Episode Eleven - The Stories in Seeds
Episode Description:
When we think about a seed, what do we imagine? A possibility, maybe — a discovery. Waiting beneath the soil to unfold into something new, our seeds are the hope for our future — but they're also buried deep in our past.
In this episode of Grounded Hope, we'll learn that seeds have stories, and they have memories. We'll learn about the history of seed legislation in the U.S., and how those laws restrict the ways many farmers can use their seeds. We'll meet a farmer who, on his family land, plants seeds that aren't governed by those laws. And we'll hear stories of seeds that have been saved — not only for planting next season, but for generations of farmers and gardeners to come.
Seeds from a Mexican sunflower plant held by seed saver and educator Beth Bridgeman, who grows the plants on her rural property in Greene County, Ohio.
Photo Credit: Lauren Shows
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO:
Lauren Shows
When we think about a seed, what do we imagine? A possibility, maybe — a discovery. Waiting beneath the soil to unfold into something new, our seeds are the hope for our future — but they're also buried deep in our past.
In this episode of Grounded Hope, we'll learn that seeds have stories, and they have memories. We'll learn about the history of seed legislation in the U.S., and how those laws restrict the ways many farmers can use their seeds. We'll meet a farmer who, on his family land, plants seeds that aren't governed by those laws. And we'll hear stories of seeds that have been saved — not only for planting next season, but for generations of farmers and gardeners to come.
I'm Lauren Shows. From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you Grounded Hope.
____________________
Shows
Just before a November cold snap hits Ohio, I meet Beth Bridgeman at her rural Greene County home. A longtime educator who contributes educational resources to this podcast, Beth teaches workshops that focus on, among other things, saving seeds, Beth saves and plants her own seeds every year.
Beth Bridgeman
And you put that in the refrigerator until next year. So these are my seed packets that I've saved from this year. I've got my marigolds ... and corn that I grew, calendula. I've got everything marked. And ... I've got my beans in here. I keep it in the fridge until I'm ready to start my seeds in January through March.
Shows
So you just that's where you stick them, just in the fridge?
Bridgeman
That's ideal. I used to just keep them in my garage or in the house, but they like to be cool.
Shows
Along with sharing seed saving tips, Beth also shares some of the history of seeds in the U.S. She tells me that the genetic material, or germplasm, of North American seeds contains a wealth of history within it — in particular, the ways that Indigenous seed and seed from settlers and the African diaspora contributed to the germplasm found in this country today.
Bridgeman
So we had indigenous germplasm; there were things that were here, when Indigenous folks were here by themselves in this country. When white settlers came and brought with them enslaved folks from the African diaspora, they each brought their seeds with them — sorghum, cowpeas are things that came from the African diaspora, and yams. And there are stories of enslaved women, you know, braiding these seeds into their hair on the ships to bring them over, because they didn't know what they were going to find in the new world. The germplasm here today is a combination of all of those different peoples and all that different movement and all the Indigenous peoples and plants that were always here.
Shows
Seeds also hold the history of the changing practices around seed saving itself: Farmers used to save their seeds as a matter of common practice. But over the last century, it's become increasingly difficult for them to do so.
Bridgeman
People have been saving seeds since the beginning of time, really. It's only been in the last about 100 years that we have not been able to save seed freely. So now, there are three or four companies that own 60 to 75% of the commercial seed in the whole world. And that's hugely problematic, particularly for farmers in the Global South. Because they can't save their seed anymore — they're forced to buy this seed.
Shows
So how did a practice as natural and logical as saving seeds from one crop to facilitate the next become, in some cases, illegal? In the U.S., it begins with an 1839 federal initiative that distributed seeds to farmers for free — first through the U.S. patent office, and later through the newly formed US Department of Agriculture.
Bridgeman
And so the idea was we were an agricultural country at that point, taking over Indigenous lands, and they wanted to get seed to farmers — viable seeds — so that farmers could plant their crops and successfully grow things. You know, there were billions of seeds going out every year through the post office.
Shows
During the 19th century, seed companies were also beginning to pop up, but they could hardly compete with free seeds. The commercial seed industry in the United States lobbied hard for several decades to have the free seed program shut down.
Bridgeman
Finally, they were successful, and in 1924, the USDA free seed program was terminated.
Shows
Even though they were no longer receiving free seeds, U.S. farmers were still able to save as many of their own seeds as they liked. They selected and saved seeds from their best plants, looking for characteristics like drought tolerance and yield in order to ensure a good crop the following year. Then, in 1931, just a few years after the free seed program ended, a gardener named Henry Bosenberg, of New Jersey, was granted a patent for "New Dawn," a climbing rose he had propagated.
