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Plan B… More Hamburg, then Grain

December 18, 2006 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

Our plans for Poland on the 9th of December fell through, and so we found ourselves in Hamburg with lots of options but no plans. We did what we could to pursue new seed-related contacts, even recruiting the help of Christina and Juan, but we found last-minute arrangements around the holidays to be somewhat difficult in Germany.

We wound up staying in Hamburg until our December 17th flight to Lithuania, mostly exploring various parts of the city and lying low.

One of the contacts Christina pursued for us worked out, and so we spent a delightful afternoon with Karl-Josef Muller, the head of the Association for Biodynamic Plant Breeders, and his fellow cereal breeder Martin Timmermann. Karl Joseph has been breeding for high quality grains in low fertility, low-input organic systems since 1986, and has developed and registered a variety of “naked” barley, Lawina, on the EU’s common catalogue. Take a Look at their website “Cereal Breeding Research Darzau” it contains a lot of great information.

We first checked out of some of their “nursery” plots and grow-out fields of fall-planted rye, spelt, einkorn, and barley on neighboring organic and biodynamic farms. Then we returned to the research center to see some of the specialized equipment (including custom tractor and special de-hulling machine), and then retired to their offices for coffee and a long discussion of the methods and whys and wherefores of organic grain breeding.

Karl-Josef told us, “Our aim is to develop new varieties, but it does not end there. It is also to develop new ideas for new varieties and to research and tell others (even the conventional breeders) what we have learned. Because if the idea is developed, sometimes that is enough for now. The market/interest (in organically developed seeds) is very small, but it is not our job to improve this. What is important is to develop new criteria for farming, organic farming, human being, these ideas.”

It was a wonderful visit, and we left with a few new varieties of grains (Lawina naked barley and a light grain rye), and shared with Martin some of the perennial wheat that we had brought. We also left with our heads full of new ideas and information.

Germany: Into the Heart of the Matter

December 8, 2006 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

Early morning on Monday, December 4, we arrived at the doorstep of Christina Henatch, a pivotal player in the German Biodynamic seed breeding scene, Working at the Gut Wolfsdorf Farm outside of hamburg Germany. Christina was gracious enough to host us for several days during a very busy time of year for her. We talked about a great deal — from nematodes and flea beetles to the reality of so-called “organic hybrids” now on the market. We participated a bit in the process of selecting carrots for next year’s seed crop, and helped process some of this year’s carrot seed crop.

We worked a great deal with Juan Richter, Christina’s knowledgable and helpful research assistant, and had what amounted to a four day seminar in the Biodynamic seed world of Germany.

Christina eagerly accepted many of the seeds that we brought, including the broccoli and beans, which are two of her main breeding crops. She was also excited to pass on some of our seed to her colleagues that work with grains, eggplant, salad greens and more. She shared with us some of her favorite carrots, broccoli, and beans, as well as a “naked barley” and some over wintering spinach, and offered us new contacts to explore in her network of Seedspeople.

Christina is a part of the oldest and largest cooperative of Biodynamic breeders in the world, Bingenheimer. Bingenheimer is dedicated to developing and promoting open-pollinated varieties for the professional gardener/farmer that are of the calibar to compete with and surpass hybrid varieties. It is a pivotal time in the evolution of the seed business, especially considering the introduction of “organic hybrids,” and the German Seed Initiative, comprised of dozens of dedicated seed breeders like Christina, is the only organization taking a pro-active stance to ensure that market gardeners will continue to have access to increasingly high-quality open pollinated varieties.

We hope to visit Bingenheimer later in our journey, but for now stay tuned for some photos of the Gut Wulfsdorf farm and our experiences here.

Barritskov, Home of Aarstiderne

December 7, 2006 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

Sounds a bit like The Middle Ages and knights and all that, and really that´s not too far off…

Thursday morning, November 30, we left for Barritskov, a manor house also on the East Coast of Jutland with 600+ hectares of Biodynamic forage crops and vegetables, and a sizable herd of beef cattle. Barritskov is also the home base of Aarstiderne (Danish for the four seasons), a “box scheme” that imports organic foods from all over the world and delivers any of nine different produce boxes, as well as a variety of specialty boxes (meat, dairy, fish, wine, etc.) to the doors of over 30,000 households in Denmark and now Sweden.

