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Kent Whealy’s Latest Letter to SSE Members

Update: PDF of the letter is available here.

I seem to be one of the first few to receive Kent Whealy’s latest letter to members of the Seed Savers Exchange.  I don’t see a lot of discussion about it on the Internet yet.  In the past he didn’t send his letters to overseas members of the SSE, and this time international postal delivery seemed to have worked in my favor and I got it here in Amsterdam before people in North America.

Anyhow, I thought I would be one of the first to write some thoughts about it.  In short it’s a 14 page letter (breaking his previous record of 8 pages), detailing his grievances with the SSE and in particular with Amy Goldman and the other board members.

I think it’s pretty fitting while we get this letter the leader of Honduras is trying to regain control of his country he lost under similar circumstances.  Even though many people have problems with President Manuel Zelaya personally, he has wide spread support around the world because the coup that ousted him breaches international laws and norms.  This isn’t the right way to oust a leader you don’t like.

The same applies to Kent Whealy, you don’t just cast the founder of an organization out on the street and tell him to shut up.

I am particularly repulsed at the way the SSE has attempted to silence it’s critics.  If you try to discuss Kent on their Internet forum, you will surely be banned.  There was at least one person I know of who was banned from the forum a few days ago, apparently in a pre-emptive strike, but in fairness he was reinstated after it was determined to be a mistake.

Kent himself has been harassed by lawyers from the SSE, a situation he compared with Monsanto suing the roughly 450 farmers who have had their crops contaminated with GM genes, then silencing them with non-disclosure agreements.  When the SSE isn’t threatening him with legal action, they are offering him huge amounts of money to shut up.

The SSE shows many symptoms of an organization losing control of their objectives and purpose.  Many members have commented they seem to be out of touch with what their members want.  Above all else, I call on the SSE to stop trying to control what people say or think.  The days are past where people appreciate this.

If there are members of the SSE management who can’t stand up to their critics, it’s time for them to step down.  There isn’t anyone in the SSE’s management who is simply ‘entitled’ to be in the position they are in. If anyone exposed their own weaknesses in the course of terminating Kent Whealy’s employment, it’s time for them to leave too.

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Amateur Foods

For some reason this subject has come up several times recently.  What I mean by amateur foods are those grown in someone’s home garden.

Many of us know what it’s like to have a glut of zucchini’s (courgettes) or when all 100 apples come ripe on your tree at the same time.  You give them away or you have methods of processing and storing them.  You may have neighbors or friends to give them to.  Since I grow about 1000 bulbs of garlic every year, it’s always a bit of an issue to find people to eat them.

What about selling them or giving them away to other people in your community?

President Obama has the stated purpose of producing fresh vegetables for a local homeless soup kitchen.  James recently posted about an initiative in his community to encourage hobby gardeners to offer their excess to others.  I got an email from Maureen telling me about her new site, The Farmers Garden, set up to match people offering their home grown fruits and veggies with those looking for offerings.

I must admit, while I usually try to be positive and encouraging, I’m also not shy about dismissing impossible sounding ideas.  I wasn’t very encouraging in my reaction to either of these initiatives.

The basic problem is this.  Being a market farmer is a very special skill, and takes considerable effort and dedication.  In most places in the world it’s difficult or impossible to run such an operation financially without government assistance.  Certainly it’s all but impossible in the face of government subsidized factory farms, or cheap imported alternatives.

While market shoppers may not be as picky as some, everyone expects their food to be reasonably free of blemishes, insect damage and generally look good.  Harvest gluts need to be managed with succession plantings and other season extension methods.  Varieties of plants need to be selected that fit in with the general business model of a market farm, and these are usually different from what we choose to grow at home.  A selection of produce needs to be offered that’s consistent with buying most of your food in a single place, and since people eat 365 days a year this sort of variety needs to be offered year round.  Most of us also depend on a relationship with the person we buy our food from, in order to have some assurance of it’s quality and safety.  It’s a tall order.

As much as I like the idea of communities coming together and sharing their food, and it’s certainly a great way to meet your neighbors, in my opinion what can come from a home garden is no substitute for market farmers.  It doesn’t matter if a whole community offers their excess produce.  It doesn’t seem like this kind of system will ever be able to provide a significant contribution to local food needs.  Or can it?

