Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes: Seeds have been very much on my mind of late. Largely, it would seem, because of the hours recently spent in the greenhouse painstakingly inserting them into peat pots and flats of potting soil. Planting seeds, to me, smacks of something magical. Is it too much to say that gardening requires a faith in seeds? While much is made in these technological times of the amazing amounts of information stored in tiny computer chips, a technological feat admittedly deserving of our respect, I am actually much more in awe of the unbelievable wealth of information, the awesome energy, and the life force that is encapsulated in a tiny seed. And I am fascinated by what seems to be the infinite variety of forms seeds take. While seeds all basically serve the same function, propagating the parent plant, they are amazingly unlike one another in size, shape, and coloring. There are, for instance, the easily recognizable seeds: the yellow or white kernels of corn, the black, brown and white beans, and the oblong black and multicolored seeds of sunflowers, these recognizable to us because it is actually the seeds of these plants that we eat. But there are the seeds that are not immediately recognizable: the tiny ball bearing-like seeds of okra and cilantro, the bone-colored tear drop shape of the cubanelle pepper seed, the flat elongated, bi-colored seeds of fennel, the flat oblong, bone-colored seed of the cucumber, the very irregular, roughly circular, craggy brown-and-bone colored seeds of chard and beets, the minute oblong brown seeds of bibb lettuce, and the tiny matchstick-like, bi-colored seed of the marigold. Indeed there are far more variations in the appearance of seeds than there are words to describe them. And there seems to be no relationship between the size or shape of a seed and the kind of plant it will ultimately produce. The seeds just described are not immediately recognizable to us because they propagate vegetables whose leaves, root, or fruit we eat, rather than the seeds themselves.
While I was once rather undiscriminating about my source for seeds, I have become much more selective as my understanding of the advantages of heirloom varieties has grown. This has been accompanied by a growing awareness of how industrialized even seeds for the home gardener have become. A few seasons ago, I was puzzled by some bush beans I had grown, which, to my surprise, produced a cluster of beans identical in size and shape, all maturing at the same time, then ceased production. Obviously, it came to me, these are industrial type beans programmed to meet the rigorous, uniform standards of the supermarket, and to be harvested all at once by machine. Of course, I never tried that variety again since my preference is for bean varieties developed for their flavor, texture, and productivity. Burpee I now regard as the General Motors of seeds, with all the negatives that implies. Instead, I favor small seed producers such as Fedco Seeds, Cook’s Garden, and New England Seeds, producers who are not just in business but are also imbued with a mission—propagating and preserving valuable seed varieties, helping to preserve what is best in the plant gene pool, and ultimately what is best in our food. Unfortunately, these small seed producers are becoming themselves an endangered species as the larger corporate seed companies are steadily buying them up, or attempting to capture their market share by seeming to offer similar products. The only thing we can do to protect the small seed suppliers is to patronize them. As in everything else, the “corporatization” of seeds can only lead to a mundane uniformity, the narrowing of choices, and the sacrifice of quality and value to the sacrosanct bottom line.
An even more insidious threat to our supply of seeds also emanates from corporate America, in particular the behemoth Monsanto. Our agricultural seeds, whether they be vegetables or grains, have come down to the present as largely manmade creations. It is through centuries of selective breeding that mankind has painstakingly produced a vast panoply of plants to serve its food needs. Now with the new practices of genetic modification instituted by corporations like Monsanto and Aventis, we are beginning to produce seeds of a very different kind. Seeds are for the first time in history being genetically engineered rather than produced through selective breeding. As animal and even human genes are randomly inserted into the chromosomes of plants, fish, and animals, our corporations are beginning to produce transgenic life forms, what we might call "frankenfoods.” Now farmers can order seeds with such chilling names as “Roundup Ready Soybeans.” Of course, a recent New York Timesarticle reported on the emergence of superweeds resistant to Roundup, and a subsequent editorial strongly discouraged such heavy reliance on the herbicide. But the effort to modify seeds to all sorts of different agricultural goals is likely to continue. For instance, Monsanto’s new RoundupReady seeds propagate the parent plant but with a difference. As a result of several gene alterations, plants from these seeds now have an immunity to the herbicide Roundup, thus enabling its liberal use in ridding fields of weeds. Now farmers can order seeds with such chilling names as “Roundup Ready Soybeans.” Since the effects of genetic modification have not yet been carefully studied, we are entering into an uncharted world fraught with human health hazards, environmental hazards, and socioeconomic hazards. The nature of these hazards is discussed and documented at great length in such books as Food, Inc. edited by Karl Weber and The End of Food by Paul Roberts. Even more disturbing, not only are transgenic seeds beginning to dominate huge swaths of food production world wide, but many of these seeds have been patented, giving the ownership of these new varieties of seeds to their corporate creators, who forbid farmers from collecting seed during their harvests to be used for future crops. In this new age of patented seeds, farmers must buy their seeds each season—from the owner of the patent, Monsanto. Seeds in this Brave New World cease to be part of the “public good,” which is how they have always been viewed. Instead, they have become intellectual property, something that can be rigidly controlled and managed for maximum profit. Should a wheat seed, the product of mankind’s selective breeding over the millennia, become, after a one-time genetic modification, the intellectual property of a corporation? Our Supreme Court apparently thinks so (but then Justice Thomas, who wrote the opinion, apparently served with Monsanto before taking his court seat).
Speaking of courts, I am reminded of a court case a few years ago for which, in my capacity as an authority on kilim rugs, I was asked to serve as an expert witness. Two pillow- and rug-making companies had used virtually the same motif in their lines. One had copyrighted what it called its own “tribal motif” and was suing the other for infringing on the copyright. The problem, from my point of view, was that the design at issue was obviously an ancient motif. In fact, I was able to trace it back over 800 years to a tribal group in Central Asia, The motif had probably existed even longer than that in Outer Mongolia. Should a weaving company, by making some minor alterations in the palette and design, rightfully claim to hold the copyright on a motif that had evolved over the centuries, the product of the hearts and minds of thousands and thousands of anonymous women in a nomadic tribe? To me seeds and tribal motifs are both part of our collective cultural heritage and hence in the public domain, where they should remain in perpetuity. As I perch on my stool sorting through seeds in the tranquility of the greenhouse, I, in my old-fashioned way, prefer not to think of seeds as mine…or yours…but rather ours. — Peter Davies
