The Seed Ambassadors Project

Bringing Biodiversity Back

Page 9 of 10

Denmark: East to West in 12 hours

When we got off the bus in Copenhagen it was very cold and seemed as though nothing was open. We decided to walk towards the center of town, past Tivoli Gardens and the wax museum to the main square. When we got to the town square it was full of life. We were surprised to see so many people awake so early — until we realized it wasn’t early for them, it was late. The bars were still open and they were still out from the night before. Once we had this realization it became obvious that every person that passed us was quite drunk, and so we had an amusing time sitting on a bench in the square watching the show.

Eventually it was late enough to call Søren Holt, a member of the Danish Seed Savers Association (Frøsamlerne) who would be our ride to Ødense for the Seed Cleaning Workshop later that day. We had a bit of difficulty with the pay phone, until a kind and compassionate (and very drunk) young man offered to make the call for us. After our pick-up was arranged, our new friend asked us what we were doing in Denmark. When we told him, he laughed and said, “You guys are very big nerds. I thought I was a big nerd when I play online video games, but you are even more nerds. You are like bionic nerds, made up of many pieces of smaller nerds stuck together!” I thanked him for the complement and the phone call, and we parted ways.

It was early enough that we were able to go back to Søren’s house before driving the 2.5 hours to Ødense. He served us toast and coffee and finally, Ikea made sense to me! We took a quick tour of his garden and were off.

The seed cleaning workshop in Ødense was attended by about 18 people, all members of the Frøsamlerne. The presenter, Jeppe Dalsgaard, has worked for seed companies in Scandinavia long enough that he had a great amount of knowledge to share: He knows the magic of cleaning seeds by hand (without fans!). Jeppe gave thorough demonstrations on cleaning spinach, kale, and carrot seeds using only three different sized screens, a shallow metal drum that looked something like a large cheese cake pan with a very fine wire mesh at the bottom, two trays and a muslin sack. He also gave the mathematical equations for how dry a seed can get at a certain temperature with a certain atmospheric humidity. He explained the finer details of “priming” parsley seed so it germinates quicker, and taught about the difference between seed vigor (speed with which seeds sprout) and germination rate (total percentage of sprouted seeds after a given period of time).

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Frankfurt to Copenhagen plus Goethe

We arrived in Frankfurt, Germany at 6pm on Thursday (11/23), after leaving LAX at about 8pm Wednesday night. Entering Germany was easier than any country I have ever traveled to. No “embarkation card” as is common in Southeast Asia, no visa, just a quick glance at our passports, a question of “where are you going?” (answer: all over!), a stamp in our passports and we were in. No one was staffing the customs booth (!), so we had no one to ask what, exactly, counts as “goods to declare,” and so the seeds and garlic remained with us. I think the smell of garlic may be with us for a long time, as it was packed tight in our bags and its perfume permeated the ziplocks.

We found a cheapish hotel room (40 Euros = $53US) and promptly fell asleep. It was almost like Thursday didn’t happen. Thanks to the wonders of jet lag, we awoke at 3am ready to start the day. I’ve always wanted to be a morning person, so I hope it will last!

We spent early Friday morning walking around exploring the city, and then, once the bus and train depots opened, trying to figure out the easiest and cheapest way to travel the 800 km to Copenhagen. We decided to take the bus — a 15 hour ride from 2pm until 5am the next day!

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We’ve been approved for the Small Lots of Seed Permit!

We were approved for our Small Lots of Seed Importation Permit only two days after it was submitted electronically, just in time for my birthday yesterday. Who’d of thought the USDA was so thoughtful?

We’ll be getting links up to some of the details of the license, what it allows us to do (and not), in the near future. For now we can just heave a sigh of relief that we’ll be able to bring back seeds. woo hoo!

