by Ray, Janisse
“If a blossom fills with rain, it will be ruined,” Cavagnaro says now. “Try to get the first blossom of a plant pollinated before a rain.”
Cavagnaro moves to another set of taped blooms and begins the process anew. “There’s not a remote chance that all of these we’re pollinating today will set fruit. The first successful pollination on a plant will take. Then the others fall off.”
In fact, the odds of success with pollinating by hand increase by pollinating the first female flower and removing any fruit that chances to set afterward on subsequent female flowers. In some melon varieties, only a small fraction of pollinations set fruit. Sometimes you can pollinate a dozen female flowers before one sets. Sometime it’s much easier to isolate than hand-pollinate.
Then the pollinator waxes philosophic. “Squash plants are smarter than people,” Cavagnaro says. “They only take on one project at a time. The plant says, ‘I’ve got enough to do.’ If it’s a big squash, like a Hubbard, it may only make one fruit per vine. “The squash says, ‘I’ll make a helluva squash.’ Or it finishes one squash and then says, ‘Now I can make another.’ That’s the psychology of squash.”
— 17 —
the bad genie
is out of the bottle
ONE DAY IN 1998, a letter carrier stuck an envelope in Percy and Louise Schmeiser’s mailbox. The return address was Monsanto.
The Schmeisers were not expecting mail from Monsanto, the multinational responsible for 90 percent of the world’s genetically modified seeds. They had never planted Monsanto seed, nor had any other dealings with the company.
Percy Schmeiser was a farmer, yes. Since 1947, he’d been growing canola on the Saskatchewan plains of Canada. But Percy Schmeiser was more than a canola farmer. He and his wife were seed developers, saving the best of their crop year to year, slowly breeding seed adapted to the Canadian plains and to the microclimate of their own thousand acres.
All of that ended with the surprise letter.
The letter stated that, following an investigation, Monsanto had good reason to believe that Schmeiser had planted Monsanto’s patented seed, a GM canola, without a license on 250 acres of land and that this violated Monsanto’s proprietary rights. To avoid legal action, Percy and his wife would have to pay the world’s largest producer of GM crops for use of their product. At $115 per acre, Schmeiser owed Monsanto $27,850. There were three additional dictates: Monsanto had the right to take samples from Schmeiser’s crop for the next three years in order to test for their canola; Schmeiser was forbidden from disclosing the terms and conditions of the agreement (if it could be called that) to any third party; and Monsanto, at its sole discretion, had the right to disclose the settlement terms to third parties.
Surely there had been a mistake. Schmeiser had never planted Monsanto canola. He saved and planted his own seed. But Monsanto had came along and tested some canola growing out by the road, and the canola contained their patented genes. The Schmeisers had been afflicted with something known as “genetic drift,” the billowing of seed-matter by wind from neighboring farms onto their own.
Percy Schmeiser explained this. Monsanto didn’t care. Its patented genetic material had been found on Schmeiser property and the Schmeisers should pay. Refusing to be coerced, Schmeiser said no, sorry, and the case went to trial. Meanwhile, Schmeiser turned around and sued Monsanto for $10 million for libel, trespass, and the contamination of his fields with Roundup-Ready canola. That lawsuit did not proceed through the courts.
In 2001, the Federal Court of Canada ruled in favor of Monsanto, determining that patent law supersedes the rights of farmers to save and grow seed and setting legal precedent. One of the key factors in the decision was that Schmeiser “knew or ought to have known” about the GM canola in his field. In other words, a corporation like Monsanto that cannot control how its gene is spread is not responsible for it—farmers are. If Monsanto plants were found on the Schmeiser’s farm, then the Schmeisers were guilty of patent infringement. By this time, costs in damages and legal fees were in the hundreds of thousands. Percy Schmeiser, a hapless farmer, had fallen victim to the strategy of multinationals to gain control of our seed supply. Farmers in the United States have faced similar legal battles, one against Indiana soybean farmer Vernon Bowman, in which Monsanto won a similar ruling.
