Apr 19, 2018

Does The World Need Heirloom Seeds?

by Caleb Warnock

Read this twice: Most of the garden seed varieties available to U.S. gardeners in catalogs in the early 1900’s are now extinct, for one simple reason. Heirloom seeds cannot be corporate owned. Today, the vast majority of seeds are sold by three huge conglomerates. (At this writing, Monsanto has made a $57 billion offer to buy out Syngenta. That would bring the total down to two companies.) They buy up seed companies, drop the heirloom seed varieties, and replace them with hybrids and genetically modified seeds because those two kinds of seeds force the grower to buy new seed each year -- and those two kinds of seeds can be patented and corporate-owned. Getting rid of natural, true seeds is good for profits, but terrible for self-reliance. I’m also convinced that having so few seeds available by so few producers -- and most of them are the kinds of seeds that purposefully don’t produce new true seeds -- is a national security issue. Our food supply is at risk.

Most people are too busy watching television and playing on their smartphones to care. Gardening -- working to provide your own food with great flavor and nutrition -- is out of favor. Seed saving, because it requires extra work, attention, and space in the garden, has only been practiced among a small percentage of gardeners for the past century anyway, so you can imagine that today, the art is nearly extinct. People with a broad, working knowledge of how to save seeds in a backyard garden are few and far between. Seed saving is both necessary and in crisis. We, today, are the first generations on earth who have entirely walked away from the concept of growing our own food. Through the history of the world, people grew their food -- and saved their own pure seeds. Today’s world is the mirror reverse -- we buy our food without ever knowing who grew it, or where it came from. And 99.999 percent of the U.S. population today has no earthly idea how to grow and harvest pure seeds from the garden.   Even three generations ago, this would have been unfathomable. 

As a nation, we have spent little time making sure our children know how to grow even the easiest of vegetables. Knowing how to feed a family or a community self-reliantly is laughable -- after all, we have grocery stores and the industrial agricultural complex to take care of our needs, right? They will never let us down. Our food system will never be in doubt. Right? I’m not fearmongering. The point I want to make is that the “zombie apocalypse” has descended on us twice before, as a nation. Both times it nearly cost us everything. I have a large collection of ration books, stamps, tokens, and guidebooks from both World War I and World War II. I have vegetable ration stamps, sugar stamps, stamps for tires and gasoline. I have the ration stamps that were carried both by the families in the U.S. and those working in the European theater of war. I give a lot of speeches and I take this collection with me to nearly every speech because most people have never seen these relics of our near national starvation. I promise you that, when my great-grandparents were children around 1900, no one thought national starvation was on the horizon. Yet without war victory gardens, starvation is what would have happened. Twenty years later, we found ourselves facing starvation again. With so many of our men at the battlefront, we had exactly enough domestic food production to either feed the people of the nation or feed the millions of soldiers we sent overseas -- but not both. Again it was victory gardens to the rescue. Without them, we would have lost the war. As it turns out when you arrive to fight Nazi Germany, you can’t knock on their front door, and then ask for their nearest grocery store. 

But that is all ancient history, and surely we will never again need to be self-reliant. Surely. I pray it is so. You can discern where this is going. Let’s all say it together now -- “Those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it.” 

We can do better.  We can teach our children and grandchildren, by example, to grow gardens using true, natural seeds. Every gardener can either learn to save their own seed, or buys seeds from people like me who work to ensure heirloom seeds remain in the public domain, and that no more heirloom seeds are lost to extinction. I literally search the globe for the last seeds of important historic varieties, like perennial wheat, white strawberries, multiplier onions, just to name three. I am single-handedly keeping alive many critical heirloom varieties. You can read about this in my book Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency Used by the Mormon Pioneers. For every common heirloom I offer at SeedRenaissance.com, I’ve grown and rejected 30-40 other varieties. I spend huge amounts of time and money on these tests because no one else is doing this work. I evaluate how these varieties perform in an organic garden, without petrochemical fertilizer, pesticides or herbicides. I evaluate earliness, flavor, production, storage, cold-soil tolerance, winter harvestability, self-seeding capacity, and more. If I don’t love a variety, I don’t sell it. Every seed I sell is guaranteed pure.  They’re NEVER hybrid, GMO, patented, or corporate owned. Our food supply MUST remain in the public domain. Join me in creating a renaissance in our backyard gardens.

Caleb Warnock is the bestselling author of 14 books, including the popular Forgotten Skills series and the Backyard Renaissance series. He is the owner of SeedRenaissance.com.