by Ray, Janisse
“Yukon Supreme,” he said. “I’m not that good with names.”
“Sounds like a fine name to me. And besides the corn, what else?”
“I keep trying to improve the earliness and productivity of tomatoes,” he said. “In addition, I’m working on a smooth-skinned version of the wrinkly Jimmy Nardello peppers, which are sweet and productive, but hold dirt when harvested.” Jimmy Nardello Sweet Italian peppers appear on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste. In 1887 they were brought to Connecticut from Basilicata, Italy, by Jimmy Nardello.
“I tend to get a few more projects than I can manage,” Glenn said.
“Do you sell your developments?”
“No,” he said. “And I never would. If I create something that makes the world a little easier, then I’m happy. My goal is to get as many unique things in the hands of people who’ll benefit from them.”
Glenn’s greatest joy comes when he gets letters from people thrilled to have his seed. One woman ordered thirty packets of a pepper and Glenn called her to ask if he could simply send pepper seed in bulk. “Oh, no,” she said, “I want thirty packets because we’re going to give them out at our family reunion. The pepper is an old family heirloom and I’m excited to see them still available.” People are charmed to locate varieties they grew in their home countries. One man ordered five packets of a tomato that his great-grandfather, now in a nursing home, had developed in Texas.
An hour and a half passed quickly. Glenn worried that I was paying long distance charges and I told him that I had unlimited calling. I only had a couple more questions. I asked him about hope, were things getting better, were young people coming online who will keep food alive.
“I think that’s the case,” he said. “Otherwise, why would I keep beating myself up with a grueling schedule?”
In southern Iowa, Glenn is surrounded by the huge research farms of Monsanto. He is the only farmer in his county who is certified organic. The other day in the teachers’ lounge at school Glenn brought out his lunch, which included broccoli. Monsanto had just announced that it had developed a broccoli with many times the nutrients of standard broccoli grown under similar conditions.
“Is that the new broccoli?” a teacher asked.
“No, this is definitely not super-broccoli,” Glenn had said.
“I try to influence as many people as I can,” he tells me now. “I tell people, agriculture doesn’t have to be the way it is. There’s a way to farm that’s not destructive. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”
— 31 —
wheat anarchists
MAYBE IT’S THE ASHES that did it. Something turned Stephen Jones into a radical wheat breeder.
The ashes are those of William Jasper Spillman (1863–1931), the fifth wheat breeder at Washington State University, whose cremated remains were scattered in the fields where he labored. In his lifetime, Spillman warned against the industrialization of agriculture; as early as 1915 he wrote that tractors were too large. He coauthored The Law of Diminishing Returns in 1924, which said that if one input is increased while others remain static, overall returns will decrease over time. Fertilizer is one input. In terms of fertilizer, Spillman’s law means that yield will not continue to climb with successive applications.
Stephen Jones, wheat breeder, has spent years of his life in wheat that grows from the ashes of William Jasper Spillman. Spillman is Jones’s hero.
But the story is even more odd and complicated.
Spillman was born the exact month and year, maybe the same day, that yet another famous wheat breeder, Cyrus Guernsey Pringle, was being tortured for refusing to fight the Civil War. Pringle was drafted for service in July of 1863 and that fall was tortured for refusing to carry a weapon. Spillman was born in October.
Pringle was born in East Charlotte, Vermont, in 1838. As a young man he became intrigued not only with plants but with the nonviolent doctrine of the Quakers, and in 1863 was faced with a terrible test. Following his conscription into the Civil War, Pringle refused to perform all military duty. He was imprisoned and tortured, including being staked to the ground with his arms and legs outstretched in the form of an X. After a day of pain he reportedly wrote in his diary, “This has been the happiest day of my life, to be privileged to fight the battle for universal peace.”
