As you begin to explore the issues surrounding our food system, you will probably hear someone claim that GMOs are evil because farmers are not allowed to save their seeds. And, perhaps, you'll hear a counter argument that farmers all buy hybrids nowadays so they can't save their seeds anyway. You might also hear about the consolidation within the seed industry - and THAT is a big deal for sure. You can see a diagram showing all of the recent seed company mergers here. And, of course, you'll probably hear people complaining that companies are patenting life - patenting the actual DNA in the seeds they sell.
So where does that leave me, the home gardener? The first few plants I planted were seeds that were given to me. I didn't think too much about where they came from. A friend, who is a committed seed saver, gave me a few more seeds and told me about a book - Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth - that explains how to save seeds. "Great!" I thought. "No problem!"
Then I wanted to plant a few more things. Nobody I knew had any spare seeds so I'd have to buy some. Uh-oh. Would I accidentally buy seeds from a company that is owned by Monsanto or one of the other seed giants? And how would I know which ones to avoid? I ended up buying seeds at my local organic nursery. They stock "Seeds of Change" brand seeds, so that is what I bought. I bought a lot of those seeds. Then I found out that the company is owned by M&M/Mars. A candy company made my organic seeds? Great. I'm not sure I'm very happy about that.
I'll cut to the chase for any other home gardeners out there. I am now buying seeds from Southern Exposure. I'm also buying a few from Kitazawa Seed Company, a company specializing in Asian varieties of veggies, for things I can't find from Southern Exposure. And there are other good seed companies out there - you just have to do a little bit of digging around. But back to my story.
These seed companies are essentially the gatekeepers that can decide what I can grow or if I can grow it. And, for the biotech companies, they get to decide if a particular variety is going to be available as a non-GMO AT ALL. A corn & soy farmer who does not plant GM seeds told me that he's had trouble accessing the seeds with the best genetics because those seeds are sometimes ONLY released as GM varieties. So these seeds are completely created with conventional plant breeding techniques, they are wonderful seeds, they give the farmer everything he wants, and the seed company decides that the only way the farmer is allowed to have that seed is if they put their GM trait into it as well. Thank goodness Monsanto hasn't gotten into GM vegetables quite yet, although they are certainly working on it (this week India put a hold on allowing GM eggplant and I know that GM cauliflower is in the works as well). Once that happens in the U.S., home gardeners will have the same problems farmers have now.
Shortly after I began gardening, I went to a fruit tree propagation workshop where the class members and instructors also brought seeds to share and trade. And I realized something - seeds are free!!! Plants are quite promiscuous, and they WANT to make seeds. Lots of seeds. Seed companies do not have to be the gatekeepers of seeds, and in fact, once upon a time, they weren't. And if you think about it - a seed company is going to try to produce a seed that grows well in most of the country, but local seed savers will try to produce seeds tailored to your specific climate. So perhaps seed saving is the way to go.
With that I began reading Seed to Seed and I realized something. Seed saving is a pain in the butt. It's amazing that our ancestors ALL did this. Perhaps they weren't as meticulous as the methods recommended in the book. For one thing, you have to let your plants go to seed if you want seeds. Some plants, like squash, peas, and beans, produce seeds in the form we eat them in so that's no problem. Others - like carrots and broccoli - don't. In some cases, letting your plant go to seed means sacrificing your ability to eat it. And it can mean leaving that plant in the ground longer, instead of harvesting it and planting something else in that spot. Furthermore, the book recommends saving seeds from a relatively large number of individual plants to maintain genetic diversity. Would I really grow 20 heads of broccoli, taking up about 20 square feet of my garden (or more), just so I can save their seeds?
If that isn't enough, you have to be concerned about who is pollinating what. Earlier this year I planted squash seeds from a few particularly tasty squashes I ate. Well, a number of different squash varieties can all breed with one another, so my squash seeds might have half their genes from any of the other cucurbits grown nearby. And the result might be delicious and edible - or not. We'll see. You have to worry about the same thing with the cabbage family, because a large number of plants (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, etc) are all the same species and they can interbreed no problem.
You can deal with the problem of cross-pollination in a number of ways if you want to save seeds. For example, you can put cages over the plants you are saving seeds from to keep the insects out (or you can put bags over several individual flowers to achieve the same purpose). Then you can hand pollinate your plants to make sure they are pollinated. You can even do "alternate day caging" if you have 2 varieties of something you want to save seeds from. This means putting a cage over one variety of plant one day, and then switching it the next day, so that insects only have access to one variety at a time. Wow. Did humans really bother with this for millennia? What a pain in the butt. Maybe it's possible to do if you have the right tools for it - and enough room to grow enough plants to maintain genetic diversity - but I don't think that I do. I can save seeds in cases where it's easy to do, and I think I'll start there.
But back to those seed companies. They can keep you from saving your seeds by selling hybrid seeds. If you save seeds from plants grown from hybrid seeds, the resulting seeds won't produce plants identical to the parent generation. If you want to save your seeds, you need to buy seeds that are "open-pollinated" (OP for short). I'm attempting to buy only OP seeds, but I'll definitely have a few hybrids, because two of my particular favorite veggies - baby turnips and sungold cherry tomatoes - happen to be hybrids.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with a seed company doing farmers and gardeners the favor of saving seeds and taking care to keep each variety pure and then charging for the seeds. And if we have many seed companies, we won't have a problem with seed companies as gatekeepers of which seeds and varieties we can grow. The problem comes with the consolidation of the industry, and the resulting ability of seed companies to keep certain genetics unavailable. That's where the issue of patenting life really comes into play. If Seed Company A does not want to produce a certain variety of seeds, I don't mind so much. If there's a demand for that variety, Seed Company B can produce it and sell it. Unless Seed Company A has a patent on the DNA. That's a problem.
Peter Pringle's book Food, Inc (no relation to the movie) does a great job explaining the current environment of seed patenting (see a synopsis of the book at the link). In some cases, companies have tried to patent - or successfully patented - seed genetics found naturally in nature. And then they've actually sued other people for growing it and selling it. That's insane! And even when companies have developed certain genetics themselves via conventional plant breeding or genetic modification, the use of patents has contributed to the consolidation and anticompetitive environment within the seed industry. When a larger company wants to access genetics that are patented by a small company, they acquire the small company. And Monsanto's played quite a game by using licensing agreements to allow other companies to insert their patented genetics into seeds in such a way that they put their competition at a significant competitive disadvantage (see details at the link). The U.S. Dept of Justice is now officially investigating Monsanto for anticompetitive behavior.
A while back, I attended a biotech conference in which someone asked a panel of biotech industry experts about the resulting loss of biodiversity from our modern seed industry. The questioner mentioned something like 4000 varieties of apples, saying today we have far fewer varieties. The answer from the panel was: "Do we really need 4000 varieties of apples?" And they followed that up by saying that there's nothing to worry about because Monsanto (or another large multinational company) owns all of the genetics to many varieties of plants, so there's no real loss. If they feel we need one of these lost varieties in the future, don't worry. They'll sell it to us. That's a rather arrogant and irresponsible attitude to take.
Biodiversity might be a poor strategy for a large company that controls the seed market. Just think - if you have to market 4000 varieties of apples, you've got a huge marketing budget and lots of R&D expenses. It's much easier to pick a few good ones and just market those. But biodiversity is nature's insurance system. When the tomato blight hit the entire east coast last year, certain varieties of tomatoes resisted the blight better than others. I would hate to lose that insurance system just because it's bad for a multinational company's bottom line.
