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Open Source Programmer Needed

Open Source Seeds and Open Source Software

I hope by now there are a number of readers of this blog who understand these two principles are one and the same.  Vandana Shiva famously talked about this in an Internet video, and I’ve certainly talked about this here before too.

It’s not like you can’t grow OP seeds in your garden by day and surf the Internet with Windows at night, but if you do it’s a bit like growing both OP and commercial F1 seeds in your garden at the same time.  There’s nothing wrong with this, but some will see it as a small conflict of ideologies, and often people don’t do it themselves for this reason.

This is because the principles behind non-commercial seeds and non-commercial software are pretty much the same.

Inventorying Genetic Resources

One of both the strengths and weaknesses of today’s genetic resources is they are spread all over the world and tucked away in different places.  There are an estimated 1700 genebanks in the world, most in different localities and jurisdictions.  Probably even more important are farms and gardens all over the world, each with their own important collections of plants.

No less importantly, there are increasingly people offering their own collections of seeds for trade, often over the Internet like the Bloggers Seed Network.

The diversity of locations is a strength because if something happens at one location or with one collection, the damage can be isolated and duplicates that may be stored elsewhere can be used to replace the losses.

This diversity is a weakness because it can both be difficult to locate needed genetic resources, and more importantly it can be difficult to detect when important resources are lost.

Garden Seed Inventory

I’m not the first person to have an idea like this.  Kent Whealy, cofounder of the Seed Savers Exchange, identified a similar problem in the 1980s which led him to compile the Garden Seed Inventory. This is something he more or less kept up to date until the time he was forced to leave the SSE a few years ago.

Kent noticed there was a lot of consolidation in the seed business in the US and Canada, and every time a seed company went out of business or was taken over by another part of their inventory was lost.  He noticed a lot of OP varieties were disappearing in this way, and no one was doing anything about it because they weren’t noticing it.

These inventories published by Kent were catalyst for a number of things.

First of course were the SSE themselves who began to purchase as many of these seeds as possible before they were lost, and added them to their collection.  This became a very important part of the work of the SSE.

A number of other people were motivated to start maintaining them as part of their private collections, and people like George Stevens of Synergy Seeds even started seed companies based on the idea of protecting these seeds that were being lost.  At one time Synergy Seeds was identified by Kent’s Garden Seed Inventory as the 13th most important source of non-commercial OP garden seeds in all of North America.

More Complexities

The world is a much more complex place than it was at the time of the Garden Seed Inventory.  Most importantly the issue of genetic resources has become much more visible in light of climate change and peak oil.  Agriculture needs to change, and genetic resources are key to this.  No longer is the availability of OP garden seeds and consolidation of seed companies in North America the focus of attention, but rather it’s the world as a whole.

Our genetic resources are threatened by personal greed, like we’ve seen at the Seed Savers Exchange and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

We’ve seen massive consolidation in seed companies worldwide, leaving Monsanto owning most of them.

We’ve seen the introduction of a number of very complex treaties and changes to intellectual property rights laws.

We’ve also seen the introduction of MTAs or Material Transfer Agreements, in many ways much more insidious that other treaties or laws.  MTAs are a written contract between you and the person giving you the seeds.  Treaties and laws will change and go away with time, subject to different interpretations in different jurisdictions, but written agreements are always and forever!  These are also usually written with future changes possible, so in fact when you sign them you aren’t aware of all the restrictions or obligations that might possibly be placed on you.  MTAs are also something a company like Monsanto can deal with, and have the money to defend in court, but the administration of these is impossible for an independent plant breeder.

The Task at Hand

On the most basic level an Internet based application is needed for the Blogger Seed Network.  Something ordinary people on the Internet can use search for and trade seeds.

At the most extreme level, it should include all plant varieties everywhere in the world, commercial varieties, garden and farm varieties, plant breeders and plant collectors personal collections, and the collections of the estimated 1700 world’s genebanks, together with their legal status with relation to the various treaties and MTAs that are around, as well as their availability.  We will need to identify duplicates and possible or near duplicates.

Obviously what we end up with will lie somewhere in between, and will very much be an ongoing project.  A lot of this information already exists, and key will be identifying and securing it, then figuring out how to best incorporate it.  We need to be able to keep this information up to date, and identify trends.

The basic application needs to be based on non-commercial software with an open architecture, with the possibility of maintaining some confidential information.  It needs to be distributed for robustness, and to prevent the possibility it could be shut down due to laws in one or a number of jurisdictions.  It needs to be kept up to date!

At one time I was paid to work as a software developer, but I was never very good and those days seem pretty far behind me.  I also don’t have time to do much work on the technical side of this.  I can however help with some of the support, planning and architectural details, as well as acquiring data.  You need to be very self motivated, and most of the work will need to be done by yourself or others you find to help you.  Mostly it will be up to you to implement all aspects of this on your own.

Can I tempt anyone into getting started on what promises to be a very high visibility programming project?

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New UN Panel on Biodiversity

While many of us were preparing for our Christmas holidays, the UN quietly announced the creation of a new biodiversity panel.  It’s hard to know exactly what this means, but hopefully we will see some real science applied to this area, with some real influence on lawmakers around the world.

Normally I would have read about this first on the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, but like many they’re on holiday now.  As a parting gift to us all, they left a link to a Futurama episode on biodiversity.  Be sure to have a look, and make sure to watch the whole episode, not just the teaser.

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Vandana Shiva in the Netherlands

This past Monday and Tuesday nights Vandana spoke at two places in the Netherlands, first in Zeist (near Utrecht) and then here in Amsterdam.  Wow, what an amazing woman.  She’s a brilliant person, and very well spoken.  It was really a pleasure to hear her speak.  There are a number of videos on the Internet of her speaking, and if you’ve never heard her, I suggest having a look at some of these.

Top on her agenda at both venues was to discuss farmer suicides in the Indian Punjab region, the ongoing tragedy that’s one of the most serious in modern history.  This combined with the fact that of the roughly 1 billion people in the world today who are hungry, half or 500 million work in the food production and preparation industries.  There is really something messed up in the priorities of today’s world if the people who give us our food are so poor.

Vandana is very good with facts and statistics, and I took several pages of notes.  She discussed things like GMOs, patents, world trade issues and human rights.  Most people who are regular readers of this blog will have heard a lot of these things before either here or elsewhere, so I won’t cover them now.  I’ll probably mention some in future posts, and indeed some are so important they deserve an entire post to themselves.

She took a few shots at the Netherlands too.  For example making fun of the new government’s decision to eliminate the Environmental Ministry, or the fact that the amount of land equivalent to roughly 3 times the size of the Netherlands is used outside the country to grow the soy and grains necessary to feed the animals here.  She mentioned the Dutch were involved in intercepting ships at sea transporting generic (so-called ‘counterfeit’) medicines from India to other countries.

Zeist

The symposium in Zeist was really very interesting, not just because of Vandana herself, but by who attended and how it was organized.

When Tom Wagner visited last year I briefly entertained the possibility of trying to organize something for him here, but the community of people who might be interested in attending something like that is so disorganized and everyone has their own opinions and alliances.  I quickly decided getting a group of people together here would be impossible.  I’ve approached some of these people in the past for various reasons, and it nearly always happens that we quickly decide we don’t have anything in common and go our own ways.  Part of the problem too is many people in the Netherlands don’t like having anything to do with people from other countries, which of course to most of us is a strange concept.  It’s a fact for example that I have almost no regular readers of this blog in the Netherlands.  On any given month I might only have 5 or 10 local readers, but 10,000+ from other countries.

What was interesting was no one name seemed to be associated with organizing the visit by Vandana Shiva or the symposium, rather it was a consortium of mostly large businesses and organizations.  No expense was spared, and quite a lot of money was spent on it all.  As well as paying for Vandana Shiva’s visit, they served us dinner cooked from organic and locally sourced ingredients, local organic fruit juices, organic wines.  The costs we all paid to attend did not cover all their expenses, that’s for sure.

A very broad range of people attended, including at least one identifiable representative of a Monsanto owned seed company.  There was at least one academic from the University of Wageningen.  The symposium itself was hosted after hours in a bank lobby, and there were a number of venture capitalists and investment companies present.  There were farmers and plant breeders.  There was one very passionate grower of organic flower bulbs.  There was a member of the EU Parliament.  It was a bit of a funny situation because when we registered, we had to state our affiliations, and they printed this on our name tags.  Some people were walking around with the title ‘consumer’ or ‘gardener’.

Everyone was there to talk very seriously about the future of agriculture in the Netherlands and the world.  There were some very heated debates!

Towards the end the question was posed to the panel and the audience, if you had 10 million euros to fix agriculture, how would you spend it, and it’s clear a number of people were looking to that question for real ideas to be implemented.  There weren’t really a lot of clear answers to that question however.

The following evening in Amsterdam Vandana had a very good answer when she was asked where she would like to see more money spent.  She suggested school gardens and community gardens.  She offered the challenge that in the next decade we should not let a single small farmer fail, and money should be spent to that end.

Amsterdam

Vandana’s talk in Amsterdam was of course also fantastic, but the venue was a little lacking.  First Vandana gave her talk, then someone from the University of Wageningen gave a presentation that essentially promoted modern agriculture.  Afterwards, there was supposed to be a debate between the two.

Vandana’s talk was in English, and the other person spoke in Dutch.  The debate was supposed to be in English.  There was really a lot of language conflict.  At one point there was a brief discussion in Dutch, Vandana asked for a translation, and she was told it was too typically Dutch and she wouldn’t understand.  I think that was very rude, and it left Vandana in a position where she may have felt people were telling secrets around her.

What this all meant was too much of my evening was taken up by a presentation promoting the Green Revolution, and the debate that followed was too unfocused.  I think Vandana ended up being slightly insulted.

The talk was held in a place called De Rode Hoed or ‘The Red Hat’.  Vandana picked up on the name and mentioned it was also the name for open source software.

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Tom Wagner Visit, Part 2

A number of Tom’s tomato and potato growing trials are hosted by Chinook Farms CSA, in western Washington State.  As it turned out during the first evening of my visit a number of grain related presentations and demonstrations were hosted onsite.

Western Washington isn’t an area with a lot of grain farms.  It’s mostly considered unsuitable for grains, but Eric Fritch and his wife who run Chinook Farms CSA are trying to change that.  They feel there is a market in the area for small scale artesian grains to be grown, and in effect they are trying to get grain farming in the area started from scratch.

Their farmland previously had cedar trees, I guess grown for lumber or other wood materials.  These were recently cleared to make room for the farm, but this left the ground very nitrogen poor.  Grains need nitrogen in order to build up protein in the grain.  Grains need a minimum protein content to be suitable for breads, and without enough protein the grains can only be sold as animal feed.

However, a high nitrogen fertilizer given too early in the plant life-cycle of the grains, will result in more seed heads and poorer quality grain.  Therefore if fertilizer is to be added, it has to be added later, after the seed heads have formed.  Part of these trials was therefore to test when and how much nitrogen to apply and at what stage in plant development.  This is why you see this so clearly displayed on the signs.

One of the problems discussed during this evening’s presentations was a lack of locally available grain processing equipment, especially suited for small scale production.

They demonstrated the combine used on the farm, something that was bought used for around US$4000, I think.  It was pointed out that anyone trying to do something with grains on a less-than-farm scale, wouldn’t be able to use something like that.  For example, someone with a large suburban lot garden.  How are you going to get something like that up your driveway?

It turns out there are smaller combines available on the market, but the cost is roughly 10 times that of the larger one and they have to be imported from Italy.  Since such a machine would only be used for a few hours per year, it would be a hard purchase to justify for the average person.

Also discussed was the need for grain processing equipment like hullers, which also have similar high costs together with a relatively few number of hours of use per year.

It all makes growing grains on a small scale very expensive, unless a number of farmers and small scale growers work together and share costs.

A combine has 1 million moving parts, and makes quite a bit of noise and stirs up a lot of dust as it goes!

One of the things Tom and I talked about was his interest in getting into breeding of grains.  In particular, he talked about the problems of getting old varieties of grains out of gene banks.

If you make a request for a sample of an old grain from a genebank, as a rule they will only give you a few grams.  If you grow this sample, after the first year if all goes well, you’ll probably have several hundred grams.  If you regrow this, a few kilograms after the second year.  So it won’t be until the 3rd or even 4th year of regrowing these samples that you will have enough to do a proper trial, and if you have a crop failure in the meantime you have to start over.

Doing these initial plantings and replantings is quite expensive and labor intensive.  It’s requires a lot of personal care and attention, and like I talked about above involves a lot of short term use of expensive equipment, as well as probably a lot of manual harvesting with a scythe.

For older varieties that can be purchased in bulk, and there are a few of these, this is a possible alternative.  Most of the older varieties however are not available for bulk purchase, and neither is it economically feasible to make these available for sale.

If someone doesn’t take it upon themselves to do or fund these initial grow-outs of old grain varieties, it won’t be possible in 5-10 years time to be able to do trials and commercial scale plantings of old grain varieties.  This is just a fact.