Community Owned Seed

Seedy Saturday (it's Canada' 20th anniversary of Seedy Saturday this year!!)

Sharon Rempel started Seedy Saturday in Vancouver BC on February 14, 1989.and the event idea has spread to over 60 communities in Canada. Stories about the varieties as well as the seed are swapped and saved. Community building happens around seed saving. Farmers Rights to grow and save the seed they choose is an issue discussed at the United Nations. Corporations attempt to control seed with patents and trademarks but farmers are the worlds plant breeding experts not the scientists who work in laboratories.

If you haven’t attended a seed exchange, swap and sale of open pollinated seeds then it is time to find one or start one. Visit http://www.seeds.ca and find the Seedy Saturday set up site (http://www.seeds.ca/events/ss_0201.htm).

Corporate control of seeds, patents, and plant breeding work done in test tubes and laboratories serve the corporate world not the organic local food communitiy. Community owned seed banks, farmer led plant selection and breeding programs provide access by all people to the seeds that they wish to grow and sell which is called Farmers Rights.

The relationship between land, people and their plants cannot be replicated in a laboratory. The 3-Ps (people, plant and place) form energetic relationships that change constantly and interact with other energetic relationships. Life. Impossible to dissect and reassemble as a whole again, despite reductionistic science’s attempts to do so over the past 120 years.

It is time to develop a more gentle, nurturing, spiritual and more holistically sharing cooperative way to grow food, save seeds and work with the land. It is time to recognize that plants, people and place have a relationship that often is a distinctive component of culture.

Some cultural groups still honor planting and harvesting times with celebrations and special foods. Other groups honor a special plant as a symbol of fertility (Ukrainian culture honors wheat for example). Other groups honor special plants in their religious celebrations; basil is holy in the Greek Orthodox Church. Even if one is away from their homeland, growing that speical plant can provide a link that transcends logic and makes the person’s spirt happy.

As we become more of a global community there are onging debates about who ‘owns’ a certain seed or variety. Political boundaries have changed through wars and land dealings, and people and ideas change. Realistically, how can a company compensate someone in a country when a heritage seed or traditional knowledge is taken by a corporation and patented? Despite our strong beliefs in laws, technology and science and centuries of attempts to ‘control’ life forms, we are finding that there are issues that cannot be solved ethically with law or science. It is by reducing the whole into parts where specialists attempt to justify ownership and control.

The old ways and days of a few controlling resources that belong to the Earth may one day be a sad part of human history. Only by envisioning and living another reality can we create cooperative ways of living peacefully with other humans. There have always been scientists who do not support the politically supported reductionistic thinking just as there are communities that realize they must start finding ways of learning to work and live together. Neither have been nurtured by the current socio-poltical environment.

Yet the old ways are not working. The geneticists who continue to try and improve humanity through engineered ‘survival of the fittest’ ideas, including eugenics (1900-1960) for humans, and ongoing with the Human Genome Project. Our plant breeders focus on hybridization to ‘improve’ varieties. GMO techniques are seen as a tool to advance the ‘improvement of ‘superior’ varieties and elimiate ‘inferior’ varieties. Genes are jumping out of the organisms they have been inserted into and making their way into complex living webs of life. Pesticides in animal fat in Antartica and other examples are reminding us about the interconnectedness of living organisms. Reductionistic thinking has gotten us into some pretty complicated ecological messes.

Yet you can choose another way. Since we all must eat, then it makes sense for people to develop collections of seeds of the crops they wish to eat and ensure those seeds remain easily accesible to them. Doing this as a community of people who share resources, a land base and some common philosophical ideas spreads out the responsibility and workload.

People can learn how to work together, using local resources, skills, equipment and seeds to develop community owned and managed seed programs. The alternative is waiting to see what varieties the seed companies will choose to offer the next season, and what varieties the government and corporations will decide are worth selling.

We’ve become used to ‘experts’ doing plant breeding work, yet communities can empower themselves and their farmers and recognize their skills in choosing what they wish to grow and eat. They can work together with plant breeders and other ‘experts’ (including experienced seed saving farmers) to develop skills needed to select and grow crops. The techniques are explained in books and the farmers’ wisdom of many centuries may well be a genetic memory we all can tune into if we choose to listen.

Having faith and courage to develop a new system starts with a seed:

Today a wise young grandmother said to me, ‘think about the seed. We all plant that seed, in the darkness and it is the FAITH in that seed that gives you the patience to wait for the little green shoot to push through the soil. Then more faith to know that under the soil are roots that will collect the nutrients that the plant, with its little green leaves will combine to produce food so more cells can grow....”

So, with those few words of inspiration, I encourage you to begin community building through planting seeds; everything you need is in your communities and your hearts. Blessings and good luck!

Ownership of Seed:

The idea of ‘ownership’ of resources is not ‘logical’ in many traditional communities. It is a way of life for plant breeders who wish to patent their work results in developing varieties. It is a reality in the corporate world that anything can be under someone’s control for a price and piece of paper. The process of ownership of something that evolves naturally is an illogical concept for anyone who’s studied ecology or spent time in nature or on the land.

