Home grown

Fighting globalization one seed at a time

By Jes Burns

January 3, 2007

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Battered plastic baggies, old yogurt containers, and small manila envelopes cover the hardwood floor of the Dharmalaya Yoga Center in Eugene, Oregon. Each is filled with seeds. One plastic bag bulges with millions of gossamer brown threads, as small and light as dust. Another contains a mix of beans: black and speckled, dirty white and kidney-shaped. A third holds round flakes, tissue-paper thin and swelling just slightly at their centers. There are seeds that look like blow darts, seeds that could easily be mistaken for pebbles, seeds shaped like almonds and striped with white from base to tip.

The packages on the floor contain more than 100 varieties of seed, all of them collected by Oregon gardeners and farmers at the end of the growing season. The harvesters have brought their bounty to participate in a seed swap, a gathering organized to distribute seeds locally and non-commercially. “Seed swap” is a slight misnomer, since participants do not trade pound-for-pound or seed-for-seed. Instead, they select based on their interests and needs.

Seed swaps build communities of growers by bringing together experience and resources. Arguably, farmers and gardeners have been informally exchanging seed since the advent of agriculture. The current incarnation of swaps is rooted in three basic desires: for diversity, for knowledge, and for control over the food we eat.

Nicholas Routledge, the organizer of this swap, is a prominent figure among the agri-activists in Eugene. Routledge is the year-round caretaker of the Food for Lane County Youth Farm, located in a working-class neighborhood in nearby Springfield. The organic farm employs at-risk teenagers during the summer to learn sustainable farming practices.

Routledge doesn’t work directly with the teenagers; instead, he seems to take a subtle pride in playing the slightly eccentric English hermit, hovering on the periphery. For working the land, he dons well-worn Carhartt pants cinched with muddy kneepads and held up by button suspenders. He appears to trim his reddish hair and beard with the same clipper attachment. And he tends to speak in sweeping philosophical proclamations: “We’re not gardening for escapism. We’re gardening because we’re deeply political animals. We’re gardening because we think it’s the most effective, pragmatic, and hard-hitting form of personal and social transformation we can engage in.”

A day at the Food for Lane County Youth Farm

Routledge lives in a small travel trailer surrounded by soggy, overgrown vegetation and his own small garden plot, which bristles with 30 varieties of cabbage. “Some of these won’t make it through the winter,” he says, looking at the robust heads. “They grew too quickly.” He’s in the first year of a long-term project to de-hybridize the vegetables and isolate stable, resilient lines of winter cabbage that reproduce simply, via open pollination. He calls the project “succeeding seceding seeding.”

Since 2002, when the USDA established national standards for certifying organic food products — no antibiotics, growth hormones, most pesticides or fertilizers, genetic modification, or ionized radiation — organics have blossomed in grocery stores around the country. The market for certified-organic products is now growing 20 percent a year, outstripping the 2 to 4 percent growth rate of conventional food products. But as organic labels pop up on everything from canned soup to frozen pizza, “organic” has lost ground to “local” and “sustainable.”

Crouching in the soft loam by his cabbage plot, Routledge points out that most of the organic products in this country — no matter what the brand on the label — are owned and distributed by a handful of large corporations. That food can burn up a lot of fossil fuel getting to market; the oft-cited statistic about American groceries is that the average piece of produce on a supermarket shelf has traveled 1,500 miles.

And seeds may have journeyed even farther from their original growers. “The average seed put in the ground by a local organic farmer may have traveled 4,000 or 5,000 or 6,000 miles,” Routledge says. Acquiring seed locally makes those miles practically disappear.

For Routledge, truly sustainable agriculture must be a local loop: locally grown seed planted locally, sold locally, and planted locally again. “Until seeds are sourced locally,” Routledge says, “sustainable agriculture is a conjurer’s trick.”

Routledge’s cynicism about the corporate fate of organics is tempered by a deep-seated optimism evident in his day-to-day existence. For him, the change will happen on a local level, and it’s already beginning. His cabbage-breeding project is a definitive step in closing the sustainability loop; he eventually plans to provide free seed to anyone in the Willamette Valley who asks.

As with organics, the seed industry has followed a similar economic pattern of concentration, with multinational companies buying out smaller seed-supply houses. The agrochemical corporations Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta now control nearly 25 percent of the world’s total seed supply. Transgenic or genetically modified crops (plants spliced with the genes of other species to increase favorable traits), terminator crops (plants genetically modified to produce sterile seeds), and the patenting of specific plant types all pose unanswered questions about the future of world’s food supply.