Thanks for mentioning this!

Here in the Netherlands there aren’t really many new or very small seed companies, so it’s hard to know what’s going on here. I would likely not have noticed anything had you not said something.

I’m starting to feel like there’s nothing left for me to post on my blog. If the EU seed regulations change and they keep increasing support for small farms, there won’t be anything to talk about. I’ll have to go back to taking pictures of the plants in my garden, and talking about them instead!

Like what you said, I believe very strongly that discussions on the Internet have played a big role in these changes, and will continue to play an important role in the future.

Alan, I’m pretty sure we are just having a misunderstanding over the interpretation of what I wrote, and maybe I wasn’t clear. My point was that if a company resells commercial F1 hybrids, they have to enter into a marketing agreement agreeing not to make clear which are the OP varieties and which are the F1s.

Johnny’s does have this problem, because they do sell commercial F1s. They have said they feel some of the commercial F1s they sell have importance to small and organic farmers, and they don’t want to discontinue them. For a very brief time, they split their catalog in 2, one for ‘amateur gardeners’, clearly labelled as containing only OP varieties, but I guess they weren’t allowed to do this in the end because they don’t make this distinction anymore.

I agree with you that Johnny’s is basically a good seed company, and they do good work. At the same time, I don’t think they are a good place for people who intend to save their own seeds to buy them from. I do in fact know someone who ordered seeds not labelled as F1 from them, exchanged several emails with them over the status of the seeds, then found out 2 years later after saving the seeds they were in fact F1s to begin with. I don’t think it was an intentional act on Johnny’s part, but mistakes like this can easily happen when dealing with a company that sells F1s and beginning gardeners are easily discouraged by these kind of mistakes.

If you or anyone else sees interesting breeding material in what Johnny’s sells, or you don’t intend to save your own seeds or don’t care if you are growing a commercial F1 hybrid, I think Johnny’s is a fine place to buy your seeds from.

You have to remember there is a difference between the people you have in the Homegrown Goodness forum and the people reading this blog! Most people here are not experienced gardeners or breeders, and mostly I’m trying to take what is a pretty complicated subject for them and make it sound simpler. In particular, there are a lot of beginning gardeners reading this blog now, and this post was specifically targeted at them.

If I make short posts people complain they are inaccurate, if I make longer ones people get glassy-eyed and glaze over them. It’s hard to strike a good balance!

I’m pretty sure you aren’t planning to directly resell commercial F1 hybrids. I’m no lawyer or expert on patent law, but what I understand is that with the exception of GM genes, the genetic material in plants cannot be patented, so once you have created your own variety with genes from commercial sources they are no longer owned by those companies and are no longer commercial in nature, until the new variety itself is patented or otherwise protected or registered. I’m pretty sure you aren’t planning to incorporate GM genes into your work. Assuming this is all true, your work would not fall into what I refer to as commercial F1 hybrids here and you would not be a commercial seed retailer.

By the same logic, I’m pretty sure what I said is not identifying work done by the other people you mention as bad in any way.

Jermey, point taken. This in not a very hard statistic. It originally came from the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/

I don’t own a copy of the book, and I have only seen lots of other people on the Internet cite the reference, so I can’t say a lot about it. I assume it does include cereal grains. I’m sure the person who came up with the statistic did it for purposes of making a point, rather than making an accurate statement. Perhaps this was a poor choice of a statistic to give here. If you have other ideas of a more accurate statistic, I’d love to hear.

I’d much rather see a citation to how someone calculated that 98%. I’m not arguing that there is enormous concentration within the commercial seed industry. I’m just wondering: does it include bulk cereals? Is it based on number of varieties sold, or tonnage, or some other figure? How does it deal with the rather large number of Registered Maintainers in Europe?