Posted on

Reasons for a Seed Network

I recently proposed a Blogger Seed network, and a number of people have stepped forward and offered seeds for this.

I wanted to take some time now in this post to talk about some of the reasons why such a network is so very important. It’s important gardeners should step forward and offer their seeds, but it’s just as important other gardeners should also step forward and grow these seeds.

If you’re a blogger, and can write about your experiences, so much the better, but it’s not necessary to have a blog to participate.

These seeds are for everyone!

Many gardeners, perhaps most often people new to gardening, are afraid to grow anything but seeds that come in a purchased packet.

Growing seeds that come from someone else’s garden are for people of all levels of experience. Beginning gardeners as well as experienced can grow wonderful things with self saved seeds. There is nothing that makes these seeds fundamentally inferior to commercial seeds, and there are often advantages. Any time you grow something it can go wrong, and growing garden or farm saved seeds is no exception. There is, however, no reason you should be afraid to grow non-commercial seeds, and there is not particularly any greater chance of failure or disappointment.

It’s possible to save seeds incorrectly but of the people so far who have offered seeds or other plant material listed on the post linked to above, I have a great deal of confidence that there are not many problems with their seeds. Over time, we will all have to help each other save seeds properly, and be prepared to address quality issues with one another. I’ll be making further posts on this topic.

The Past

There was a time saving seeds was a threat to seed companies, in particular before WWII. After all, if you are a gardener or farmer why would you pay for seeds you can get free from someone else or from your own plants? People were not just saving seeds, but also breeding plants in their own gardens for free, making it difficult for seed companies to justify paying someone to do the same thing. There was simply not much money in seeds, and running a profitable seed or plant research company was difficult to do.

The need for research was particularly acute during the war years, when the world was facing food shortages and research was needed to find ways to boost food production.

A number of mechanisms were put in place to deal with this problem, and were different depending on where in the world you lived. Some of the more universal principles included patents on plants, seeds and the genes they contain. Most places established licensing for seed companies. Commercial hybrid seeds were developed in part to make it difficult or impossible for these seeds to be saved and regrown. Since most countries subsidise their agriculture, rules were put on these subsidies that promoted purchased over saved seeds.

While the ideas behind all of this weren’t entirely bad, it’s truly amazing what this has all become in modern times. Now we have GMOs. We have seed companies like Monsanto who actively promote their crops, knowing their genes will contaminate crops of other farms, so they can then sue farmers who save and regrow these contaminated seeds! Included in these genes contaminating the environment are the so called ‘terminator’ genes, that can cause contaminated plants to stop reproducing. A very dangerous battle has developed over who has the right to grow the food in today’s world, and who owns it.

The Future

In most places outside of North America, Europe in particular, seed companies selling non-commercial seeds suitable for seed saving are operating outside of the law. That’s right, they’re selling illegal seeds! These seeds are not in any way unsafe, in fact many of the varieties are the same ones our ancestors ate. They are illegal because all those years ago laws were set up to protect seed companies and make their operations profitable.

This year in France, Kokopelli Seeds was fined €30,000 for selling illegal seeds, leaving them with an almost insurmountable debt for a small seed company. In the long run they will not be able to underwrite these kinds of fines and remain in business.

This year Real Seeds of the UK had to delay packaging their seeds because of a series of threats from local authorities, leaving them unsure if they were about to be shut down. Okay there’s no €30,000 fine as was the case with Kokopelli, and they weren’t shut down, but how can anyone expect a seed company to operate under those circumstances?

It’s likely every seed company of this nature operating in Europe is being harassed in this way, and it’s going mostly unnoticed because of their small size and because the harassment is difficult to quantify. It’s just not the stuff newspaper headlines are made of.

Just how fair is it anyway that companies like this have to operate largely out of the goodness of their own hearts, without any hope of ever seeing profits and sometimes having to pay fines out of pocket in order to stay in business? Weren’t these laws put in place all these years ago intended to protect and promote seed companies?

Different but related circumstances face small seed companies almost everywhere in the world.

It’s time for harassment of small seed companies to stop!

The Bloggers Seed Network

What was once a threat to seed companies, home and farm saved seeds, is quickly becoming the only hope for many small seed companies. The only way to protect these seed companies, and our right to grow the seeds they sell, is to do what many years ago was destroying them.

The only way these seed companies will be able to exist in our modern world is along side an alternative distribution network for seeds that is so big and well established, that it makes the what these companies sell unimportant and therefore no longer a target for governments and larger seed companies. This is why I am proposing a bloggers seed network.

We have to make self saved seeds a common household word.

