The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food Read Online Free PDF Page A

Revolution, agribusiness began to woo farmers toward a new dawn. The Green Revolution, which in this country was an entire narrative in itself—a beginning, middle, and end—cemented a slide from agrarian to industrial life. Chemical fertilization, standardization, homogenization, mechanization, and commercialization were catchwords of the new agriculture. It promised an end to world hunger and although it did for a time coincide with the production of more food per acre and worker than ever before, one billion people in the world are still hungry. As Jules Pretty writes in his essay, “Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People?” industrial systems “only look efficient if the harmful side-effects . . . are ignored.” Agricultural industrialization rode into town with a skulk of sidekicks: a shift from the local to the global; from the small to the large; from the nutritious to the filling; from the storied to the acultural; from purity to toxification; from independence to victimization.
    In order to serve the model of continuous progress, which may not correlate with profits for the farmer, tractors began to take the place of living, breathing workers. My friend Angus Gholson remembers when his father got his first tractor. “I like it okay,” the elder Mr. Gholson said, “but nothing comes out the back.”
    Industrial agriculture also forced specialization, larger areas planted with a smaller number of varieties, as well as more acres planted in annuals and fewer in perennials. Its mania was monoculture, a few dependable, high-yielding varieties that ripen at the same time. “In south Georgia,” a farmer told me, “we’re trying to major in corn and soybeans.” Diversity, in fact, is an impediment to efficiency and productivity, as is small or human-scaled agriculture. A diversified small farmer who saves her own seeds is not only of no use to a corporation, but a threat. The basis of diversity—which brings with it possibility, stability, hope, and power—is small and differentiated.
    Recently I enjoyed a stint as a visiting writer at Warren Wilson College near Asheville, North Carolina, which has a working farm. The college requires each student to work fifteen hours a week, anything from library support to computer repair to blacksmithing to beekeeping to farming. One day I walked into a classroom to teach, and notes from a previous lecture remained on the marker-board. I was midstream in their erasure when I began to read the phrases and imagine the lecture that had taken place.
    mechanization of agriculture
gospel of progress
loss of mules
the spectral trace
    I knew the story by heart. The words formed a kind of ghost life I never knew as my own but to which I have longed to return. I have been walking in the spectral trace.
Hybrids
    Industrial ag went after seeds themselves and with appalling swiftness took over the seed supply. They began to hybridize, a hybrid being the offspring of a genetic cross. Hybridization is simply plant breeding sped up. The pollen from one plant with desirable characteristics is rubbed on the stigma of another similar plant with desirable characteristics. This flower produces a seed that, when grown, exhibits a combination of desirable characteristics—excellent productivity and growth—called hybrid vigor. Because of this and because new varieties are often bred to be disease resistant, hybrids are tempting to grow.
    In the mid-1920s, the first hybrid seeds reached the market in the United States. The first hybrids were two varieties of corn. In 1924, the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station introduced Redgreen, and Henry A. Wallace introduced Copper Cross. (Wallace was a corn breeder who would go on to start the Hi-Bred Corn Company, the world’s first hybrid seed company, which would come to be owned by DuPont and allied with Syngenta.)
    When farmers planted hybrids, bluntly put, they made more money. The bad news about hybrid seeds, however, is that