Schmeiser didn’t back down. His appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal was heard in May of 2002 in Saskatchewan. The appellate court upheld the earlier ruling, so Schmeiser asked to put his case before the Supreme Court. In 2004, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that Monsanto’s patent was valid but that Schmeiser did not have to pay penalties to Monsanto, because the farmer did not profit from the GM canola.
I heard Percy Schmeiser tell his story in 2005 when he traveled to Vermont at the invitation of State Representative David Zuckerman—a young Progressive Party member, organic farmer, and chair of the House Agriculture Committee.
Percy Schmeiser was a soft-spoken, seventy-four-year-old, unassuming man. He wore glasses and his hair was thinning. He stood on a low stage in the concrete-floored social hall of First Congregational Church in Brattleboro, before a card table that held his notes and a plastic cup of water. He spoke of the tremendous stress his family had endured, the debt they had incurred, and the breakdown of their rural social fabric as neighbor farmers who stood up for the Schmeisers received the same Monsanto letter.
“The whole issue for Monsanto is contamination,” said Schmeiser. “It’s like secondhand smoke.” He adjusted the sweater he wore over a collared shirt. “Contaminate and people don’t have a choice.”
“The right of farmers to use seeds from year to year should never be taken away,” he said, in a clipped Canadian brogue. “Some of the best wheat we have in Canada is developed by farmers, not companies.”
The previous year, 2004, Schmeiser took a total of 161 flights in an effort to call attention to the hazards of GM seeds. “We’re going to go down fighting for the rights of farmers,” he said. “We don’t want to leave a legacy of our land and our food full of toxins.”
We can blame the wind. It steals pollen from Monsanto’s flowers and brings it over into our fields. Then Monsanto comes after us, as if we were thieves, because it has found its patented genetic material among our crops. We didn’t ask for the monster’s babies to crawl into our arms.
Genetic drift is a handy lever to force farmers to use a corporation’s seeds. And when it decides to whip a farmer into shape, into lining up to buy corporate seeds, it commences with threat. Then lawsuit. Out-of-court settlement. Or court.
By 2005, Monsanto had filed ninety lawsuits against U.S. farmers for patent infringement, meaning GM genes found in the fields of farmers that had not paid for the right, and Monsanto had been awarded over $15 million. I’ll tell you here and now: We have a screwed-up justice system. These lawsuits and seeds are nothing less than corporate extortion of American farmers, said Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, as reported in the Seed Savers Summer Edition 2005.
Not only is the wind responsible for its invisible passenger, GM pollen, but so are the digestive tracts of birds and animals, our own clothing and shoes that attract seeds in crevices and hems, and the cheeks of mice and squirrels. All these spread genetic pollution. We can blame food aid too; somehow Oaxaca, hotspot for maize diversity, became contaminated with GM corn—despite Mexico’s ban on it. By its very nature, pollen travels, and halting the advance of pollen from GM seed is impossible.
Imagine the scenario of transgenic contamination combined with the terminator gene. If you’ve never heard of a terminator gene, let me explain it. To prevent gardeners and farmers from growing out new patented varieties, scientists developed a method of rendering these seeds infertile, further busting up what has been for at least twelve thousand years a self-sustaining food supply.
Let’s say you grow a zucchini. It’s geneti
cally engineered to taste like cotton candy. Every mother in the world rejoices because her kid is going to love this stuff. They go crazy for cotton-candy zucchini. So Mama Cuckoo, let’s call her, saves the seed so she can plant a few hills of zucchini in the backyard. They don’t come up. She plants more. Those don’t germinate either! Little does she know, last year’s plant contained a gene that causes the very seed she’s trying to plant to abort itself, a terminator gene. She’s trying to plant dead seeds. The only way Mama Cuckoo can serve more of the high-class zucchini her child raves about is a) to buy it from the grocer or b) to hurry to the hardware store and purchase some of the corporate seed. Either method involves a purchase. However, if Mama Cuckoo grew open-pollinated seed, she would be able to produce zucchini that tastes and looks and acts like zucchini. She could save their seed, plant the seed, and grow more zucchini—round and round, ring-around-the-rosy, without expenditure. Possibilities for her include Black Beauty, a variety found in seed catalogs from the 1930s; Constata Romanesca, a Roman ribbed variety; Mogango Liso, a round Brazilian one. She could grow Grey, Golden Bush, White Volunteer.