Hopeless idea or food system of the future?

Does anyone have first hand knowledge of a working system like this?

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Today’s Weather Forecast in Amsterdam

Today’s weather forecast is partly cloudy, high temperature of 25C (about 80F), with a chance of scattered heavy showers and hail.

It’s really that last bit that gets to me, ‘hail’.  After all shouldn’t there be some point in the summer when the chance of hail is behind us?

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Oxford 2009 and Tom Wagner

I’m hoping to get some feedback from those planning to attend the Oxford meeting this year to help me make a few decisions.  One of the people I’ve been trying to arrange to attend and talk to us is Tom Wagner, a public domain plant breeder from the US.  Tom specializes in tomatoes and potatoes, and in particular has recently created a number of potato varieties totally resistant to late blight.

Late blight was the plant disease behind the Irish Potato Famine, and remains a serious problem today and is the reason hundreds of tons of very toxic chemicals are applied to potato crops every year.  It’s very significant Tom’s work is in the public domain.  His work holds tremendous potential as a major food crop for the developing world, and Tom’s host of his upcoming visit to Ireland put it this way in a recent comment on Tom’s discussion forum:

We are excited here in Ireland, that Tom might be coming to Brown Envelope Seeds, for the weekend of the 17/18th of October to do a workshop. We haven’t had any confirmation yet so i m hoping that Tom will see this and let us know. We commemorated the Irish potato famine in Skibbereen this year, where mass graves hold the remains 8,000-10,000 people who died in 1841. It would be apt that came and publicized his work as the use of GM techniques, to introduce blight resistance into potatoes, is being used as a marketing tool for GM crops here.

My questions for those of you planning to attend the Oxford get-together are basically as follows:

The most likely date for Tom to visit Oxford is Saturday 24 October, which is quite a bit later than our meeting last year.  Is this a date that’s okay with most of you?  Probably it means our picnic would be indoors rather than out.

There are some costs associated with Tom coming, and someone has to pay these.  I’m still pretty sure the cost of the Oxford event won’t be more than £15, but it’s possible it could be cheaper if Tom didn’t come.  It’s also possible if we didn’t spend the money on Tom, we could do something else instead.  If we can’t raise enough with our meeting to cover Tom’s expenses, it’s possible I can find money from other sources to pay for it, but someone would have to pay this one way or another.  Is it worth these extra costs in order to invite Tom to speak to us?

One way to cover the costs of Tom’s visit might be to hold an all day hands on potato breeding workshop with Tom the Sunday following our get-together.  Anyone who wanted to attend this workshop would have to pay a little extra, the intention being to help raise money to pay for Tom’s visit to Oxford.  Would anyone be interested in attending such a workshop?  As an alternative to this workshop in Oxford, it may also be an option for anyone interested to travel to Ireland instead the weekend before.

Here are links of people who’ve expressed interest in the past:

Daughter of the Soil
Veg Plotting
Spadework
Fluffius Muppetus
Manor Stables Vegetable Plot
Hills and Plains Seedsavers
MustardPlaster
Joanna’s Food
The plot thickens
A Blog Called Fuggles
Ben – Real Seeds
This and That
Baklava Shed Coalition
Guardian Gardening Blog
Horticultural
Soilman’s Allotment Blog
Kitchen Garden in France
Tater-Mater
Observer Organic Allotment Blog
Oxford World Development Movement Group
Down on the Allotment
Organic Allotment
Urban Food Gardening
Kokopelli
Brown Envelope Seeds
Frøsamlerne
Fennel and Fern

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Hudson Valley Seed Library

Ken of Hudson Valley Seed Library recently left a comment here, and I’ve since had a brief email exchange with him.  He has a nice arrangement for people living in the US Northeast (probably not where a lot of you reading this live), where you become a member then ‘check out’ seeds like a library book.  The idea is you replace the seeds the following year with seeds from your own garden.

In particular Ken mentioned they are doing a lot of work with dehybridizing commercial F1 hybrids, and acclimating them to their local climate.

If you live in the US Northeast, consider becoming a member!