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

although they often perform better, a farmer can’t save them for another year’s crop. The offspring fail to “grow true”—to produce fruit similar to the ones from which they came. When a gardener plants seed saved from a hybrid, he doesn’t get the same beefsteak tomato or supersweet corn but a hodgepodge of the ancestral strains used in breeding.
    Using science to improve food production is not intrinsically bad. Science is worrisome when it only serves the interests of mercenaries and their employees in the long run. Seed companies patent F1 hybrids and have proprietary control over them in an attempt to achieve monopolies on genes. A farmer, then, is forced to return year after year to the company that produced the seed, infecting our food supply with greed.
    Increasing numbers of farmers, those that didn’t die or quit, went with the new schema—abandoning vintage, traditional, mom-and-pop, place-adapted, planter-bred, hand-saved, carefully guarded seeds. Before 1932, hundreds of corn varieties were grown across the continent, including Stanley corn. Or the grits corn I got from another neighbor, Lewis Snowden, which came from his stepfather, Mr. Gore, who got it from a Mr. Ogden. Or Keener corn, which I can’t wait to tell you about.
    The year 1932 was the tipping point. This was the year Golden Cross Bantam, the first hybrid maize that became popular, was introduced in US fields and gardens. Stewart’s bacterial wilt had plagued farmers; the early 1930s had seen it in epidemic proportions. Golden Cross Bantam, developed by pathologist Glenn Smith of Purdue University, was resistant to the wilt; when put on the market, the seed flew off hardware shelves everywhere.
    A sea change happened in the blink of an eye. In 1935, less than 10 percent of Iowa corn was hybrid. Four years later, 90 percent of it was—specifically Golden Cross Bantam. In the slip of time between 1935 and 1939, an interval during which both my parents were born, the face of our agricultural landscape forever changed. Trusting the advertisements, not knowing long-term consequences, not understanding the loss, and wanting to survive, farmers stuck their canisters of homegrown seed-corn on back shelves in sheds and went to town for Golden Cross Bantam. By 1946, according to Jeff L. Bennetzen’s Handbook of Maize , Iowa was 100 percent hybrid; 90 percent of the corn belt as a whole grew hybrid corn.
    Hybrids are designed to be successful in a wide range of climates and growing conditions. They are broadly adapted, as opposed to the more localized open-pollinated varieties—allowing a national and international seed trade to function. Before long, American cornfields transacted almost exclusively in hybrid varieties. To grow them was to enter the milieu of progress.
    Nobody faults the farmers, who were acting in their financial best interests and did not know they were joining a system that was already cracked and would be soon broken. Hybridization itself is not really even the issue. As plant pathologist Albert Culbreath told me, “Hybrids have a place and are of use. But they should not be used exclusively and they should be of diverse parentage as well.” The real issue is what hybridization represents—including the loss of an extensive seed heritage and agroecological diversity. The problem is the industrialization of hybridization.
    Suddenly we had a countryside full of farmers who no longer had to worry about leaky barn roofs and varmints in their seed corn. Seed companies worried about that. But the farmers still had to worry. They had to worry about autonomy. They had to worry about parity (as opposed to disparity , inequality, or farmers receiving prices for crops that did not reflect the cost of inputs to the farmers). They had to worry about the bank. In giving up seed saving, they became prisoners to Big Ag.
    It is important to note that other methods of speeding up traditional plant breeding have come into popularity,