Making a Difference with a Tomato and a Blog

The Tomato

Hanna of This Garden is Illegal recently posted a review of an Iraqi tomato she grew with seeds from Baker Creek Seeds. She said:

“It may sound silly, but since there is nothing I can do to help those people, I thought the least I could do was try their tomatoes”.

This post and comment has just brought to mind a flood of memories from the last year and a half of blogging, and made me think again about some of the reasons I decided to start this blog. I decided it was time to reflect back on some of these memories.

First for those of you who don’t already know, until the latest Gulf war, Iraq had one of the largest collections of ancient food crops anywhere in the world. Being the part of the world where civilization began, the history of it’s biodiversity goes back a very long time. Under the best of circumstances a war is an almost insurmountable threat to this sort of biodiversity.

Many of us know of the doomsday vault being built in Norway to preserve the world’s agricultural biodiversity in case of catastrophe, and just like this is being designed to store the seeds at a very low temperature, the same thing is necessary to store seeds in Iraq. When the bombing starts, and the power goes off, do you think anyone is standing up and saying power should be diverted from hospitals to the freezer units in order to protect the seeds? In addition to freezer units, ongoing work by scientists together with support staff is needed to keep the seeds going and viable for crop production and during times of war there are simply no resources.

All this would truly be bad enough, if the US and other members of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ had not also imposed a ban on growing these traditional varieties or saving their own seeds. Instead farmers are obliged to purchase seeds from approved sources which are mostly US and European seed companies that emphasize patented, GM and hybrid varieties.

It’s funny how sometimes people can look at a ban like this, and brush it off, in a sort of Pulp Fiction way. Perhaps questioning if the ban really exists, or assuming there are some loopholes. Make no mistake, the ban is true, total and absolute. It is intended to make a direct replacement of traditional seed varieties with commercial varieties. By it’s design, there are no loopholes.

Together with this ban are subsidies to farmers who do grow commercial varieties, because otherwise food production in Iraq would come to a standstill. How many farmers do you think there are who are prepared to both flout this ban, and give up the possibility to receive a large subsidy?

It’s also worth mentioning this ban seems to have taken the entire seed saving community by surprise. When the war was brewing, it seems no one anticipated such a disaster would take place or that the multinational seed companies could get away with such a seed ban. It appears to have left the seed saving community scrambling to find Iraqi varieties in order to protect them from being lost, with the hopes that someday they can be repatriated.

Many people find it hard to understand how a ban like this could exist anywhere in the world. I think a lot of people would in fact be surprised to know that this kind of ban is actually very common. North America is one of the few places in the world that does not have such a ban. Such a ban covers all of Europe, and was just introduced in Turkey. Many places in Latin American have such a ban.

A ban on non-commercial food crop varieties was considered in the US during the Clinton years. The proposal was to create a ‘white list’ of approved varieties, and anything not on this list was to be considered an ‘invasive species’. Anyone found cultivating an invasive species was subject to having their plants immediately destroyed, at their own expense and without any legal recourse, and also subject to a fine and jail term. This was never passed, but from time to time there are renewed efforts to revive it.

So what can we do?

The answer to this question is very difficult. After Hanna purchased a packet of seeds for an Iraqi tomato and grew it in her garden, she discovered something very important. She discovered her climate in Ohio is not the same as in Iraq, and the tomato didn’t grow well or taste good. Like I just mentioned, considerable work is needed to make a tomato like this a viable crop in a climate like Ohio.

Someone with experience in what they are doing would need to grow at least a hundred, maybe several hundred of these tomato plants and selectively save seeds from the best ones in order to create a new variant of the tomato. This process can take a number of years, and in the case of Iraq could involve hundreds or thousands of unique varieties of plants, not just a single tomato. Even for a company like Baker Creek taking on just one variety of a plant in this way and offering it for sale is a massive undertaking. Baker Creek deserves a lot of credit for doing this. I make no secret of the fact that I have no plans for a similar project myself. There is only so much one person can do. In addition, no one can blame Hanna for not wanting to grow a mealy tasting tomato in her garden.

As one person there are limits, but there are things you can do. Just like Hanna did, you can show you care by buying Iraqi seeds from companies who sell them. Hopefully, you will also grow them and blog about them like Hanna did, maybe even save some seeds and share them with others. By doing this you first of all send a message to companies like Baker Creek that if they invest the effort into saving Iraqi plant varieties, their customers will reward them by buying the seeds. In addition, there is a high degree of political embarrassment that can be achieved.

