The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

by Ray, Janisse

  There, in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the temperature is permanently below freezing, about 23°F. Refrigeration units lower the temperature further, to about -4°F. At this temperature, seeds stored in watertight and airtight foil packages last anywhere from fifty to two thousand years, depending on the type.

  No matter what tomorrow brings—be it natural disaster or civil unrest, war or industrial accident or atomic bomb, or even genetic tinkering gone awry—the Norwegians hope their ark is impenetrable. “Seeds are not just seeds,” said Jens Stotenberg, Norway’s prime minister, speaking of the new vault and at least paying lip service to the idea of seed saving, “but the fundamental building blocks of human civilization.”

  The Doomsday Vault is a gene bank, which, as Cary Fowler (Seed Savers Exchange board member at the time and executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an organization that actively promoted the vault) has pointed out, is a fancy word for a freezer. Faced with a dwindling diversity of crop plants and their wild relatives, gene banks are coming into favor as bomb shelters for agriculture.

  But the idea of a frozen vault in Scandanavia made one young farmer chuckle when he read about it. Daniel Botkin is cofounder of a three-acre family operation called Laughing Dog Farm in Gill, Massachusetts. In a blog entry he called the global gene bank “sexy.” “The bigger task,” he eloquently wrote, “is to decentralize society’s entire relationship to agriculture, seeds, food production, and food security.”

  Gene bankers want seeds to continue as badly as do the home seed guardians. Seeds, however, cannot be kept forever like stacks of gold ingots. Seed must be conserved in situ, on farms and in gardens. They die otherwise. A foolproof seed vault in the Arctic Circle, where seed copies are kept, may get us through a catastrophe, but is not reliable for long-term genetic preservation. Scientists estimate that half of the seeds in the 1,400 seed banks worldwide are in desperate need of being grown out.

  A garden is a living gene bank.

  Gene bankers tend to be suspicious of gardens. When seeds are grown out they risk exposure to environmental pressures, such as a colder or warmer or wetter or drier growing season, which may force adaptations on a plant. Those being grown out are subject to the risks of cross-pollination. And, of course, a disastrous enough pressure, like a hurricane, and the seeds could be destroyed or lost altogether.

  Gene banks are mostly interested in preserving genetic material. As Gary Nabhan explained in a 2005 interview with Arty Mangan of Bioneers, “Gene banks are genetic conservation projects.” Gene banks do nothing to spread resources that, as Nabhan declares, were historically shared in systems of reciprocity. Traditional societies traded seeds to keep a variety going. For the Cherokee nation, for example, November was the Month of the Trading Moon (nu da de qua), a time of swapping between towns and tribes, and one must assume that the Cherokee, understanding the importance of trading in order to enlarge and enliven genetic resources, would swap seeds during the Trading Moon.

  Gardeners, especially seed savers, are preserving names, stories, heritage, place, cuisine. Their aim is to retain the “culture” in “agriculture,” rather than stripping it away, scientifically reducing it to mere germplasm. Gardeners want to regenerate seeds as often as possible, because seeds mean food and because gardeners often welcome adaptations.

  The gene bank school of security is akin to people who think we’ll be safer with a bigger military, more locks on the door, and a gun under the pillow. The Nabhan school of thought, on the other hand, believes that we’re safer when we’re out in the world, interacting with and attempting to understand the world and each other.

  On a national level, the USDA maintains gene banks as part of a program called the National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), whose mission is to acquire, preserve, evaluate, document, and distribute crop germplasm. However, the system is a network—as it freely admits—of federal, state, and private entities; “private industry underwrites selected projects,” admits its website. If one reads the mission statement really closely, small farmers will not see themselves in it. NPGS is developing “new knowledge and technology,” meaning that they believe that time-honored, simple, grassroots technology is not enough. NPGS believes in “a competitive food economy.”

  Mainly the NPGS doesn’t bother with penny-ante growers like me; they deal with seed companies or university scientists who need stock for breeding. But recently I was able to talk the system out of another seed I’d lost.

  Remember the Jack bean—that inch-long, eyeball-like bean, like a black-eye on steroids—that my grandmother had given me when I was a little girl? I could not find it in any source I checked. John Swenson told me that the bean was curated at the Southern Plant Genetic Resources Conservation Unit in Griffin, Georgia. “I am looking to obtain an accession of Canavalia ensiformis, commonly known as Jack bean,” I wrote. “I see that you have this variety in your Taxa list. How could I go about obtaining this?” Brad Morris wrote back that he would need to know what type of research I was planning and the name of my organization.

  I had a ruse ready:

  I’d like to do some research on the possibility of using the bean as a mulch, either a living mulch, or perhaps the breakdown crop in no-till agriculture. Perhaps the bean could be scythed after growth is complete, so that it fixes nitrogen and also becomes the mulch that stays on the ground.

  I want to experiment with it in a larger organic gardening system, such as a quarter-acre, to try to determine its value in the South in cover-cropping for both nutrients and water retention. Since it is native to India, I am interested in its potential in the southern United States. We are seeing dramatic changes in climate as a result of global warming and climate destabilization, and we are looking at possibilities for the future.

