Ten thousand years after humans became less nomadic and learned how to cultivate crops, veteran investigative journalist Mark Schapiro plunges into the struggle already underway for control of seeds, the ground-zero ingredient for our food. Three-quarters of the seed varieties on Earth in 1900 had become extinct by 2015. (emphasis added) In “Seeds of Resistance,” Schapiro takes us to the front lines of a struggle over the seeds that remain — a struggle that will determine the long-term security of our food supply in the face of unprecedented climate volatility.
A Seed Chronicle Foretold
A seed story, like life, starts small and gets bigger.
In the mid-1990s, a letter arrived at a simple adobe-style office on a dusty lot on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. The site, headquarters of Native Seeds/SEARCH, an organization which saves seeds native to the southwest, is little more than a couple of garden plots and a refrigerator and freezer filled with indigenous seeds. Here you can find seeds that have inherited characteristics dating back as far as three-thousand years.
The letter came from a lawyer for the food company […]
This certainly hits home because my wife and I depend upon our organic garden, and we do save our seeds when we can. Last year we had two types of squash growing: Trombocino and Butternut. This year the seeds I had planted from our Butternut seeds turned out to be a combination of elongated Butternuts which had been changed by the Trombocino seeds that were too close to the Butternut plants last year. They taste really good, but became a problem where they were planted on the fence next to our neighbor’s shed he had put up this spring. The new Butternut/Trombocino combination seeds turned out to be stuck between the fence and shed. I had to pull the fence back to squeeze the fruit out with great difficulty because they were so huge, weighing in at about ten pounds each; they are huge. We made the mistake and now must buy new organic seeds from an organic seed company to make sure we don’t have the same problem again. It is not an easy job saving seeds. We keep all of ours in the fridge for safe keeping. Most seeds will keep for years in the cold of the fridge, and some can be frozen for safe keeping, too. We buy many of our seeds like beets, kale and other crops which take two years to bloom and produce seeds, but try to save as many as we can.