14 minute read
Feature: Seeds can Save Us
We save what we care about. And for more than 10,000 years, humans have saved seeds. When we moved, we took our favorite seeds with us and as we changed, we changed our food. But at what cost?
Story by Kristen Munson // Photos by Joshua Brown
A decade ago, Eric Bishopvon Wettberg was scrambling on the rocky slopes of southeastern Turkey searchin gfor strains of wild chickpea with an international research team. They knew from gene banks and herbarium reports that the plant grew in grassy places too steep to plough. They also knew that wild chickpea had something domesticated varieties didn’t but desperately needed: genetic diversity.
“We rely on crop genetic diversity,” says von Wettberg, a plant biologist at the University of Vermont. “Traits like resistance to disease and pests, drought tolerance, freezing tolerance— those have a genetic component. One of the basic things my research group aims to do is preserve genetic crop diversity.”
Von Wettberg co-runs the Consortium for Crop Genetic Heritage and collaborates with researchers including Daniel Tobin, a rural sociologist in Community Development and Applied Economics who studies the ways farmers respond to policy and climate shifts. Together they are working to strengthen the food system by diversifying our seed supply.
“Dan thinks a lot about how and why people save seeds, and we think a lot about what the genetic consequences of people saving seeds are,” von Wettberg says.
The phrase “you are what you eat,” holds some truth. Humans have evolved alongside the plants we bred to munch and mash and roast.
“Our civilization is deeply tied to the way we produce food,” von Wettberg explains.
We need crops to endure drought and flooding and blights and pest invasions, to be productive and taste good, too. But our needs don’t always match the genetic strategies wild plants develop to survive. For instance, shattering—the dropping of seeds as they ripen—is good for dispersing genetics far and wide, but bad for growers who collect them.
“When people developed wheat that didn’t shatter, they selected it, and … plants with that mutation led to a domestication bottleneck that reduced genetic diversity,” says von Wettberg.
The mechanization of farming further diminished the gene pool as homogeneity of harvests was prized over diversity. Seed companies went global and specialized in more uniform crops. Even the science of crop breeding produced a winnowing effect as crops that were easier to process and be stored longer took precedence.
It’s easy to point fingers and declare industrial farming public enemy number one. But we are no longer a nation of subsistence farmers, and feeding the world is hard and necessary work. Tradeoffs inevitably happen. Luckily, wild relatives of plants can help us restore lost genetic diversity and people who save heirloom seeds (and their mutations) select for traits that may be of secondary importance to commercial growers— traits like flavor and regional adaptation. These are the seeds von Wettberg and Tobin want to salvage.
“Across the landscape, having more people save seeds means greater diversity,” von Wettberg says.
That means if a blight wipes out a crop in one location, seeds from a population grown elsewhere could be used as a patch to prevent catastrophic losses. This has happened before—and will again.
“In 1968 there was actually a massive blight on corn,” von Wettberg says. “The way people were breeding corn made it much, much worse than it would have been otherwise.”
It was a warning taken seriously that altered how people breed corn. More recently, a fungal outbreak in wheat led growers in Africa scrambling to find resistant strains.
“We have gotten lucky,” von Wettberg says. “If there is a motivation for everything I do, it is climate change and it very much keeps me up at night.”
But at some point, luck runs out.
On the floor of his office sits a box of small green mung beans. It’s not a plant one often finds growing in Vermont gardens. But mung beans have worldwide appeal. In Asia, mung beans are used in dahl recipes and confectionary, and increasingly by the plant protein industry. But what von Wettberg loves most about them is the speed at which they grow.
“One way to diversify your risk in a changing climate is to have something that grows fast,” he says.
He envisions mung bean growing in places like Iowa to add nitrogen to soil and another rotation for farmers. Theoretically, farmers could harvest winter wheat and mung beans in one season to complement a rotation with corn and soybean and cover crops.
“If the corn-soybean rotation is the biggest ecological sin of American agriculture, if we can make that a four-crop rotation, we have done a real service,” von Wettberg says. “Vermont is at the edge of that, and I want to push it forward.”
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Daniel Tobin thinks a lot about who and what we aren’t measuring in the food system. And he sees both problems and promise in the gaps.
Tobin began studying Vermont seed savers because he suspects they are quietly maintaining the bulk of crop diversity in the region.
“The noncommercial folks are often the ones who have the time and labor capacity to save a lot of the different crop species and varieties in their gardens,” explains Carina Isbell ’20 M.S. ’22, a research assistant in Tobin’s lab.
