ISSUE 38, SEEDS, Part 5: The Challenge of Seed Saving
The Challenge of Seed-Saving
Here’s a hard truth; whenever you take a seed out of a germ plasm bank—or try to revive a landrace grain or heirloom vegetable that has not been grown out in any scale for decades, you will be visited by every malady and vulnerability that caused the variety to be sidelined years ago. If you were counting on immediate productivity, you will be disappointed. You will see a portion if not the majority of your crop languish, sicken, or die. But in nature—that harsh arena of predation and conflict—you will witness the crop express its strength and genetic diversity over the growing seasons. That part of the crop that makes—however small it is—will be the seed stock for the next year. And in three or four growing seasons of choosing only the strongest plants, you will have a field that is local adapted, healthy, and free for the most part of vulnerabilities.
Over the weekend Nat Bradford sent me pictures of his fields of the Carolina African Runner Peanut. This small sweet peanut was the variety brought over by enslaved Africans from the Gold Coast and Slave Coast at the end of the 17th century—it is the ancestral peanut of the South. It is smaller, sweeter, and has a superior oil quality that later bred peanuts. But it was hard to harvest. And it fell victim to viral spotting in the field in the 1920s. So it disappeared as a crop 80 years ago. NC State had seed in their germ plasm collection and Dr. Brian Ward of Clemson brought the plant back some years ago. Nat Bradford loved the taste, so he planted a field of it. And the diseases came. And came. And came. But he selected for resistance ruthlessly. And now his field is a healthy green carpet of running peanuts.
Seed saving takes time. Farmers are not as patient as they once were.
Maybe they were never that patient. One conclusion that I’ve reached as I’ve read through the multitudes of seed catalogues published since the mid-19th century [many are available through the biodiversitylibrary.org], is that the majority of farmers did not save their own seed. They purchased from brokers year after year. And the brokers were operating in a way that maximized profits for themselves. That did not include destroying 70% of their seed crops because they generated plants with imperfections. Insstead they fixated on “germination rates.” Would the seed sprout. And so the seed that farmers and gardeners bought often had vulnerabilities.
Locally adapted, rigorously selected crops are the glory of our agricultural heritage. It takes the perseverance and faith in the inherent genetic adaptability of landrace and heirloom plants (plants that are not genetically bottle-necked), of a Nat Bradford to truly restore a classic cultigen to full vitality and commercial viability.