We took a tour with Chris Russel, the long-time renaissance man of the business and an American that has lived and worked in Denmark almost twenty years. He arranged for us to stay in the “gardener’s house,´´ a two-hundred year-old four bedroom home with a thatched roof, that is sometimes used by the president of the company but is in the process of being converted into a guest quarters. We were the first guests to stay here and felt quite lucky to be treated so well.

We met with Chris again on Friday, and had a good conversation about our project and the project there at Barritskov. Chris even videoed an interview of us for the company´s VLOG!

We gave Chris seeds (that he promised to increase) for their experimental garden, and he gave us access to boxes and boxes of Seeds of Change seeds from a 2002 trial garden they did for SOC. We were quite delighted for this gift, which included a few varieties that Seeds of Change doesn’t offer any more and we are excited to bring back. Most of the seeds are not on the EU Common Catalogue, so we took some seeds that we thought people might be interested in further down the line.

Barritskov was a wonderful place and while we were there we had the opportunity to explore the forests and coastline, and also walk to the town nearby. It was a great snapshot of the Danish countryside, and a much better seed contact than we had imagined.

Denmark´s Organic Agriculture College

December 4, 2006 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

From West Jutlands High School we traveled by bus to the city of Arhus, and then on to The Organic Agricultural College or Den Økologiske Landbrugsskole på Kalø near Rohne. This school, besides being a foreign language “high school”, also offers a three year certificate in Organic Farming, and trains about sixty students per year in organic grain crops, pigs, or cows for dairy or meat. Kristian, the school’s principal, took us on a tour of the campus. The fields of Brassicas as a catch crop, functioning dairy, and marsh sewage treatment plant treating all of the schools wastewater were only some of the great projects the school was involved in. Students attend classes for five months, then have twelve months of on-farm experience, then another six months of class work. They must already have at least one year farming experience before they can be accepted to the school, and the program is, essentially, free. The certificate earned by the end of the program is somewhere between an associate’s degree and a bachelor’s degree, and a person must have one of these certificates if they want to buy a farm that is more than thirty hectares in Denmark.

We attended two international classes — about half of the student body is from Eastern Europe, mostly Poland, Bulgaria, and Ukraine, with the other half from Denmark. The International classes are all in English. The first class we attended was a lecture in a unit about crop rotation for first term students. The crops in question were mostly large area commodity crops such as sunflowers, canola, rye, spelt, etc. To this class of about seventeen we gave an impromptu lecture about our project. We focused on why we believe open pollinated seeds are important, with issues of food security and biodiversity stressed. We took a detour from the school for the rest of the morning and walked three miles out to “the ruin,’’ a several hundred year old fort on a small island that is connected to the mainland by a man-made jetty. It was quite beautiful, and a nice walk to boot, past a small marina and around an inlet of the bay. Andrew even found some wild yarrow seeds to collect.

Vestjyllands Højskole = West Jutlands High School

December 2, 2006 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

Birtha Toft, garden manager extraordinaire and member of the Frösamlerne, invited us to stay and work for a few days at Vestjyllands Højskole, “folk high school” where she works. Young people attend these schools of alternative education for six months to a year, usually between what is in the US high school and college. There are “high schools´´ all over the country where people can study everything from theater and art, to fusion cooking, to politics and sustainable living. The “folk high school” offers courses in all of these and more.

We exchanged work in the Biodynamic garden for room and board, and ate some of the best food any of us had ever had. We prepared some of the sandy, no-dig raised garden beds for the winter with manure and straw, mulched paths, built up fences, and broke ground to prep new beds for next season. We had a great time with all of this work, and traded some seeds with Birtha to boot!

We also gave a short presentation to the students and faculty of the school about the Seed Ambassadors project. We were able to hook up our computer to a projector so we could share some photos of Oregon, as well as some of the varieties that we brought seed for, including Painted Mountain Corn breeding projects and Kale. Our first formal presentation and it went really well, brought to life thanks to the photos.

During our stay there we also found the time to walk to nearby Rinköbing Fjord, and Birtha took us on an outing to see some amazing sand sculptures depicting viking myths AND the North Sea. A very great experience for all.

United for a Common Cause

November 30, 2006 / Andrew Still / 0 Comments

At the Frøsamlerne, event in Denmark we met up with Kayla and Amanda Preece, sisters(also from the Pacific Northwest) that have been traveling together checking out the seedscape of Italy since the beginning of November. We will be traveling together through our visit to Lithuania, after which they will return to the US.

Stay tuned for Kayla´s blog posts to find out more about the story in Italy and her take on the Seed Ambassadors Project.

The Seed Ambassadors Project