Traditionally, seeds are present at the start and end of a plant’s life cycle. Saving seeds closes the loop. But it’s a step that few growers today actually perform. Some don’t save seeds because it cuts into the growing season for additional crop rotations; others because they simply can’t save them.
Commercial hybrid seeds, first developed in the 1920s to improve yields and disease tolerance, and popular among large-scale growers, aren’t typically replanted because they don’t grow back true. Hybrid offspring don’t produce reliable yields or disease resistance for the next generation of plants.
They have intellectual property protections, too, Isbell says. “Essentially, what people are doing when they are buying those seeds is licensing those seeds, so they don’t own them. If they were to replant them or save seed from that crop, technically it’s illegal.”
Her research with Tobin found that Vermont seed savers often have motivations such as taste preferences or a desire to be self-sufficient that prompt them to sidestep the marketplace.
“I am 100 percent sure that the great majority of crop diversity [in the United States] is being maintained by hobbyists—people who just love it or have an affinity for nature,” Isbell says. “… [and] they 1,000 percent have better tasting foods.”
Questions Tobin has been mulling lately concern the origins of seeds in our food system. Do they matter? And if they do, why don’t we know more about where they come from?
“For the last 20 years I have heard about how local food systems are going to save everything,” he says. “What always seems to be absent is … if we don’t have local seeds is it a local food system?”
“I am 100 percent sure that the great majority of crop diversity [in the United States] is being maintained by hobbyists—people who just love it or have an affinity for nature,” Isbell says. “… [and] they 1,000 percent have better tasting foods.”
Seed companies typically contract with growers and license the seeds grown elsewhere. Many companies don’t want to divulge where the seeds come from, Tobin says. “For a crop-based production system, seed is the most important input, and we have really no idea what that input supply chain looks like. There just seem to be a lot of blind spots that I would think would be really useful to unpack as we are thinking about sustainability and food system resilience.”
Because seeds, like us, have an expiration date. What happens to a species in conflict zones or when the people preserving them stop?
“What really concerns me,” Tobin says, “is the most promising seed savers here are in their 70s. To me, the nut to crack is how do we preserve this knowledge and package it in a way that the people who are maintaining this knowledge feel comfortable with, but is also accessible to younger generations?”
His students have begun experimenting with new media forms, including a podcast about seed saving and a documentary Katherine Morrissey, ’23 M.S. ’24 is filming to swell the ranks.
“Some of seed saving can be really hard, but I think that is sort of the magic to it too,” she says. “It’s like this act of resistance.”
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On one level, food is fuel. It provides the calories needed to support life. But food is also culture. The meals we prepare connect us to one another and to a place. And that is one reason Tobin and von Wettberg began a research project with the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, a Maryland-based collective that connects BIPOC and marginalized communities with culturally meaningful heritage seeds.
“Cultural acceptability is a core component of food security,” Tobin says. “… We did a project a few years ago [with refugees] at New Farms for New Americans and they hate our corn. It’s so sweet … they want African maize that is meaty and has some substance. The flavor profiles of what is accessible and what is acceptable are so different.”
Our food system is fragile,” she says. “It is so compartmentalized, so not diverse in the places that it is at, that we are at significant risk.
Ujamaa was created as an alternative to the traditional seed system after its founders realized the current one was not necessarily built for them. Seeds donated to Ujamaa’s parent organization STEAM Onward, were not matching the needs of their communities.
“Personally, I call it the unbearable whiteness of seeding,” says Chanda Robinson Banks, one of Ujamaa’s founders. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s deliberate, I would go so far as to say it is because of the fact that you have to have resources.”
Resources like land and knowledge, she presses. “These are elements that are lost and denied BIPOC farmers due to the cultural hegemony BIPOC people experience in the U.S.”
Robinson Banks has a law degree and questions things like ‘who owns the land?’ and ‘where did the seeds in germplasm banks come from?’ and ‘were anyone’s rights trampled to acquire them?’
“My conversation with the land is very fraught,” she explains. “My father is Piscataway Conoy and as a child sharecropped tobacco here in Maryland. … How do you sharecrop tobacco on unceded land that was supposed to be yours?”
Ujamaa’s programming introduces BIPOC communities to the science of growing and saving seed, lowers the bar to enter farming, and allows people to reconnect with their foodways.