This network has the greatest chance of success if it spans as many legal jurisdictions as possible, and does not depend on any one point of organization. It should interconnect with as many other seed sharing networks as possible that already exist, or emerge as the result of the hard work others put in. It will depend on participants working together to make use of legal loopholes, and getting around local rules from other jurisdictions. It requires us all to realize that while we have different goals in our own gardens, reaching out and working with others on common goals is important too. It means you have to take the time to search out other seed saving individuals and communities over the Internet, regardless of their size and location, and promote trade with them.

Local is important too.  Beginning with your garden, together with friends and neighbors, and local seed swaps are all important. It’s the nature of home saved seeds that your chances of success are greatest with locally produced seeds. Whatever you do, don’t forget the importance of reaching out to other seed savers in other parts of the world.

Many of us who have been active on the Internet know similar global action has successfully taken on software giants like Microsoft, as well as the music and film industry. Democracy has taken on new meanings with globalization and the emergence of the Internet, and now we need to apply some of these principles to the food we eat.

Posted on

Contaminated Manure in the UK

Rebsie just did a post on this here.  Before that it appeared on the Green Lane Allotments site.

The issue seems to be a new hormone based weed killer called aminopyralid.  While it’s not approved for use on food crops, it’s applied to pasture land used to graze cattle.  It’s very persistent, and residues are contaminating gardens and allotments where the resulting manure was applied.

It’s really part of a very deep seated tradition here in northern Europe, as well as other places in the world, to use manure on gardens.  There are really a lot of reasons why this is not a good idea, and this contamination is just the latest example.

If you keep your own animals this is a completely different story, but modern farm animals are simply not a safe source for garden manure.  There are also several other reasons why it’s not a good idea to apply fresh manure to your garden, under any circumstances.

Contamination

Modern farm animals consume a wide range of chemicals, foods and medicines that persist in their manure that you really don’t want in your garden.  This is true in even so called organically raised animals.  These things range from hormones and antibiotics, to GM animal feeds, as well as pesticides like in this case.  Farmers are really quite often very detached from what they are doing, and have been known to feed really outrageous things to their animals.

We like to think there is some quality control, but in fact there is very little almost anywhere in the world.  A very small percentage of our food is tested in any way.  Even with organically raised animals, there’s often little in the way of quality control other than the paperwork that went along with the certification.

The other very important type of contaminants are the biological ones.  New strains of Ecoli that have emerged in recent years are really quite scary.  These can make you very sick, and are spread by animal manure.  The recent contamination in the US of packaged lettuce is suspected to have come from cows on a neighboring field, and this contamination was spread all through the country.  Even if you have access to manure that didn’t come from factory farm animals, the risk remains because these diseases now infect livestock worldwide.

The majority of these contaminants will survive both composting and ageing of the manure, and apply not just to cows but other animals like sheep and horses as well.

If you have an organic garden, and you apply manure obtained from a third party, you probably don’t really have an organic garden after all.

Free or Soluble Nitrogen

The other problem with manures is they are high in nitrogen that is not fixed, but rather soluble.

With all nutrients it’s not only an issue if they are in the ground, but if they are actually in a form that can be used by your plants.

The issue with manure is almost all of the nitrogen can be used immediately, and is water soluble as well.  What this means is you will have a hard time regulating how much your plants absorb.  In the short term it will probably make your plants grow quickly, and in the longer term it will wash away so you’ll have to add more.  For many plants the stress of this will just kill them, especially very young plants.  For other plants, you may make them vulnerable to various diseases or other problems.  A good example is garlic rust that I recently posted about.

Fixed Versus Soluble

The other issue, that I am suddenly noticing in my community garden complex, is that using soluble nitrogen in the form of manure or fertilizer can prevent the establishment of fixed nitrogen, and actually deplete long term nitrogen levels.

Having fixed nitrogen in your garden is the best possible thing, because generally it becomes available at the rate your plants need it.  All nitrogen you add in the form of fertilizer or manure is soluble.  While there are several ways of getting fixed nitrogen into your garden, the most efficient is to grow nitrogen fixing plants like beans or peas.

The issue is that nitrogen fixing plants do this according to their own needs.  This means, if you apply soluble nitrogen in the form of fertilizer or manure, any nitrogen fixing plants in your garden probably won’t need to fix much of their own nitrogen.  Since whatever soluble nitrogen you’ve applied will eventually wash away, this will leave your garden without any long term benefit.

The only way to fix nitrogen in manure is to compost it first.  Since composting requires a good balance between nitrogen and carbon, you will need to mix the manure with a very large quantity of high carbon material like straw in order to get good quality compost in the end.  An alternative to composing manure is to age it for a year or two, in which case the soluble nitrogen will wash away or dissipate into the air.

Trusted Animals

If you have animals you raise yourself or otherwise get manure from a trusted source, there is little harm in composting or ageing  this first and adding it to your garden.  Perhaps when all is said and done, there is not a great benefit to this either.  This will provide a source of organic material and compost to your garden, but perhaps there are easier ways to do this.