Take a look at the “seed permit”

Our Field Trip to the USDA

In our quest to be transparent and legal in all of our Seed Ambassadorizing, we decided to procure a permit from one of the largest bureaucracies in the American Government: the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). One of the programs of the USDA is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), and a program of APHIS is the Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ) program. Whew! The PPQ runs a permitting program to import small lots of seed (more info can be found at http://www.aphis.usda.gov/ppq/Q37/smalllotsseed.html), and lucky for us, this permit can be applied for online.

If all goes well, the Small Lots of Seed Permit should allow us to both ship and carry up to 50 seed packets at a time without a phytosanitary certificate (and we hope without much additional hassle). But we first had to register for Level Two access for the USDA website, which requires presenting oneself and one’s government issued ID to a local USDA worker.

We drove thirty minutes through a downpour and presented ourselves to Delores, a USDA Farm Service Agency employee, who glanced at my driver’s license and chatted it up with us as she tried to figure out how to navigate the computer program. She asked us what we were doing and we told her a bit about our project, at which point she walked us over to the desk of one of the Humboldt County Agricultural Commissioners, who seemed interested in our project.

We talked with John from the County Agricultural Commission for a few minutes, and he was very helpful, despite not knowing much about the programs we were applying for (since he was a county employee and not federal or state). He seemed to think that some seeds (especially Agricultural crops) may need to be quarantined (!) or treated with both fungicides and pesticides (!) before we could bring them in, “to protect against food supply bio-terrorism.” He was sure to warn us that there may be additional State regulations that we would do well to inform ourselves about, because “everything has changed since September 11.” He gave us the phone numbers of some people in the state capital, and wished us luck.

After John had done his official duty, he told us about some freaky purple warty Peruvian heirloom potatoes he had just bought from a farmer’s market that he was excited to grow out… Though he doesn’t know how anyone was able to import them, because “it takes and act of Congress to import potatoes from Peru.” Thank goodness we’re not trying to import potatoes from Peru!

The Cabbage Coalition

“Crop varieties incorporate the values of their creators. When you grow varieties bred by others, you propagate their values along with their varieties. Today’s professional plant breeders – university and corporate – are breeding plants to facilitate and serve the modern megafarm agribusiness pattern. These varieties produce well in huge moncultures grown with massive doses of herbicides and chemical fertilizers. Bred into the varieties are the values of their creators – that more is always better, that monocultures are best, and that pollution, biodiversity, and sustainability don’t matter.

“It is time for new patterns – new patterns for agriculture, and new patterns for plant breeding. It’s time for the rising up of a new generation of plant breeders out of the soil of our farms and gardens. It is time for farmers and gardeners everywhere to take back our seeds, to rediscover seed saving, and to practice our own plant breeding. It is time to breed plants based upon an entirely different set of values.”

Carol Deppe
Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2000

Why am I growing thirty different varieties of winter cabbage? Well, I like cabbages. I also believe that the world stands on the cusp of a plant breeding revolution – in the values which inform it; its purposes; its strategies and tactics. Here’s an edited and enlarged excerpt from recent emails to a couple of friends, outlining some of the context for the shift I perceive.

Very recently, a stranger asked me who my heros were. Without hesitating, I heard myself say, “plant breeders.” As circumstance would have it, the years have gifted me the friendships of some of the key food plant breeders Stateside who, for several reasons – local ecology among them – are concentrated in my bioregion. These are the greenworld equivalent of IT open-source developers – a fiercely independent tribe whose lives are devoted to breeding open-pollinated, organically bred varieties of food plants. They happen to be some of the more remarkable souls I have ever met.

What I’ve been attempting to hang words on of late is that Wendell Berry’s observation that we can have agriculture only within nature, and culture only within agriculture (“At certain points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another”) is a great deal more than a tidy philosophical maxim. What fundamentally underpins the behavior of our civilization is nothing less than the literal, embodied fabric of the germplasm which sustains it (for IT hands, read OS). And because it is food crops which sit at the very apex point of our most immediate (thrice) daily interface with the greenworld, so our attitude and approach to co-evolving with our foods determines the very nature of the meme-foundation of our lives.

