Announcing the Backyard Seed Vault

The 1979 children's book Ox-Cart Man describes a colonial family who spends all year raising a crop and an ox, building the ox's cart, making mittens, brooms, and candles. Then the ox-cart man sets off to market to sell the crop and the mittens, brooms, and candles, then the ox, then the cart. He returns home carrying the supplies from the market the family will need for the next year and everyone starts over again raising a crop and an ox, building the ox's cart, making mittens, brooms, and candles.

Maybe at one time we all shopped at markets visited by ox-cart men. Since then, farmers, artisans, cooks, and eaters have had to develop ways to recover from the American institution known as the supermarket. Starting with farm CSAs, we've developed ways to reconnect with our communities and share the bounty of fruit trees, meat, wild foraged food, ferments, canned goods, backyard fruit, ready made traditional food, charcuterie, homemade goods, wild game, and on, and on, and on.

But what about the genetic diversity underlying all of that delicious food? Can we grow out heirloom crops in our backyards and share the collective gene pool using all the know how and social networking we've developed for these other models of sustainable food? Allow me to explain.

If you're not on the Texas or Kansas Boards of Education, or have read Darwin and his ilk, you know that in biological systems, variation and the transfer of genes between individuals is essential. Despite the controls industrial agriculture operations try to impose, agricultural systems are ecosystems that rely on this genetic diversity. Governments, NGOs, and seed companies alike know that crop genetics are all important.

Seed companies seek to develop new, better crop varieties, but also want to protect their investment. One way to do this is by producing and marketing F1 hybrids. These hybrids are a uniform variety of the first filial generation of two parents with desired traits and expressing the characteristics of one or both parents. While F1 hybrids often express hybrid vigor or other desirable traits, they do not "come true from seed," that is seeds from an F1 hybrid parent will not produce offspring of the same variety and cannot be saved from year to year. Hybrid seed is the first biotechnology that allowed seed companies to develop a value-added product and protect their property from being co-opted by others. And this is without even mentioning the controls offered by the modern biotechnology of GMOs. Here, on a Cooking up a Story segment, organic seed producer Frank Morton describes the predicament.



Today, Big Seed works as hard as ever to maintain control of their investment and is not always interested in maintaining diversity or continuing to produce your favorite variety. This causes major problems for farmers, as Judith Redmond pointed out in a recent Full Belly Farm newsletter discussing difficulty in securing Early Girl tomato seed.

In contrast to corporate control of seeds, seed banks have been established both as a library of genetic diversity for lending to research facilities or as doomsday vaults to "back up" important plant varieties in the event of major global catastrophe. The U.S Department of Agriculture maintains the National Seed Storage Laboratory. The Millennium Seed Bank Project is the largest ex situ plant conservation project in the world, saving seeds from the around the globe dried and frozen in underground vaults. Smartest, and scariest, of all is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility bored into rock on remote Spitsbergen island in the Arctic. The joint project of the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international consortium, serves as a back up of the back up from the world's seed banks in case of global catastrophe.

In an era when we worry about peak oil and climate change wreaking havoc on food prices and availability you can even buy your own little seed bank to keep in the freezer. Disaster preparedness companies are marketing personal Survival Seed Banks to the survivalist fringe. You know, for the post-health-care-bill apocalypse, when the socialist Antichrist Obama tries to round up patriots into FEMA concentration camps. Stephen Colbert just had to poke fun.



Having a stock of seeds on hand to sew a yearly garden and some extra for larger community plots in case of food supply disruption does appeal to agrarian self sufficiency and a DIY ethic. Official seed banks have their place as libraries and back-ups, but those remove us from a 10,000 year old lineage of crop seeds developed by our ancestors to suit the particular tastes and growing conditions of a region and saved every growing season over these many millennia. Seed savers form an in situ seed bank and reconnect with this heritage by saving seed from their gardens and farms and exchanging genetic diversity in cooperatives and seed swaps.

Correctly saving seed can can be a bit of a challenge in small, urban garden plots. The main issue is separation distance, the space required between plantings of the same species of crops of different varieties to ensure the variety remains pure. Some vegetables such as tomatoes, lettuce and peas are inbreeders, with closed flowers that almost always self-pollinate, but to be safe should have a small separation distance. Other crops are outbreeders and rely on spreading their pollen far and wide and are fertilized by the pollen from other individuals. These crops include corn, carrots, onions, beets, and brassicas (broccoli and the like). To complicate the issue, outbreeders can suffer from inbreeding depression if there aren't enough individuals grown in the same plot to maintain genetic heterogeneity. The number of individuals to stave off inbreeding depression varies from 6 to 40 individuals and recommended separation distances range from 25 feet to 1 mile, which would be hard to achieve unless you have a very large garden.

But what if you grew Bull's Blood Beets, Cosmic Purple Carrots, and Country Gentlemen Sweet Corn; the couple on the next block grew Chiogga Beets, Arkansas Traveler Tomatoes, and Perisienne Carrots; and the family across town grew Amana Orange Tomatoes, Strawberry Popcorn, and Tete Noir Cabbage? Then you met up regularly to exchange surplus produce, ensuring everyone experienced the full variety of the crops grown. At the end of the season all the seed was saved and distributed, and next season everyone grew different varieties than they did this year (and hopefully some new folks were able to join up). You and your community would have a chance to sample a greater variety of produce than you could grow yourself and you would create a living seed bank held in common trust.

With this idea in mind, Agrariana is pleased to announce our new program, the Backyard Seed Vault. We'll collect your contact info and information about your gardening experience and space, then provide opportunities to get seed and planting information suitable to your skills and garden. We'll organize meet ups to trade produce and gardening advice, and lead workshops on saving seed at the end of the season. The Backyard Seed Vault will also improve participants' gardening skills by providing access to cover crop seed and teaching how to make and use compost tea. Gardeners of all skill levels are welcome to jparticipate and we hope you will join us.

I like to think that the ox-cart man socialized with his fellow farmers at the market and returned home with a few traded seeds in his pocket to try in the family kitchen garden. A bit like at the Bailey Building and Loan, the ox-cart man's genetic 'savings' weren't locked up in some vault or owned by a company, they were in the soil of his neighbor's plots, awaiting a withdrawal should anyone need it. In an era of uncertainties - economic, environmental, political or otherwise - this is a plan I can feel certain about.