During the covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration was hugely embarrassed over the widespread interest in Nicaraguan coffee that developed. An embargo on this coffee was put in place, but then people found ways to circumvent it. It’s true the Sandanista’s were making money on this coffee, but in many ways the political embarrassment that so many people were going out of their way to purchase something from a country that was an enemy of the US was just as damaging. The same thing can be achieved if people start growing Iraqi vegetables in their gardens.

By growing other heirloom varieties and learning to save your own seeds, you can dramatically increase the impact of the statement you are trying to make by growing Iraqi varieties. It shows you have a much deeper understanding of the situation. If you have the ability to do growouts of large numbers of plants and selective breeding, so much the better!

The Blog

Of course the other thing you can do to increase the impact of growing Iraqi vegetables is to blog about them.

Perhaps there are some people who have a blog because they like speaking to a large number of people at the same time, but one of the very special things I find about blogging is how it puts me directly in touch with so many people on a one to one basis. Search engines in particular are critical in this process, because they can find the few words or phrases that make you a unique person, and put you in contact with someone else looking for you.

Of course with any blog the most important people to be in touch with are your own community. A blog that just stands on it own doesn’t have any support base or credibility. In my case these are blogs of fellow gardeners.

With Bifurcated Carrots, one of the groups of people I was most surprised to be in contact with was scientists. Several of whom have left comments or sent me emails. As a blogger, it’s a very big complement to be contacted by a scientist and told what you are writing about is interesting, because it is somehow connected with what they are doing.

More than once I’ve also been criticized for writing the things I have, because they were unscientific. I’m a blogger, not a scientist! If what I wrote was scientific, I would not maintain contact with the people I do, and I am not a scientist anyway. I would say the same thing to any other professional who said my writing would be considered unprofessional in their field. At the same time, such criticism is very welcome and I take it as a complement.

One of the scientists who contacted me was in Iran. He manages a large collection of agricultural related plants. This was about a year ago, at the peak of the sabre rattling over Iran’s nuclear program. He was understandably concerned about the safety of his seed collection, the possibility of a US invasion and had probably found my blog because I had written about what happened to Iraq’s agricultural biodiversity. I spent some months trying to find a way to help him or put him in touch with someone who could, but in the end it came down to I was just one person and was not the right person to help him. Just like the Iraqi tomato, there’s only so much one person can do.

Several farmers have contacted me because of things I posted about, or because they wanted to order seeds from me. Most seem to understand the topics here, but others seem to be a bit more confused. One of my favorite requests was from Pakistan and was would I please send samples of ‘seeds and pesticides’. It’s clear a lot of people in India and Pakistan have been reading things I posted about them.

Media

It’s been interesting to me to see how journalists and mass media in general have reacted to my blog. Some journalists and media outlets have been supportive, and some not. Most have just ignored me.

A few other blogs run by well known journalists have made supportive posts, and provided links to this blog. CNN linked to my post on Aspartame, because it was in connection with a story they carried.

The Anonymous Readers

At some point I began to notice a large number of ‘anonymous’ people accessing my blog. These are people who’s Internet (IP) address didn’t resolve to anything decipherable. I started to look into who some of these people might be with tools like ‘whois’ or ‘traceroute’.

A number of them turned out to be Russian computer hackers.

The first real one of these mystery blog readers was pretty easy. It was someone with a hugely fast Internet connection, that was requesting nearly the entire contents of my blog every half hour. It was not just requesting the contents of the web interface, but also requesting the same information through all of the RSS protocols as well (rss, rss2 and atom). It was making these requests from a rotating pool if IP addresses so large, that only a government could have secured so many of them. I tracked this down to a company specializing in US military contracts, located next to a US army base in San Diego. This was obviously one of the US intelligence gathering agencies that our tax dollars fund.

Several other included government agencies, like the Dutch government. It included some people located within the UK and Belgian/Flemish parliaments.

Some other anonymous readers had corporate connections. Many others I didn’t bother to investigate or couldn’t find anything about them, so I have no idea who they are.

The Bottom Line

There has been something of a revolution on the issue of eating natural and local foods, thanks in a large part to Michael Pollan and many others. It’s clear the issue of gardening is part of this revolution with heirloom gardening and seed saving being an important part of it.

There are now more blogs than I have ever seen before discussing seed saving topics and stating the intention to trade with other bloggers.

There are a lot of ways as heirloom gardeners we can and have participated in the world around us.

Simply put, there are an awful lot of ways we can make a difference with a tomato and a blog!