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Saving seed
Our ancestors were always conscious that a portion of the seed from this year's harvest must be planted to produce the next crop. Failure to save viable seed, or worse yet to consume it, would result in barren fields, suffering and the end of life as farmers. Today we don't collectively think this way, as we assume others who specialize in such matters will take care of moving the genetic material forward for a fee and we can spend our time and thoughts on the higher priorities of our lives. Since farming began, we thought nature couldn't package plant embryos any better than a storable, viable, genetic reproduction of its ancestry. Then we hybridized corn and realized that Mendel's law of genetics caused the first offspring to exceed both parents but the second to revert back to traits reflected in the parent lines. We had the resources to develop a multi-year process to gain a harvest well worth the effort in overall yield. When we moved to genetic modification, we found that a trait may be moved from one organism to another and will breed true in future generations. This troubled some farmers until they saw the result and the adaptability to their farm. The adoption of genetically modified crops in the 1990s was much more rapid than the adoption of corn hybrids in the 1930s. Perhaps it was the prevalence of technology and advancement in the post war era or the mindset of farmers who had witnessed the penalty for lagging behind technology in the previous generation. Still soybean, rice and cotton farmers were outraged that they could not save the seed of these GM crops without paying a royalty fee for use of a patented product. Monsanto surely had no idea of how tough they would have to be to keep farmers from violating their intellectual property rights. Threats, lawsuits and just plain anger permeated the countryside while Roundup Ready soybeans took over the market. Many growers, who could have continued planting conventional soybeans and utilizing crop specific herbicides, were hard pressed to accept that they had to give up control of the seed when planting the new generation of altered varieties. We have now crossed through the doorway to a new era where the seed is a means to greater achievement. We come from a world where the ability to grow more food has increased the human desire to plant its seed and create more life. Our population has matched or exceeded food production in the past 150 years with sometimes disastrous results. However, famine is feared today only by the technology deprived portion of the planet that has experienced it in living memory. Even Europe and China have a fading awareness of the consequences of drought and war that trigger events that lead to a failed harvest and stress on human population. If these times come again we can be sure that desperate people will take desperate action. They will consume their seed and hope for outside aid to ship them food. We will again share ours and hope that it is the right thing to do. Assuming we are not the ones who suffer crop failure. In our thinking as a progressive culture, every generation should be an improvement over its parents. My mother and father would take the largest or tastiest melon and brush out all the seeds onto a newspaper to dry. They would wrap them in porous cheesecloth and put them in a safe place for planting the following spring. If there was a ritual in agrarian life, it was to choose the best seed and hold it for the coming year. None should appreciate the new generation more than farmers and ranchers. We know that our greatest seed is our youth, our offspring. As we raise them, do we realize that they should be treated as well as the crops we cultivate? Do we save the best to carry on the work of agriculture or do we give them a start in fertile soil then leave the rest to chance? Literally and figuratively, seed is life, and there is no higher priority than encouraging our progeny, our seed, toward a new generation and a higher plain of achievement. We can hope that they will carry not only our genetic material but our knowledge and culture so that our best traits manifest in them and our weaknesses and shortcomings become recessive and fall away. Editor's note: Ken Root is now celebrating his 34th year as an agricultural professional. His career began as a vocational agriculture teacher then turned to agricultural broadcasting and writing as well as environmental consulting and association management. He was the original host of AgriTalk (1994-2001) and now is lead farm broadcaster for WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa. Date: 7/12/07
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