Dave Cavagnaro, an Iowan photographer, teaches people to hand-pollinate squash with masking tape to keep vintage varieties pure.

Seeds, it turns out, don’t just grow plants—they build stories, heritage, and history, which tend to be shared every time seeds pass from hand to hand. So it’s fitting that Ray, an accomplished nature writer and activist, shares some of her own story in The Seed Underground. When she was just a child, Ray got her first heirloom seeds from her grandmother—Jack beans, which resembled eyeballs. At 12 she set a brush fire trying to clear land for a garden. At 22 she joined Seed Savers Exchange.

Perhaps we learn the most about Ray from her present-day gardens at Red Earth, her Georgia farm. Ray writes that in the garden, she is “an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.” She grows crops like Fife Creek Cowhorn okra, Running Conch cowpea, and Green Glaze collard. Her barn is filled with drying seed heads; her kitchen is stinky with seeds fermenting. “Seeds proliferate in the freezer, in my office, in the seed bank, in the garden shed—in jars, credit card envelopes, coffee cans, medicine bottles, recycled seed packets.”

Ray outlines the basics of seed saving in The Seed Underground, but it is not a how-to book. It’s a call to action, which often reads like a lyrical love letter to the land and to varieties of squash and peas most of us have never tasted. It’s also a love letter to us, Ray’s readers. “Even though I may not know you, I have fallen in love with you, you who understand that a relationship to the land is powerful,” she writes.

The truth is, Janisse Ray is on a mission to turn you into a quiet, under-the-radar revolutionary, and if you read The Seed Underground, she just might succeed. At the very least, you will look at seeds—tiny, but vital to our survival —differently.

“A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help,” she writes. “Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener. It needs you.”

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/images/65CoverMedium.jpg

Abby Quillen wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Abby is a freelance writer in Eugene, Ore. She blogs at abbyquillen.com.

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April 8, 2013Filed Under: Gardening, Social movements Tagged With: Agriculture, Food, food heritage, Gardening, Heirloom Seeds, organic food movement, Seed Saving, Seeds

Wildlife-Friendly Food

By Abby Quillen

“Eating is an agricultural act.” – Wendell Berry

As you fly over the Midwest, you can look down on the seemingly endless patchwork of plots that make up much of our country. From the air, it’s striking how organized, clean, and antiseptic the nation’s farms look – almost more like factories than farmlands.

Humans have been farming for 10,000 years, but few of us have to think much about agriculture these days. Ninety percent of colonial Americans made their living in agriculture. Today less than two percent of us are farmers. Thus many people don’t think much about how farming has changed in the last 200 years.

For most of human history, farmers had no choice but to care for the health of the soil and ecosystems to some extent. Compost, manure, conservative tilling practices, crop rotation, beneficiary insects, and other natural allies were farmers’ only ways of ensuring healthy crops. But in the last century, petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides enabled farmers to buy fertility in bottles.

Today many consumers are concerned about the dangers of fertilizers and pesticides to human health. But one factor is often ignored: they and the “sterile” farming methods they’ve engendered have been disastrous to wildlife and ecosystems.

Today agriculture is the single biggest cause of habitat loss and endangered species. In the last century farmers across the nation have ripped out vegetation, cut down forests, eradicated insects, shot and killed predators, and filled in wetlands and streams. Wilderness is something increasingly contained in designated areas, not something tolerated on the farms and ranches that make up 40 percent of our nation.

Does it have to be this way? Can we protect the health of ecosystems and grow enough food to feed the world? Can we combine the unpredictable, fertile disorder of the wilderness with our craving for predictable, high-yield agriculture? Can farms be wilder?

I’ve been grappling with these questions for an article assignment over the last month, and in the process learning much about conservation and agriculture. I’ve gotten to talk to many interesting people on the subject and have been pouring over the writings of Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, and other thinkers, who’ve challenged notions of wild and tame.

I’ll share more about my article after it’s published. In the meantime, I thought you may like to know how you can support farmers who are protecting ecosystems, wildlife, and natural areas. A handful of eco-labels help consumers purchase food grown on farms that protect biodiversity. Some people call these labels “beyond organic”. If you don’t see them at your grocery store, consider asking the owner or manager to stock food certified by these organizations.

The Food Alliance

The Food Alliance launched its certification program in 1998 to designate producers and processors dedicated to social and environmental responsibility. To gain certification, farmers and ranchers must:

  • Conserve soil and water resources
  • Protect biodiversity and wildlife habitat
  • Provide safe and fair working conditions
  • Practice integrated pest management to minimize pesticide use and toxicity
  • Continually improve practices

To find Food Alliance Certified farms, ranches, processors, and distributors in your area, click here.

Salmon Safe

Salmon Safe certifies vineyards, ranches, and farms on the West Coast that are protecting endangered wild salmon and steelhead habitat. They require growers to:

  • Restore and protect waterways and wetlands
  • Prevent stream bank erosion and control sediment
  • Minimize the use of pesticides and contaminants
  • Keep livestock out of waterways

You can find out about some of the farms Salmon Safe has certified here and find a Salmon Safe wine here.

Demeter Biodynamic

Rudolf Steiner developed the concept of Biodynamic agriculture in 1924 in Germany, envisioning the farm as “a self-contained and self-sustaining organism”. In 1928 Demeter was formed in Europe to codify Steiner’s farming principles. Demeter requires farms and ranches to:

  • Avoid chemical pesticides and fertilizers
  • Utilize compost and cover crops
  • Set aside a minimum of 10% of total acreage for biodiversity

You can find a list of some Biodynamic farms here.

There are also a handful of excellent eco-labels that designate non-U.S. growers protecting wildlife and natural areas, including Bird Friendly, Fair Trade, and Rainforest Alliance.

You can find out more about all of these eco-labels and look up any that you see in the grocery store to make sure you can trust their claims at Consumer Reports’ greenerchoices.org.

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April 4, 2011Filed Under: Gardening, Health Tagged With: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Conservation, Demeter Biodynamic, Eco-Labels, Nature, Organic Agriculture, Organic Farming, Salmon Safe, Sustainable Agriculture, Sustainable Farming, The Food Alliance, Wilderness, Wildlife, Wildlife Conservation

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