In the realm of archetypes, the same rules hold true through all spectrums and dimensions of experience, don’t you think, and it was when I was pondering patterns around information technology that I began considering evolutionary ontology, in earnest. What I recognized then was an implicit direction toward evolutionary drift – toward, put simply, openness. Hence, for example, the explosion of the web and the open-source movement in recent years – phenomena which proffer a timely, exacting and quite prophetic ‘rules-analog’ for the behavior of our cultural engagement with the greenworld. My strong sense is that these same evolutionary pressures are set to take the plant breeding community by storm and in so doing will refashion the fundamental fabric of that which sustains us.

No plant breeder worth her or his salt will pretend that the major imperative behind plant breeding strategies is not an economic one. This has had profound implications for the foundational genetic structure of our world because the vast majority of commercial companies sell food crops that are not open-pollinated (that is, they are not the greenworld equivalent of open-source). Instead, the overriding focus of recent decades has been on fashioning breeding techniques to create plants that are hybrids – life forms that are literally, structurally, proprietary. When we save seed from a hybrid, the ‘temporary holding pattern’ of a cross between two typically highly-inbred parents, and replant it, the resulting progeny is highly unstable. It does not breed true. What we get, instead, is a highly variable mess that also ‘disguises’ the genetic inheritance of the parental lines. Hence, farmers and, more specifically, competitors, see little benefit in ‘growing out’ hybrids. Hybrid vendors therefore literally lock a recurring annual profit into the structure of life and their balance sheet.

Why this technology is interesting to me is because evidence strongly suggests that the defining plant breeding motif, one that so far has put a great deal of money in people’s pockets, nevertheless flies fundamentally in the face of evolutionary trends. Not only do we see this in the the fact that plants naturally tend toward greater OP-ness where they are able, we see it most particularly in the essential nature of hybrid behavior. Hybrids are inherently, intrinsically, degenerative. They are designed, deliberately, to lack evolutionary resilience. In a nutshell, hybrids have no sense of place.

This, I sense, is where we encounter the not-insignificant cultural implications of dehybridization, among other practices. It’s my unshakeable sense that the fundamental essence of effective cultural regeneration will be underpinned, literally, by nothing less than an evolution in food plant breeding strategies – that in deconstructing food crop breeding as it stands, by applying strategies and tactics that honor ecological truths as distinct from synthetic ‘economic’ falsehoods, we do nothing less than deconstruct civilization and refashion it in the image of freedom, openness, sharing and the regenerative power of Nature; because our approach to seed, of course, is the foundational archetype upon which our culture is sustained. I believe this claim is not unsound.

Everything I’ve learned since even before I began my working life hopscotching around the deepest reaches of the international capital markets tells me that hitching a survival strategy, in this day and age, to breeding strategies that are fundamentally closed, is a Loser’s Game; that “the irresistible march of evolution” as Teilhard de Chardin puts it, has our economic imperatives beat. Hands down.

For complicated reasons, what it takes to raise food genotypes with a deepening capacity for co-evolving intelligently with local ecologies through the years, as distinct from ‘self-destructing’ after one season, isn’t simply a question of tweaking our existing approach: it will require a fundamental re-engineering of our culture and the assumptions which sustain it. A shift in collective conscience, perhaps. But as we move toward the evolutionary inevitability of inherently sustainable – as distinct from unsustainable – foodsheds, the plant breeding story moves center stage because it, of all human activities, provides us with a tangible, navigable cultural roadmap into the roots of authentic health.

Quite how this transition in breeding tactics and strategies, and the profound cultural shift it embraces, will unfold, I have absolutely no idea. We are all steering, after all. Tim Peters’ work is one example of what we might describe as a ‘deeply contextual’ approach to breeding – one which comes closer than most to annihilating the distinction between breeding plot and the harmonic chaostrophy of wild nature – as distinct from the moncultural segregation that conventional breeders typically seek to foster. What kind of lifestyle and awareness does it take to breed plants in this way?