  I am interested only in the white-seeded form of Canavalia ensiformis, also called horse bean, Overlook, and sometimes sword bean. I will experiment with eating the young pods of the plant, although in large amounts the mature beans are said to be toxic. I also want to see how farm animals react to them as feed.

  In the end, I didn’t write any of that. Did I really intend to experiment with our goats? Or my family? Instead, I wrote a simple request. “I am a nature writer and I am doing a project on heirloom seeds. Jack bean was the first bean my grandmother gave me when I was a kid. I would like to grow them again and I was given your contact info as a place to obtain them. Do I need to outline a study or is it enough that I am a writer and would like to grow these beans again?”

  When the beans arrived, a little card with them said the accession had come from Costa Rica.

  I have grown Jack beans every year since. Their story is relevant to my own. It helps define me. I’m exultant that a gene bank kept them alive during my own climate crisis, when the seas rose around me, and I’m pleased that it returned them to me when I was ready to take care of them again.

  — 28 —

  grassroots resistance

  WE EARTHLINGS FIND OURSELVES at a crossroads, with our lofty ambitions grappling with environmental limits. The limits are so imminent that author and contrary farmer Gene Logsdon predicts that the most popular vacation spot of the future will be the backyard. The time is perfect, then, to become part of a beautiful uprising to maintain all options for feeding ourselves.

  Every day I get news of resistance, not just the thousands upon thousands of gardeners who are quiet revolutionaries but the activists. For one thing, grassroots seed banks are springing up across the country and world. Most operate with a membership that grows out a plant, saves its seeds, and with them replenishes the bank’s supply.

  Charlotte Hagood and her friend Dove Stackhouse started the Sand Mountain Seed Bank in Alabama. Their bank is a collection of seeds that either originated in or naturalized to the Sand Mountain area of northeast Alabama and the tip of northwest Georgia. Bonnie’s Best tomato hails from Union Springs
, for example. The Sand Mountain Seed Bank, like most others, is not only a repository of the seeds of aging gardeners; it’s a source where gardeners can get a start of legendary bioregional, open-pollinated varieties. Membership is inexpensive, ten dollars a year, because this is a homegrown operation. It’s a labor of love.

  Hagood laughed with me recently about her home state. “Alabama is so far behind,” she said to me, “it’s gonna be ahead when things crash. It has sort of a culture still here.” She has been busily gathering up the remains of that food culture and keeping it alive until it is needed. The hope of Hagood and Stackhouse, who lead seed-saving workshops, is that once again White Half-runner beans and Choctaw Sweet Potato squash will be commonplace on the dinner table and that Alabamians will be proud of their food heritage. The seed bank provides a place “where the legacy of our ancestors can literally be kept alive,” Hagood said.

  On a larger scale, the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association has started One Seed at a Time, an organic seed bank devoted to Southeastern biodiversity. In addition, Southern Seed Legacy, currently housed at the University of North Texas in Denton, is banking seeds for the region. Southern Seed Legacy is the brainchild of two University of Georgia professors, Virginia Nazarea, anthropologist and author of Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers, and her late husband Robert Rhoades. It too is a member-driven organization; a third of a member’s seed harvest is returned to the bank and a third is passed along to another person.

  For years Southern Seed Legacy operated out of the University of Georgia and was run mostly by graduate students. Every year they advertised a seed swap. One autumn Saturday, Raven and I traveled to one in steady rain four hours north, almost to Athens. We kept hoping that rain wouldn’t be falling in Crawford, Georgia, where the swap was to be held at the Nazarea-Rhoades farm, Agrarian Connections. There, before his death, Rhoades collected historic farm buildings that were in different stages of restoration.

  But it was raining, and in the deluge the swap was a bust. A few people erected colorful but soggy canopies and had small handfuls of seeds out to trade or sell. I walked around once, huddled under an umbrella. I walked around again. I perused Southern Seed Legacy’s collection and watched an old couple drive up in a rickety truck and drop off sprouted garlic. I bought six tomatillo plants and we got back in our cars and drove the dismal four hours home.

  In many ways, however, the seed swap was a gigantic success. At least a hundred people, many of them young, had come to check out the scene. Despite the nasty weather, some hardy believers were grilling barbecue for lunch. A band called the Roughbark Candyroaster Band was supposed to play. Everybody there was excited about genetic preservation. They braved even winter rains to be there.

  Across the country, in state after state, bioregion after bioregion, the same thing is happening. People are standing up to guard seeds.

  Seed banks have been given a novel twist in some areas of the country. These are seed libraries. Local seed groups deposit packages of seeds in racks or card catalog file drawers at public libraries. Library users are allowed to “check out” the seeds, the same way they would check out books, videos, or magazines. The check-out time is a growing season, and at the end of the season the patron “returns” seed to the library.

  In some cases there are branch libraries at farms and at community centers. Volunteers stock the seed shelves and raise money to buy new varieties of seeds. They hold seed-saving orientations for new library patrons, not to mention seed-starting workshops and farm workdays. Some of them are part of the Transition Town movement and some are people who understand that systems we have relied on are collapsing. Some of them are stockpiling, others are attempting to identify varieties that do particularly well in their locales.