Bridgeman
It was the first plant patent, and it was asexual propagation. And so that means things that are done by grafting or, you know, plant cuttings. And that really opened the floodgates to everything that came afterwards.
Shows
Over the next 40 years, people would continue to patent plants that were reproduced asexually. But that original 1931 patent would eventually lead to the Plant Variety Protection Act, passed in 1970, when seeds themselves came under patent law for the first time.
Bridgeman
At that time, small seed companies started buying up all the seed and patenting it. And then bigger seed companies started buying those small companies so that they could have the genetic material because they want to do their own breeding and research. So for example, commodity companies — corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. — they want the very best genetics in their product. They're also selecting for drought tolerance and yield and things like that. And so then they own that genetic material, and it's theirs, and they can do that breeding themselves. But then nobody else can do it so nobody else can have access to that genetic material.
Shows
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that farmers who saved seeds with patented genetic modifications are committing patent infringement. When farmers purchase patented seed from large seed companies like Bayer, formerly Monsanto, they sign an agreement stating that they will not save seeds from their crops, but will purchase new seed each year. Beth says the inability to save seed has been a problem for farmers all over the world, particularly in India, where farmers have gone into debt, buying seeds from large companies as climate change makes crop failure more likely. Beth says this deep debt has led to an increase in suicide among Indian farmers.
Bridgeman
Farmers have to buy their seed from Monsanto — Monsanto is now Bayer. And so these farmers, you know, they're subsistence farmers, and they have to buy seed for the first time. And then that crop fails. What are they going to do, they have to go to the bank and take out a loan to purchase more seed for the next year. Navdanya is Vandana Shiva's foundation in India that has been working on this problem, and trying to regain and maintain the rights of farmers to save their own seed.
Shows
So what about those of us who aren't farmers but who still want to grow our own food? Can we save, say the seeds from our best tomato plants and plant them next year? Yes — we can save non-patented seed, preferably seed that’s open-pollinated. And Beth says that if at all possible, we should. When we save our seeds, we help grow plants that can adapt to not only the areas where we live, but to the ever-growing threat of climate change.
Bridgeman
Seed has memory. We all want to have seed that grows best in the place where we live. That's the work that we need to be doing as this climate is changing so quickly. We need to keep working with our seed each year. Okay, last year was a drought year, let's save the seed that that lasted best through that drought, or we had terrible flooding all year, which seeds did best? And we just keep adapting that seed for the climate as it's changing in our region each year.
Shows
At the same time, we also connect ourselves back to the land and to the stories nestled inside each individual seed that we sow.
Bridgeman
People have kind of forgotten about saving seed, but people always saved seed. And seeds have such beautiful stories and they're so important. So you have this seed and you know, this was great-grandfather's seed that he brought over on the boat from Germany. And you know, our family has saved it ever since. And oh, this amazing turnip that, you know, my great-aunt grew. The culture in seed is as important as the genetics in seed. This is a joyous process. It's fun. It's gratifying, it really connects you with nature and you can't go wrong. Like if it doesn't work, you just eat that thing. And you know, just don't save the seed from this tomato if it didn't turn out the way you want it — it's still great, you know.
Shows
Despite the global corporate practice of making seed saving illegal for many, there are farmers who operate outside of that system, growing non-patented, open-pollinated crops on smaller farms. These heirloom vegetables and grains are genetically distinct from those grown on large scale commercial farms.
Shows
Jon Branstrator operates a 175-acre farm in Clarksville, straddling the line between Warren and Clinton counties in Ohio. Because he farms with mostly unpatented heritage grain varieties, he's able to save his seed every year for next year's crop. In early November, John shows me around Branstrator Farm. With the wind rustling the stalks and dried corn husks crunching under our feet, we talk about what he looks for in good corn every year.
Jon Branstrator
This is one of the plants that I would select the seed. Number one, it's sturdy. The ear's hanging down. So I want something that will stand well, produce a nice ear and within a certain biological configuration.
Shows
John is the fifth generation of Branstrators to work this farm, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year. The land was originally purchased in 1821 by Andrew Branstrator and his wife, Frances Wilkerson, both of whom are buried in its soil. John left the family farm in the 1970s, but returned to take the helm in 1995. At that time, the farm had been raising monoculture crops and John says he found soil that was eroded and unhealthy.