Robinson Banks recognizes the role that seeds play in improving a community’s health and economic opportunity. For instance, commercial seeds are produced in just a handful of places in the United States. Adapting seeds to regional growing conditions boosts the resilience of local food systems.
“When people say ‘my seeds weren’t great,’ well, part of it is because the seeds that you are buying aren’t for you,” Robinson Banks says. “That is not even a BIPOC conversation. That is a concentration of commerce conversation.
“We are trying to have a more inclusive conversation around not just food, but also to acknowledge that climate change is coming, and we must change as well.”
In 2021, Ujamaa partnered with Tobin and von Wettberg on a Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant to expand the market viability of culturally meaningful, regionally adapted seeds. While Tobin focuses on the social science side of the equation, von Wettberg and Jasmine Hart, a Ph.D. student in plant genomics, provide guidance alongside other breeders and seed organizations for Ujamaa’s participatory plant breeding programs.
“To develop genotypes or cultivars without the input of farmers or the rest of the market,” Hart says shaking her head. “For the time that it takes, you could redirect your efforts elsewhere to something that could actually help folks.”
This is something Heather Darby thinks about every day.
She is a seventh-generation farmer from Alburgh, Vt., and a UVM Extension agronomist and soil specialist. In recent decades, Darby has noticed a decline in crop biodiversity across the country. Farms in the Midwest where she saw small grain fields of oats, wheat, and barley, with corn, soybean and alfalfa, now just have two crops.
“Our food system is fragile,” she says. “It is so compartmentalized, so not diverse in the places that it is at, that we are at significant risk.”
One area where she is trying to undo some damage is with northern varieties of flint corn—a variety found in cold climates that matures in about 60 days. After being gifted a coffee can of heirloom flint years ago, Darby has planted and saved its seeds ever since. When asked what traits she selects for, she laughs.
“Beauty,” she says. “… sort of maybe nothing in particular but maybe everything in particular.”
Darby walks through the corn rows seeking stalks that are still standing and have its husks. The ones the birds haven’t yet opened or don’t exhibit disease. But every so often something catches her eye.
“Sometimes,” she says, “even though there is something wrong with that plant … but I happened to pick up the ear and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen; I am going to save it.”
Her work is part of a revitalization program to ensure northern flint varieties survive a rapidly warming climate.
“The potential to lose northern flints is real,” Darby explains.
In the end, that desire to protect crops and farmers is what motivates her research. Darby is constantly looking for ways to help farms add value to their operations by developing unique or hardier strains so that growers can survive to plant another season.
The flint corn variety Darby saves is similar to what indigenous populations grew in Vermont, and she has a partnership with the Abenaki tribe to preserve and adapt culturally significant corn varieties so they aren’t lost.
“We need to protect the past, but we have to understand the future,” she says. “Had the Abenakis, or any tribe really, been able to just live they would have already been doing this.”
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Sylvia Davatz is in her front yard raking pinecones under a rare December sun in Wilder, Vt. She is prepping the lawn for her new garden—a landscape she fantasizes will serve as a residential model of permaculture and seed saving.
Davatz is entirely self-taught. She began saving seed 30 years ago when she noticed her favorite varieties were becoming more expensive or disappearing from seed catalogs entirely.
Davatz describes herself as “60 percent pioneer woman.” She used to sew her own clothes and makes brooms from sorghum she grows. She is infatuated with learning what she can do—and what she can save.
At the peak of her efforts, she maintained about 250 crop varieties and ran Solstice Seeds, a seed catalog she recently passed on to her neighbor to manage. Decades ago, Davatz co-founded the Upper Valley Seed Savers, a small group of Vermont seed savers who meet monthly to share techniques. She conducts seed saving workshops and works with Tobin on research projects. And sometimes, she worries about what is being lost.
“I had this whole page of resources that I put together over time,” she says. “I [recently] went through it and there were all seed companies that I had in there that didn’t even exist anymore. … So that is part of it is loss.… Once a variety is gone, that’s it. It’s gone forever.”
People often email Davatz looking for a specific gherkin or lettuce variety they can no longer find. She sends them seeds and wonders about all the varieties being saved that no one knows about.
“Seed savers tend to be people who prefer to get dirt under their fingernails than sit in a cubicle,” she says. “And they are not necessarily technologically very savvy.… How do you capture what they are doing and what they have and make sure others know?”
It’s a problem she knows she alone can’t solve. But right now, she needs to collect pinecones. She needs to put roots down.