Communities and individuals who feel that ‘seeds’ should be freely available to anyone without paying royalties for use face challenges in a world obsessed with ‘ownership’ and ‘patents’ and regulations such as variety registration.

It is important to understand the laws of your country and region that affect seeds and agriculture. Then find a process that allows you to contact your decision makers and ensure they are informed about your needs and possible changes required in the regulations and laws. When people stand together, changes are very possible. The government view of the ‘survival of the fittest might support the unlimited growth of transnational corporations’ yet your community reality of the fittest might support allowing varieties to grow and adapt to the changes with the place over generations of growing the plant in the community. As plant, people and place grow together, amazing energies work synergistically together.

The process of having the community members decide how the community’s seed project will work will ensure that the project is ‘owned’ by the people who are involved. The farmers and consumers of the region first and foremost should drive the project, and ask research agencies and other resources to participate as their expertise or resources are required.

Learning to work together:

In order for communities to develop a strong regionally owned seed project, the community should work together to define their research goals and priorities.

Don’t get discouraged if there is a lot of negativity or disagreements. Keep going. People seem to fight more than they agree; community building takes Effort. We have forgotten how to live and work together in community and how to really ‘listen’ to each other’s ideas and needs. We really have been brought up to be dependent and to rely on outside validation of ‘truth’, including government and ‘specialists’ who tell us what to do. School has attempted to turn us into reductionistic thinkers, not divergent thinkers.

A ‘community’ is composed of people who each have a unique package of skills and abilities as well as personality traits. Learning to work as a community can be a very difficult process, as personalities can quickly start irritating or dominating SO it is important to establish some clear goals and objectives for any project.

How? Bring people together face to face. For those who have never called a public meeting, here’s one way to do it:

Call a Seedy Saturday!

- A good location is important. Check your area for a wheelchair accessible room in a church or community league hall or school or legion ideally with free and accessible parking.

- Book a date and time that doesn’t conflict with a major community event. If you are inviting seniors remember they don’t enjoy driving in the dark. If you want families then you might want to offer child care services. (2-3 weeks minimum in advance)

- Advertising helps get the word out. Put a notice in the local paper, on the radio and invite people to attend through word of mouth, church notices, school newsletters and senior citizen networks. You might want to drop flyers in mailboxes too.

- Try and identify and invite and ensure participation of the ‘community leaders’; people are often more interested when they see their leaders participating.

- Invite a diversity of people from different backgrounds who share common interests. Try and make the project sound ‘inviting’ not ‘exclusionary’.

- Provide some refreshments if you can, even if it is water.

- It is fine to ask for donations to cover expenses if you need to cover advertising, room rental or food costs.

- Decide about recording information; a flip chart works well. Also, will you want a facilitator to keep the meeting running smoothing and on time? Decide at that meeting if people wish to share phone numbers, names, etc. to keep in touch.

Some questions and ideas to consider for a seed selection project:

- Identify the problems you wish to have addressed in the breeding and selection work

- Identify varieties that in the past were successful in the region. What did grandpa grow? Dad?

- Identify the ‘end use’ criteria (eg. who wants to buy the crop and what they are looking for in ‘quality’)

- Identify resources in the community. Soil specialists, weed identification people, native plant people, farmers with knowledge about old ways, farmers with small scale plot equipment such as fanning mills, row seeders, small threshers, etc; research agencies, etc. are all valuable resources.

- Identify resources outside the community.

- Decide if you want to have someone responsible for the project. How will you compensate their time to the project?

- Identify seed sources.

- Identify quality testing that needs to be done after harvest.

- Identify sources of machinery, funding and other resources to help the project happen.

- Identify sources of old agricultural testing and information. This might include old field handbooks, provincial or federal annual reports or agricultural college libraries. Much of the old material has been discarded as useless in a world where everything valuable is supposed to be accessible on a computer. Find this material before it is thrown away.

Despite all our good ideas.........the Government of Canada has other ideas....

By Canadian Variety Registration laws it is illegal to sell varieties that have not been registered. You can visit the CFIA web site (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) for the latest information on Variety Registration (http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/plaveg/variet/newproe.shtml) . I have found that government sites tend to give limited information to outsiders and without a glossary there can be a diversity of interpretations of terms and conditions. Information is power.

The CFIA registration system has favored high input agriculture and the various committees and recommendation bodies have not included organic farming experts. The CFIA is also the regulatory body that approves GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) test sites and is a partner in some of the testing that takes place in Canada. This doesn’t give much impartiality to any decision making process for variety registration or difference of opinion to high input high technology practices.

Unfortunately Canadian agriculture favors export vision agriculture and high input conventional agricultural practices to the exclusion of organic. Organic farming criteria for ‘merit’ are different than the needs of ‘high input’ agriculture. Variety tests for ‘organic’ should be done in organic fields and meet the criteria of organic food users and processors. These may not match the criteria used to evaluate a variety for ‘high input’ conventional agriculture. Organic farming is not new; chemical farming is the ‘new’ kid of the last sixty years. Your community owned seed project can decide to support organic farming as a component of your project.