Saving Nation’s Seed Supply

  • Multinational corporations started taking control of seeds around thirty years ago. Now, ten corporations own over half the world’s commodity seed supply. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

Some small gardening businesses
are noticing more customers want organic
and heirloom seeds. Experts think that
trend might be important for the world.
Kinna Ohman reports they believe
those seeds might be the hope of future
food supplies:

Transcript

Some small gardening businesses
are noticing more customers want organic
and heirloom seeds. Experts think that
trend might be important for the world.
Kinna Ohman reports they believe
those seeds might be the hope of future
food supplies:

John Meshna points to a half empty rack of vegetable and flower seed packets in his
store.

“We’ve emptied this thing at least a half a dozen times this year. I thought maybe
we’d have a rush in the spring and that’d be the end of it. And it looks like it’s
going to be going through the winter.”

Meshna owns and runs DirtWorks – a green garden supply business in New Haven,
Vermont. He’s been selling organic and heirloom garden seeds for more than twenty
years. Heirloom seeds come from vegetables that have almost disappeared. And Meshna
thinks people want those types of seeds more and more because they’re worried about our
food supply.

“People call us just to make sure sometimes before they order, now, ‘these are really
organic seeds, right?’ Yeah, it says it right on the label. It’s gonna make you very
happy when you get that package.”

And it’s making certain experts happy too.

Hope Shand is the research director of Etcetera Group. It’s an organization that’s
concerned about corporate control of the food supply. Shand says when more home
gardeners and small farmers grow plants from organic and heirloom seeds, that helps
keep variety in the world’s food supply.

“This is an incredibly important service. People, gardeners, small farmers, urban
gardeners, are conserving, and saving seed diversity. No one else is really doing that
job.”

Hope Shand says multinational corporations started taking control of seeds around thirty
years ago. Now, Shand says, ten corporations own over half the world’s commodity seed
supply. And she thinks that’s risky.

“The seed is the first link in the food chain. Whoever controls the seed literally
controls the world’s food supply. We can’t afford to have the level of vulnerability
and dependence that that entails when we have a handful of multinational seed
companies controlling the world seed supply.”

(sound of watering)

“I’m growing greens without heat.”

At a small organic nursery in Hinesberg, Vermont, Julie Rubaud is one of those who
wants to get these seeds and plants to more people. For her, it’s not just preserving a
strain of a vegetable, it’s trying to match up those plants with the right gardener.

Rubaud grows close to eight hundred varieties of organic and heirloom plants for her
customers. She says that helps her connect people with the right plants for their gardens
and tastebuds.

“I always start out asking, ‘how much room do you have?’ And then I ask them
how they like to eat tomatoes. It’s nice to be able to cater everyone’s garden plan to
their individual needs because we have so many varieties.”

And if next year’s anything like last year, Rubaud will have at least forty varieties of
organic tomato plants ready for new gardens by next spring.

She wonders – with the economy the way it’s been – if one plant might do exceptionally
well.

“There’s Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter Tomatoes. Have you heard of that
one?” (laughs)

Radiator Charlie’s tomato has been around since the 1940s. You probably won’t find it
at the big-box discount-store gardening department. It’s one of those colorful, hardy,
productive plants that many people think will help bring back variety to our food supply.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kinna Ohman.

Related Links