Permaculture Principles

This is another very good example why it’s best to apply permaculture principles to your garden, and avoid inputs and outputs where possible.  With a properly run garden or farm, you won’t need anything except a couple of garden tools.

History

The reason why there is a culture of adding manure to gardens is because a long time ago some farmers realized they could avoid some crop rotations if they added manure or other materials to their garden.  This turned out to be a short term solution to a longer term problem, but the idea stuck.  This in turn led to the idea that somehow adding manure or other fertilizers or chemicals to your garden was a good thing to do.

Posted on

A Zoo for Our Seeds?

My memory tells me it was probably until the 1980s or so where environmentalists and scientists who were trying to preserve endangered animal species worked very hard to accommodate them into zoos. The logic being that the day would come where we could release them into the wild and they could reestablish themselves.

After quite a bit of soul searching, and the zoos were full of species that had no hope of ever being returned to the wild, came the understanding that many of these species were becoming extinct because of habitat loss and unless that was addressed there was no future for them. In fact by building these zoos we were actually doing the animals a disservice, because we were eliminating any justification for preserving their habitat and just locking them into a prison where they could never be freed.

I don’t know that I completely agree with it, but GRAIN takes an interesting point of view by suggesting we may be doing something similar with the construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

Are we just building a giant cage for our genetic heritage, so we can just cast it aside and forget about it? Are we only taking away the arguments against polluting the world genepools with GM material and ensuring there are no remaining arguments for biodiversity? Are we locking up our seeds into a zoo from which there will never be any hope of ever leaving?

Our friends over at the Biodiversity Weblog don’t seem convinced.

It’s certainly something we need to watch and pay attention to.

Posted on

Flavonoids and Organic Tomatoes

There’s kind of an interesting post and discussion at the Biodiversity Weblog about a study showing another reason why organic vegetables may be better for you than conventional.

If I may be so bold as to condense a 10 year study into a few words, the basic idea is that many plants have natural defence mechanisms to pests that cause them to produce substances (in this case flavonoids in tomatoes) which seem to have a benefit to human health.

This may be part of the reason organic or home grown produce tastes different too.

Depending on your point of view I suppose, this is either justification for more research into this mechanism in order to devise ways of producing healthier foods, or it’s another reason we should be eating more natural foods.

Posted on

Bird Flu in India

GRAIN just published a report on the recent bird flu outbreak in India.

In just three weeks after it was officially confirmed, 3.7 million birds had been killed. This comes out to an average of about 122 birds per minute for every minute of the day, day and night, seven days a week over this period. All this is made possible with modern technology like the super efficient AED-100, list price $600,000, which kills 10,000 birds per hour, by picking up the birds by their feet and dragging their heads through electrified water. This included not only birds on a few large factory poultry farms, but birds all over the region including small farm and backyard flocks. It was a devastating blow to the biodiversity of the area.

It seems like we don’t hear much about bird flu these days, but it’s still there and no less important than a few years ago. There are still many people dying each year from bird flu, and the risk is very real that soon there will be person to person transmission of the disease possibly causing a world wide pandemic.

Perhaps the reason we don’t hear much about it anymore is the politicians and large corporate interests profiting from the trade in factory farm birds knew the public wasn’t going to buy their stories anymore about the disease being caused by migratory birds and small flocks kept outdoors.

They knew if they kept telling this story, people would start pointing out that in fact what was happening was outbreaks in factory farms were infecting wild birds, in turn infecting small outdoor flocks. In fact, small outdoor flocks are the solution to the problem, not the cause. The small outdoor poultry holders don’t deserve to be the victims.

The reason there are outbreaks in factory poultry farms is the highly inbreed bird varieties used in these operations have a depressed immune system making them vulnerable to all sorts of infections. It was inevitable a virus like H5N1 bird flu would develop in the unsanitary and crowded conditions of modern factory farms. Bird varieties usually used in small outdoor flocks have normal immune systems.

It’s outrageous that large scale operations which are the source of the problem get massive government subsidies to cover their losses, as what happened with European poultry farmers during the last large outbreak in Europe, while small flock holders all over the world don’t get a penny and face legislation restricting their ability to continue raising birds.

The only option we have is to act as consumers and not buy factory farm poultry or poultry products! The definition of what is or isn’t factory farm is all but totally blurred now. It doesn’t matter if you buy ‘organic’, ‘free range’, ‘grass fed’, ‘grain fed’, ‘pasture raised’ or whatever else they call it. The legal definition of these terms has been so watered down as to not mean anything. It doesn’t matter if you buy these products in a supermarket or whole foods store. Any poultry product you buy will probably be a factory farm product, unless you have a personal knowledge of the farmer or unless you or a friend raised the birds yourself.