  There’s the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) in San Francisco and a very organized and impressive one in Richmond, the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, to name two.

  When scientists at New Mexico State University announced plans to genetically engineer chili peppers in an attempt to make the industry more profitable, students organized a group called Occupy Green/Red Chile. The students are smart and well-spoken. They are determined. They’re organizing petition drives and marches. “Everyone cares about this because in New Mexico chile isn’t just a food, it’s your culture,” student Jessica Farrell told a reporter in 2011. “To secure the long-term protection of the farmers and the protection of consumers in terms of culture, there is no room for a genetically engineered seed.”

  Since March of 2011, residents of five small towns in Maine—Sedgwick, Blue Hill, Penobscot, Trenton, and Hope—voted to declare “food sovereignty” in their villages by passing “Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinances.” State regulations favor industrial agriculture and have forbidden the sale of certain foods, like fresh milk or locally slaughtered meat. One ordinance proposed that “Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing.”

  “Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance,” resident Mia Strong told a reporter. “I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food.”

  The resistance takes many forms and the resistance grows. Way back in 1996, Greenpeace protestors sprayed milk-based paint on soybean fields near Atlantic, Iowa, where Monsanto research was taking place.

  Outside the United States, a number of places, including Europe, require labeling. When GM foods are labeled, we’ll know if people get sick after consuming them. States, including California and Vermont, are working to pass labeling laws. In the absence of labeling, activists design labels to attach illicitly to GM foods.

  In 2006 Prince Charles set up the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, a charity that works to end farmer suicides in India. Mother Seeds in Resistance of Chiapas, Mexico, is protecting indigenous corn from contamination by GM seeds. The Clif Bar Family Foundation awarded $375,000 in grants to three doctoral fellows pursuing organic plant breeding.

  Guerrilla gardeners transform empty city lots overnight into gardens. Others make seedbombs, tight balls of wildflower seeds, and launch them onto highway medians, shoulders of sidewalks, and vacant lots in order to beautify their surroundings. Millions of people take seriously Patricia Klindienst’s notion that “we eat our history and our politics every day,” and they nourish themselves with organic, local, sustainable food.

  The list goes on and on. This and more is what happens when we take the stewardship of food crops into our own hands.

  Extinction is not an event, but a process. Extinction does not occur when the last germ of a certain seed loses its vitality. No, extinction occurs when a species can no longer evolve, a point called a genetic bottleneck. The loss of genetic resources—genetic erosion—both pauperizes and threatens human civilization. We are losing the plants that we have traditionally depended on, that built human society as we know it. Our food supply is in crisis, and to guard against catastrophe, either quick or prolonged, we need a good insurance policy. We need a bank account. We need a library card. We need quick action.

  — 29 —

  public breeding, private profit

  MOST MODERN PLANT BREEDING takes place at government-funded experiment stations like the one where Randy Gardner worked for over thirty years. The guy’s name makes me chuckle. I once knew an ichthyologist named Bass, and a chef named Baker. I’ve wondered about this, whether influence is at work here, or simply chance. When I visited, he had just retired as a tomato breeder at the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research Station, out on the interstate ten miles south of Asheville, North Carolina, a sprawling conglomeration of greenhouses, office buildings, and fields. Gardner doesn’t seem to mind meeting me at the experiment station during late afternoon on a Sunday. He’s still reporting to work as if he hadn’t retired.

  “I never had
much aspiration that I would ever become anything in life,” he said. “I planned on going into farming, since I was raised on a subsistence farm in Virginia.” But he found himself at Cornell studying pomology, or fruit cultivation, and after graduating in 1976, Gardner took a job in North Carolina, four hours from home. Western North Carolina farmers were suffering from the wane of burley tobacco as a cash crop in the mid-1950s and were looking for another. The region’s farmers were trying summer vine-ripened tomatoes, as opposed to tomatoes harvested when green. Breeding efforts for varieties adapted to green harvest centered in Florida and California. But North Carolina needed varieties bred specifically for its climate—days with temperatures in the mid-80s, nights in the 50s to 60s.

  Six years after his arrival in Asheville, in 1982, Gardner released his first F1 tomato hybrid, a variety he named (as carefully as he named his children) Mountain Pride. “I get in mind what I want in a hybrid and then I develop parent lines and then I cross these two together,” he said. “The first wilt resistance was developed in the 1950s. I went back to varieties from Florida and California that had wilt resistance and started there.”

  The work itself was done in large, sterile greenhouses and also in immaculate fields in the valley of the French Broad River. Mountain Pride, Gardner told me, was released openly to any seed companies that wished to produce seed. Castle Seed Company picked it up. Mountain Pride is still produced in limited quantity.

  After Mountain Pride, funding for practical breeding programs got slashed and public research programs were forced to come up with their own budgets. “There’s little grant money available to us researchers,” Gardner said. “So there’s no more open releases of hybrids. We give a hybrid exclusively to one company, with a royalty payback of 10 percent.”