Branstrator
That was not very ... didn't seem right to me. In Warren County here we have some real good thought leaders on regenerative agriculture from back before it was called that. And they would do seminars and conservation breakfasts, bring in guest speakers that would talk about cover cropping and soil biology and different things. And then some light bulbs went off and I started doing — I went and visited other farms. And I saw how it was working on their farm. So I stuck my toe in and started cover cropping, and then I saw improvements and I saw the soil coming back to life, but I get a lot of satisfaction now. I have seen lots of Monarch butterflies, lots of other butterflies. When it rains, the rain soaks in. If I get a little bit of runoff, it's clear. This last crop of pumpkins, I needed no insecticide because I had an accidental cover crop of buckwheat and all the flowers created this situation for the predators. So I never had that day when I had to pull the trigger and spray pyrethroids in my pumpkins — it was like didn't happen. That's what really makes me happy is when I can see the improvements.
Shows
Another thing that makes him happy is connecting with the history of the things he grows. One of his heirloom grains is a wheat variety called Red Fife, which Jon says is favored by bakers.
Branstrator
It's a variety that came from Northern Europe in the 1800s. It was the main wheat variety in Canada. And then it moved into the United States. It's actually more than a variety, it's a population. So there's genetic variability within it. After a few generations, it becomes part of the local gene pool. And so it's able to adapt — if there's a dry year, if there's a wet year, certain individuals in this population will thrive. And it will adapt to our conditions. I've heard of people growing it in Arizona, and it's got a terroir or a flavor from each area — sort of like wines. That makes it interesting. The bakers really like it. It's got a nuttiness, it performs well, especially for people that are hands-on. And I like growing it.
Shows
Jon has an affinity for not only heirloom seeds, but also heirloom farm equipment. His barn — in addition to a bevy of barn cats — houses an assortment of vintage and antique machinery that he still uses, including a 1940s era seed cleaner and an even older hand crank corn sheller, which he demonstrates.
Branstrator
I'll shell this out and then I'll plant this as my seed for next year's production and it should be fairly pure
Shows
Oh wow.
Branstrator
Tada! A hundred-and-seventy-year-old technology.
Shows
The corn he's shelling is another heirloom variety called Leaming's Yellow Dent, and its history began very close to home. It was developed via hand selection in the mid-19th century by Jacob Spicer Leaming, just a few miles down the road from Branstrator Farm, in Union Township. Leaming won a silver medal for his corn at the Paris Exposition World's Fair, and though it was once popular with Ohio farmers, it's now something of a rarity. Jon tells me there are a number of organizations, like the Seed Savers Exchange — of which he's a member — that are working to not only maintain rare heirloom varieties like Leaming's Yellow Dent, but also find varieties that were thought lost.
Branstrator
These people are exploring and they're detectives and they get leads and then they go and find out — sometimes it's wrong. But sometimes they find these very important plants and they're then publicized and other growers grow them. And these quite often are selected because of flavor, because of resiliency — they'll make a crop no matter what. And they're not like the hybrids that these seed companies want to be like a worldwide blockbuster that will will produce this commodity cantaloupe for the world trade.
Shows
Leaming's Yellow Dent is a favorite of Jon's, not just because of its local history, but because it's just a better variety of corn than what a lot of farmers are growing in the area.
Branstrator
It has high protein, high oils, lots of flavor, superior flavor to any of the hybrids that farmers generally grow around here.
Shows
The history of corn itself stretches back thousands of years, when it was developed by native peoples in Mexico over generations from teosinte, a wild grass. For the last several years, John has spent his winters in Oaxaca in Southwestern Mexico, delving deeper into the stories within the seeds he tends.
Branstrator
I love studying corn and I love going to the places in Southern Mexico and to Oaxaca and learning from the farmers and the abuelas on how to produce this wonderful food. What do we owe these people who developed this? For me, gratitude is something. It's a marvelous plant. I love growing it — it's beautiful this time of year, when the wind blows, there's this crackling noise out in the field. If you can get into some good cornbread, some good tortillas, a great tamale — it's delicioso.
Shows
Maintaining a range of genetically diverse seeds is important to preserving history and culture. But it's also critically important to preserving our access to food. Large-scale agricultural seed companies have whittled down the diversity of seeds available to commercial farmers to a select few. And if those few are threatened by changes in climate or disease, what will we eat?