Pringle also wrote in his diary, upon entering Virginia, forced to carry a weapon he would not use: “Seeing, for the first time, a country made dreary by the war-blight, a country once adorned with groves and green pastures and meadows and fields of waving grain, and happy with a thousand homes, now laid with the ground, one realizes as he can in no other way something of the ruin that lies in the trail of a war.”
President Lincoln personally petitioned Secretary of War Edwin M.
Stanton to parole Pringle. After his release Pringle returned to his botanical work as a plant collector, nurseryman, botanical surveyor, and plant breeder. The first variety of wheat he developed he named Defiance.
When I first heard of Stephen Jones, I was listening to the panel of “On-farm Vegetable Breeding” experts at MOFGA. The minute this guy stood up I sat straighter in my seat. Jones is tall with bright blue eyes and a smile big enough to cause charley horses in his face. He stands up with a big, happy smile and tosses a little bomb in the room, which is full of growers who have just partaken of the most amazing potluck in the history of hippiedom, sitting comfortable and well-fed in our seats.
“Right now agriculture is centralized, globalized, and completely screwed up,” Jones said. Not that Maine farmers didn’t already know that. But this language isn’t what they expected from a college man.
He switched on his slide show. “For ten thousand years on this planet we’ve had the right to save seeds for replanting,” Jones was saying, “and now the biotech industries are working day and night to take that away. That’s criminal and mind-boggling.”
“Biotech is about ownership,” he said. “That’s all it’s about. Owning the seed.”
Jones is a dryland wheat breeder (“dryland” meaning not irrigated) formerly based in the Palouse, thousands of acres of what was once native prairie and what is now the rolling wheat fields of the Northwest, encompassing parts of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. Jones comes from Washington State University (WSU), a land grant university that—like most land grants—typically and historically favors Big Ag.
Jones, however, who now directs the Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, located in the magnificent Skagit Valley just north of Seattle, believes in Small Wheat, small enough even for a sickle and hand-threshing. He also believes in local, in sustainable, in organic. (He attained organic certification for eleven acres on the WSU campus.) He’s breeding wheat for low-input ag, organics, and nitrogen-use efficiency. Jones, who is on the board of The Land Institute, is also involved in converting wheat to a perennial crop.
He is not the kind of plant breeder who develops a variety and sells it to a company that then promotes it to farmers and returns a royalty to the breeder’s institution. No, Jones takes seriously the idea of a public university and a public breeding program. He believes in the farmer as breeder, practicing what he calls evolutionary or participatory plant breeding. Defiance is his middle name.
The Washington Wheat Commission was pissed that Jones and colleagues went directly to wheat farmers and asked what traits they wanted in a wheat. They were so perturbed that in 2003 they staked Jones to the ground, metaphorically. The commission threatened to end its $1.66 million support for Jones’s projects, mainly winter wheat development. He came under pressure because he refused to introduce herbicide-resistant wheat. The herbicide-resistant trait, called Clearfield, was owned by the firm BASF, which touts itself on its website as the world’s leading chemical company.
“No, I don’t enter into contracts with for-profit corporations,” said the lone crusader. “
I have a problem with public breeding programs not being public.”
The story of wheat growing in this country has been the story of industrialization wildly triumphant. At MOFGA, I learned that in 1880, Maine, for example, grew forty thousand acres of wheat, producing 14 bushels to the acre. In the decades that followed, however, wheat-growing became chemical-intensive, concentrated, and machine-driven. The crop centralized in the Midwest and Maine fell off the USDA chart for wheat in 1946, when its production dipped below one thousand acres. Vermont went off the chart in 1931.
Washington produces the second-largest wheat harvest in the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s the Palouse of Washington produced high-yielding wheat, 100 bushels per acre—nonirrigated, nonchemical. The average chemical farm in Kansas today produces 36 bushels per acre. “We’re gonna starve if we keep growing wheat in Kansas,” said Jones.
According to him, growing wheat is easy (harvesting is not). Field trials these days are proving high yields in organic varieties. Madsen, for example, yielded 92 bushels an acre organic compared with 87 per acre chemical. Eltan grew out 115 organic and 105 chemical.
“Nobody can tell me we can’t feed the world on organics,” said Jones.
His credo is:
1.Organic agriculture needs separate breeding programs. (In field trials he’s found that the very worst wheat in organic can be the very best in chemical and vice versa.)
2.Farmers can breed their own damn varieties.
3.We need to diversify our fields and our science.
“Breeding takes time,” says Jones. “But basically wheat breeds itself.” Here are the steps.
1.Evaluate historical varieties. Not all made good bread or pasta.
2.Create variation. Select for it or let the environment select for it. Most important, utilize farmer knowledge and encourage farmer participation in the selection process. “I’m working with genetic wheat anarchists,” says Jones. He means the farmers.
3.Harvest, replant, select.
One of Jones’s success stories of evolutionary participatory plant breeding is young Lexi Roach, the granddaughter of Jim Moore, a organic wheat farmer in Kahlotus, Washington, whose farm receives only eight inches of rainfall a year. Lexi first became interested in wheat breeding when as a middle schooler she listened in on conversations that Jones had with her grandfather regarding breeding his own wheat. A few years later, she and her grandfather went to Western Washington University, where they crossed two varieties of dryland wheat that performed well on the Moore farm, producing new variation. For the next six years, they planted and stabilized the population. Lexi and her grandfather walked the rows together, pulling out weak plants and those with traits they didn’t want. In 2007, yield from the Lexi 2 variety beat the farm’s other top varieties by eight bushels per acre and in 2010 beat out fifty-nine other wheat varieties grown in a university-conducted trial.
In his last slide, Jones lists his research funders. This is the first time I have ever seen anybody do this—transparency and honesty. There is not a single corporation on the list. “No corporate influence,” Jones says.
For a hero, Jones has Spillman. Spillman had Pringle. And I have Jones.
— 32 —
a vanishing plant wisdom
HOW MANY PEOPLE still know that huckleberries have seeds, and they have glands at the base of their leaves—and that blueberries do not? How many still know that the pungency of wild peppers is related to altitude and that the higher the altitude, the greater the pungency? How many know that the scapes of wild onion, like garlic, are edible? Or that a tobacco hornworm becomes a Carolina sphinx moth?
It strikes me that what we are doing at this point—in what I am hopeful is our evolution from an industrial society into a sustainable one, from the Cenozoic into the Ecozoic—is reclaiming lost decades in the garden. “Gardening is managing our relationship with nature,” said writer and naturalist John Tallmadge. As biologist Robin Kimmerer said it, “We’re all reading from the same book—the land. The library of knowledge is in the land.”
Mostly we do not even know what we have lost. Most of us don’t know that a pumpkin vine, for example, puts out flowers most commonly in a specific order of male and female. Many of us don’t know what the male flower looks like as compared to the female. In fact, some of us don’t even know that a pumpkin begins as a flower. Or where a pumpkin even comes from.
Part of the joy of this work is in discovery. Not long ago, when I was selling seed packets at the Statesboro Farmers Market, a couple in their second year of gardening, on a tiny scale, asked me about okra. “We grew some last year,” they said. “We let it get big, then we couldn’t eat it.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Okra has to be picked young, when it’s tender. The longer it grows, the tougher it gets, until it’s inedible.”
“We figured if we let it grow we’d have more of it.”
“It’s counterintuitive but true,” I said. “You have to eat okra when it’s young.”
I recollected where I had learned the habits of okra. I had learned about it in any number of okra patches with which I had been associated as a kid, including that of Mr. Chavis, who lived in an empty building my dad owned and grew a patch of okra to sell. Someone at some point told me how to harvest okra, what size to cut. I also learned about okra in my mother’s kitchen, watching her process the vegetable for stewing or frying and then helping her do it. If a paring knife did not easily enter the pod when pressed against it, the pod was too hard and must be thrown in the scraps pail for the hogs.
What other okra wisdom is there? It makes you itch when you pick it. You should wear long sleeves and gloves, unless you have grown Clemson Spineless (guess where that variety was developed). Okra is not harvested all at once, like a head of lettuce. Okra keeps producing. Keeping up with the harvest is difficult, since okra pours out pods. Every second or third day is the optimal harvesting time. You’ll need a jackknife. Pick all pods that are ready. If you missed a pod during a previous harvest, cut it and throw it in the compost, unless you want to save it for seeds. If so, mark it with a string and leave it alone.
The job of a plant is to reproduce itself. When an okra plant throws some pods, and they are left to grow, and the seeds mature, that signals the plant to stop producing. Its work is done. But if you keep taking the fruit, the plant must keep making more, in hopes of completing its work on earth. An abundance of okra is a product of plant stress.
I don’t know everything there is to know about okra. Nobody does. The important thing is that I want to learn as much as I can.
When Jane Howell sent me the Marriage garlic, the letter told me her plant wisdom. “This is a hard-necked garlic,” she said. “It bears six to nine cloves around the hard neck. Then the small cloves will grow in size until they are big enough to make their own head.” How many people still know that some garlic varieties are hard-necked and some are soft-necked? That rocket and wild rocket are not the same plant, although both belong to the brassica family?
It seems that every day I am an archeohomesteader, uncovering lost wisdom, and not just about plants: how to render fat, how to prevent scours in bottle-fed calves, how to caponize roosters. At the same time, I recognize that a burgeoning science enlarges the body of agrarian knowledge, some of it in response to modern challenges, and I eagerly add this information: where to find native earthworms to use in vermiculture so as not to spread invasive species, how to prune muscadines most effectively, how to control mites in beehives naturally. To plow forward without appreciating traditional wisdom, however, is a mistake. Virginia Nazarea writes about “connecting people to places through ‘rivers of time’ so that the present becomes full of possibilities and the future not so daunting.” Without the traditional wisdom, learned in traditional ways, it’s hard to move forward.
One area in which we are at risk of losing
our wisdom is interspecies cooperation. Agribusiness, of course, favors monocropping, because that’s what the machines can handle. But we are not machines, we gardeners.
Traditionally, we humans have been great at multicropping. In India, a second crop, such as fava beans, would be planted among wheat at exactly the right time—the wheat must not be so tall as to shade out the bean and the wheat must not be so short that the bean overwhelms it. When the wheat is cut, the fava beans scramble skyward.
In the Southern United States, vining cowpeas would be grown on cornstalks. The pea had to be the right variety, planted at exactly the right time. If planted too early, the pea overpowers the corn. If planted too late, it is shaded out. This explains why so many heirloom cowpeas carry the name “cornfield bean.” My hundred-year-old neighbor, Leta Mac Stripling, told me that her family planted Velvet beans among their corn.
Companion planting, as well, encourages symbioses. Tomatoes and basil planted together benefit each other, the tomatoes attracting pollinators to the basil and the basil discouraging pests from the tomatoes. Strong-scented herbs like mint or rosemary help deter the cabbage butterfly. Bill McKibben reported from a trip he took to Cuba that, for some unknown reason, when green beans and cassava on the organóponicos are mixed in the same rows, yields improve 66 percent. Gardeners for centuries have been figuring out these things.
As Will Bonsall said to me, “Peasants were not stupid people.”
I believe that we will relearn the ancient wisdom of the wild garden, and that we will become not only elders of the land but caretakers of it as well. If we get started learning from each other, learning from books, and (most imperative of all) learning from our own experiences on the land, we too will become wise.
Try marigolds near tomatoes. Horseradish with potatoes. Try pole beans growing on amaranth. Let sunflowers get up several inches then intersperse with pole beans. Try corn and White Tender Creaseback Cornfield beans.