Use of a suicide gene begs a question: If hybrids don’t necessarily grow true, why did companies need terminator genes? Again I turned to my pal Tom Stearns of High Mowing Organic Seeds for the answer.
“Many of the genetically engineered crops are not hybrids,” he said. “They’re open-pollinated. Soybeans, for example. There are millions of acres, billions of dollars. The terminator gene would prevent soybean farmers from saving their GM seeds.”
At any rate, food activists decried the suicide gene. In 1999 the Rockefeller Foundation, which had funneled tens of millions into biotechnology research, asked Monsanto’s board of directors to renounce it. In 1999, Monsanto chairman Robert Shapiro released a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation “making clear our commitment not to commercialize gene protection systems that render seed sterile.” So Terminator was terminated, or at least we hope so. Geri Guidetti of The Ark Institute blogged in 2000 that over thirty terminator-type technology patents have been awarded and are owned by giant gene companies.
Schmeiser visited Vermont at a perfect time. The Farmer Protection Act, a state bill addressing farmers’ property rights concerning seed, had just passed the Senate and had moved to the House. It had three tenets:
1.Seed companies wouldn’t be able to sue Vermont farmers for genetic drift.
2.In the event a Vermont farmer was sued, the court case would take place in the state. (Monsanto had been forcing farmers to trek to their headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, for court cases, at great expense.)
3.Most important, the person who owned the seed would bear the consequence of that seed. In Vermont at least, Monsanto would be responsible for genetic drift.
The Vermont legislature passed the Farmer Protection Act, but it was subsequently vetoed by the Republican governor at the time, Jim Douglas. However, many other states and municipalities also began taking local charge of GMO (genetically modified organism) contamination and also creating GM-free zones. In 2004, Mendicino County, California, inaugurated a ban on the propagation of GM crops and animals. Montville, Maine, banned GM cultivation in 2008. The movement gained so much traction that Monsanto began convincing states to pass preemptive legislation that prohibits such bans.
In 2005, the Schmeisers sent Monsanto a bill for $660 to sweep up more genetic contamination they had discovered. In 2008, Monsanto settled out of court and paid the costs of cleaning up the contaminated field.
The issue is bigger than the property rights of farmers. Genetic meddling is humans playing God, and GM technology was forced on America without us taking the time to fully understand its ramifications. For now, in this country, GM foods are among us, governed by companies that appear to be above the law.
Remember Percy Schmeiser. Put out of business by a little pollen floating on the wind, he lost almost fifty years of his farm’s legacy. “There’s no such thing as coexistence,” I heard him say. “The GM gene is the dominant one. If you introduce GMs, there is no turning back.”
We have not only introduced GMs, we have fallen heedlessly and haplessly into their traps. Are we going to be able to save the diversity of food? In this David versus Goliath battle, do the bad guys win?
— 18 —
tomato man
TOMATO MAN HAS A BIG GARDEN in a filing cabinet. He’s got a little garden in the yard. He grows only tomatoes in his garden. He’s got yellows and reds, oranges and streakeds. He’s got stuffers and dryers, plums and cherries, currants and purples, grapes and pastes.
The garden in the filing cabinet is in little brown manila packets, tucked in file folders, everything labeled. It is tidy and well-organized, probably because Tomato Man is Dr. Charles Case, professor of sociology at Augusta State College, who has one foot behind a desk and the other behind a rototiller. In and out of the lecture hall, Dr. Case is a big believer in trimming the suckers. He even grades his tomatoes, and sometimes they flunk.
Although he should be expecting us, Dr. Case is not home when Raven and I arrive at a small, vinyl-sided house on one lot of land near Augusta, Georgia, 115 miles from our home. Beyond are first-growth woods. Soon Dr. Case pulls up. We’re standing beside the real garden, looking. He says he’s been to the store for Sevin dust, a chemical insecticide. His gardener, whom I’ll call Jolene, is with him. This is her day to work.
“I bet you’re amazed at how small this is,” says Dr. Case. “When you wrote that you wanted to come see my ‘operation,’ I snickered. I don’t have an operation.” His blue T-shirt says AUGUSTA STATE STUDY ABROAD. On his face is a significant amount of gray stubble. He wears a Carhartt hat.
I read about Dr. Case in the Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook, where he was offering 312 varieties of open-pollinated heirloom tomatoes. The purpose of my visit is to see how he grows his tomatoes and get advice on which varieties to plant. The previous season I tested 22 open-source varieties of tomatoes in my hot, humid south Georgia garden. With the exception of cherry tomatoes, we did not harvest one fruit, mostly because of diseases—Southern blight and wilt—which are destroying our ability to grow our sweetheart vegetable.
“Since 1985, I have grown more than one thousand varieties of heirloom tomatoes,” says Dr. Case. “Over three hundred of these have been highly successful. Well, let me show you around.”
The operation is three different plots—one in the front yard, two in the back, the largest about thirty by sixty feet. One garden is shaded. Each tomato plant is from 2.5–5 feet tall, staked to a 5-foot-tall PVC pipe. The ground is completely weed-free, the bare dirt sandy and gray.
“I was pure organic,” says Dr. Case. He must know by the way I look that I’m antichemical. “I tried various stuff. Texas Pete bug spray, soap. None of it worked worth a damn. So I’ve resorted to insecticides. We don’t use herbicides. The weed control is rototilling and hand-weeding. And we use manure from the horses next door.”
The plots are fenced to keep out deer, posts of PVC pipe strung with twine. Tied to the twine is a bunch of trash—large plastic bags, folded rectangles of tinfoil, and Styrofoam plates drawn with faces. Jolene—less than five feet tall, with plastic clogs on her feet—points out that each face is different.
“That’s what you call a bored professor,” she says. She is about fifty. Dr. Case looks to be in his late sixties.
“I know. I’ve got the summer off,” he replies. He is trying hard to relax.
“So you have over 300 varieties of tomatoes here?” I ask.
“The secret to our 312 varieties is that we grow just a quarter of the collection, 80 varieties, each year. I’ve found that four-year-old seeds germinate about as well as new seeds.”
“We grow four plants of each variety every fourth year,” Dr. Case says. “Since they are self-pollinating, we’re not so worried about gene pools.” (He refer
s to the need to grow a minimum number of plants in order to maintain genetic diversity.) “Cross-pollination happens anyway from time to time. They claim bees will even force a blossom open to get at it.”
Each plant is marked with a name; labels are plastic detergent bottles cut in squares, lettered with enamel paint that comes in a marker. One variety is already ripening. It is Red Alert. “This one is about fifty-five days,” says Dr. Case. “For the first week that’s your pride and joy.” We walk along verdant rows, reading labels: GOLDEN QUEEN, BLACK MOUNTAIN PINK, COUSIN ROY’S STUFFING TOMATO, JITOMATE BULITO.
Either Jolene or Dr. Case has a story about each. Phyra has hundreds of cherry tomatoes. Napoli is a prolific paste. Liberty Bell is a stuffer. Reisentraube, “giant bunch of grapes” in German, is a drying tomato. Little Pink is a great tomato but it’s yellow, not pink, although it blushes slightly.
The professor gives us a quick lesson on the two growth habits of tomatoes, determinate and indeterminate. “Determinate stems end with fruit and blooms,” he says. “The fruits all ripen at once and then the plant dies. That’s their strategy. They get done in a big hurry and die. At least that’s the way they work for me here.” He looks around and moves to a plant nearby. “Tip Top slicer, this is a prototypical determinate. And Wayahead here is perfect example of determinate too. Indeterminate stems end with shoots. They sprawl and tend to keep setting fruit until frost.”
Not to be confusing, but it turns out that tomatoes are also delineated by the kind of leaf they have. Most tomatoes, like Eva Purple Ball and thousands of others, have the leaves we associate with tomatoes, flat and serrated. But others, like Prudens Purple, have foliage that closely resembles their cousins the potatoes—darker green, thicker, and somewhat puckered. Dr. Case tells me that potato-leafs have to be grown in isolation, because they will cross with regular-leaf tomatoes. They need one hundred feet between varieties to not cross. So he grows one potato-leaf variety per year. His darling is Brandywine.