And here in Eugene-Springfield, we are now co-ordinating growouts among the various non-profit teaching gardens in town. This is affording us the opportunity, for example, to work simultaneously with several crop types of Brassica oleraceae (which include, among others: kale, cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, kohlrabi and rutabagas). This species is highly problematic for small scale independent plant breeders, given that it accounts for an extraordinarily high percentage of our food crops, yet brings with it cross-pollination-isolation concerns that are typically only assuaged by spreading growouts, expensively, across disparate, isolated plots – one of several factors contributing to the very great paucity of independent efforts to develop depth in OP B. oleraceae especially, in recent years.

Stateside in particular, independent breeders’ efforts to develop B. oleraceae (particularly of the heading types) have, with a tiny number of notable exceptions, been paltry. Let us hope that in time, conventional breeders will bring their remarkably sophisticated array of knowledge, expertise and passion to bear on the OP B. oleraceae story.

Of course I’m aware of the fundamental structural resistances standing in the way of such a transition. As a plant breeder with the Dutch transnational powerhouse, Bejo Seed- and one of the more impressive souls lurking around the PNW plant breeding scene – responded politely and matter-of-factly to me a few weeks ago: “Plant breeders need to be paid.”

The man’s concerns are as deeply valid as care for one’s family get – especially, goodness, in this day and age. But we live in an evolving universe, and the life forms which sustain us are not economic abstractions, even as our dominant cosmology treats them as such. As Terry Tempest Williams puts it:

“We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.”

And these abstractions, if insufficiently faithful to life, are innately harmful and intrinsically unsustainable. Look about us: a Reckoning with such false idols was always predetermined.

We can, however, choose to be servants of, rather than slaves to, this Reckoning: because, blessedly, this challenge amounts to one and the very same thing as our great responsibility, our great opportunity, our great salvation. Conscious, generous-hearted work with the plants that hold up our world points us to the heart of a pathway into authenticity. It gifts us a pathway toward “ontological concurrence with the facts of the world” as George Steiner puts it, toward fashioning the cornerstones of our lives in the harmonious image of Nature rather than in the image of an incoherent and, as it happens, quite temporal abstraction – the authority of the bottom line.

As Tessa Gowans at Abundant Life told me when she gifted me seed to carry on my 2001 cross-country seedswapping adventures: “Seed wants to be free.” Interestingly, this is an exact analogical echo of philosopher Stewart Brand’s prescient observation: “Information wants to be free.” Regard seed: regard information. Perceive how they work. Perceive how this seed of an idea works. (“Seed-syllables travel and carry certain efficacies” – Anne Waldman.) Life, indeed, wants to be free: and will be free. This, we can be certain, is an evolutionary inevitability. The fight to fight, is lost.

In the meantime, the Universe has accorded me the immense privilege of living a life which aspires to what Jim Corbett referred to as the Quixotic Principle: “To open the way, a cultural breakthrough need not involve masses of people but must be done decisively by someone.” Right now, I am growing 30 different varieties of winter cabbage, together. Mostly hybrid. I hope to let this array of characters cross, and to use the immensely rich genetic squishfest which results, a de-hybridizing ‘grex’ we call it, to provide the foundation for local, grassroots efforts to segregate out stable, ecologically resilient, open-pollinated winter cabbage varieties over the long-term. The seed will be free. Succeeding seceding seeding, you might call it.

“I want death to find me planting my cabbages – caring little for it and even less about the imperfections of my garden.”

Montaigne

(…edited and enlarged from thoughts shared in email conversation, August 2006, with john chris jones and Richard.)

First Things First – Denmark

As the first posting and I decided to talk about our first destination. Denmark!
Does anybody have anything to say about Denmark? We are very excited to go there for many reasons. First because we have received a warm welcoming invite from that area of Europe. Other reasons include: It is friendly to English speakers and they have a very healthy seed stewardship scene there to check out.

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