Shows
There are, as Jon mentioned, other small seed companies working to find and save heirloom seeds — companies like Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. A cooperatively owned seed company, Southern Exposure offers more than 700 varieties of open-pollinated heirloom and organic seeds. Ira Wallace, an author, Black farmer and worker-owner at Southern Exposure, was a keynote speaker at Agraria's Black Farming: Community Land and Food Sovereignty Conference in September of 2021. In her keynote address, Ira shared stories of some of the seeds Southern Exposure maintains — particularly stories of seeds connected to enslaved Black Americans and Indigenous peoples. Here's an excerpt of some of Ira's stories.
Ira Wallace
We really think it's important that these heirloom varieties be maintained. One of the things that gives urgency to the work that we do with making varieties available is the outside climate and the ownership of many of the open-pollinated seed varieties by large, petrochemical companies throughout the world.
Another thing that is a background is the unwritten story of all of these Black historical farmers who developed varieties and were the backbone of agriculture, especially here in the Southeast where I live. And it's only in indirect records that we're able to bring that knowledge out, and we'll do some of those stories.
Fish pepper is an heirloom that's well-known in the eastern shore of Maryland. And some people say — it's hard to prove this — that all of the fish peppers that you find in heirloom catalogs now were descended from seeds that were saved by a Black man named Horace Pippin, and then traded in exchange with the grandfather of seed saver William Woys Weaver. But what we do know is that this pepper is well-known as a fish sauce and other hot sauce amendment in Maryland.
Another story that I learned actually just about a year and a half ago, is we offer at Southern Exposure, Odell's Large White watermelon, and we always thought it was developed by the owner of the Palmyra Plantation in around 1865. But as it turns out, other historical records show that it was not he who developed it, but an enslaved man named Harry who took on the name Sumners when he was freed. And this watermelon is particularly well-known because it came up during a time of a hotbed of developing new sweet, thin-skin watermelons. I was really excited to be able to pull out Harry's name and raise it up and remind people that watermelons are one of the plants that we love that came to us from Africa.
Even during revolutionary times, enslaved people were using their knowledge and working, sometimes in the evenings and on Sundays, to earn money that sometimes was, over time, enough to ensure their freedom. But if not, at least to have a better diet for their families.
When we are looking at who owns the seeds, it's always important in the Americas, to honor the native people of the Americas, and the debt that we owe them for cultivating corn and beans and squashes and other plants of the Americas. And we at Southern Exposure had an opportunity to repatriate — or rematriate actually — Cherokee White Eagle Dent corn to the Cherokee Nation. They had this variety that had been common, and that they had lost the seeds of and we were able to cooperate with the Center for Cherokee Plants and the Reservation Extension Service and donate back seed which we had gotten through a part-Cherokee grower whose family lived in Ohio. And there was a successful grow-out of a quarter of an acre. And then everyone who was part of that reservation who wanted to, had seed stock to start growing this well-known dent corn, which is something that they really appreciated.
So hearing some of these stories, and knowing a little bit of the importance of maintaining so many varieties and to keep the diversity going, what can you do? Well, one thing is to learn to save seeds. I've discovered that many families of seed savers only maintain one or two varieties that are particularly important to them. How they become real keepers to that is they not only save the seeds, they grow the variety. They eat it, they save recipes, they save the stories that go along with how that seed is tied to a particular place and time. And you can adopt a family heirloom variety that you use, so that becomes very important not just to you, but to your children and to other people in your extended community.
And then another thing that you can do, even if you're very limited in your seed saving ability, is to grow heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. And that act in itself is a pushing back against the consolidation and the tendency to have seed companies offer more hybrid seeds, more GMO seeds, other things that you as a gardener or farmer cannot maintain yourself. Vote for diversity with your seed dollars. At your local farmers market, those farmers who are maintaining something special will have seeds of those varieties. If you like them, buy some. Grow them. Save seeds yourself. This is an important way not only to nurture the seeds, not only to carry forth the stories, but to gain more control over our food supply.
_______________________
Host outro:
Shows
Visit our website at groundedhope.org and click on the "Educational Resources" tab to learn more about seed saving and what you can do to protect seed sovereignty. This podcast is brought to you by the people at Agraria, Ohio's first center for regenerative practices, and is funded in part by a grant from Ohio Humanities. To learn more about Agraria, visit www.communitysolution.org. To watch Ira Wallace's full keynote address, as well as other videos from the 2021 Black Farming Conference, visit Agraria's Facebook page at facebook.com/theagrariacenter.
Shows
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson. Our scholars are Beth Bridgman, who teaches a series of rescaling and resilience courses at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio; and Rick Livingston, the assistant director of the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
Shows
I'm Lauren Shows, and you've been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset