permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

from - http://www.primalseeds.org/rescuingcrops.htm
<http://www.primalseeds.org/OTHERSTUFF/new/rescuingcrops.htm>

For the Liberation of Seeds and Humus
By Kent Whealy , director of the Seed Savers Exchange.

We live in a beautiful area on the Iowa-Minnesota border. We are in the
heads of valleys as they start to drain toward the Mississippi River. It
is called the "driftless area." The glaciers split and flowed around it
so they didn't grind everything flat as they did the rest of Iowa.

My wife's great grandparents came from Bavaria in the 1870s and settled
in the area around St. Lucas, Iowa. My wife's grandfather would tell me
stories about when they were courting. Her father was very stern and
would really give her trouble if she came home in the horse-drawn sleigh
and would sit too long outside. He could always tell the next morning
how long they had been sitting there by the pile of frozen horse manure.
Grandma and Grandpa Ott had a good life: They had nine children; he
farmed with his father; they cleared 40 acres with World War I dynamite;
he ran a sawmill; drove a cream route; he was a homestyle vet. Although
it was a hard life, it was a really full life.

I met Grandma and Grandpa Ott 57 years after their marriage. Grandpa had
leukemia but wanted to live out his days on the farm so we went back to
make sure that happened. He was an incredible story teller--the
orneriest old man I think I ever met.

My wife was carrying our first child when we first were back, so I asked
him what it was like when they had kids. Grandpa told us a story about
the old German midwives who would come by. I repeated the story to some
folks the next day and one fellow just laughed at me and said, "You go
back and ask that old man again." He said the story around here is that
Grandpa would always tell Grandma he called the doctor, but he wouldn't
and by the time she found out it was too late and he would deliver the
baby himself and save the money. So the next time I saw him I said, "I
heard you delivered all your kids yourself." "It's just like pulling a
calf," he replied, "But you know, the twins fooled me."

These folks were really different than you or I. They worked harder than
we can probably imagine; they were the farm folks who built this
country. They were just as tough as nails. I've seen this old man sit in
his rocking chair and sew up a cut on his own hand with needle and
thread. Yet it always surprised me, rough as he was, he just loved flowers.

During the year we stayed with him he gave us the seeds of a couple
garden varieties his parents had brought over from Bavaria. One of these
was a little purple morning glory that has a red star in its throat. He
also gave us seeds of a huge pink German tomato. We've grown this up to
nine inches across. The German folks use it as a slicing tomato.

Diane's grandfather didn't make it through that winter. We knew if his
seeds were to survive it was up to us. About that time we came across
the writings of several geneticists who were trying to warn the public
about the dangers that we were going to face if we continued to let the
breeding material for the food crops of the future die out at such a
rapid rate. Dr. Garrison Wilkes, professor of biology at the University
of Massachusetts, wrote:

The reason for alarm and concern about the loss of native strains is the
irreplaceable nature of the genetic wealth. The only place genes can be
stored is in living systems; either living branches such as the budwood
of apple trees or in the living embryos of grain and vegetable seeds.
The native varieties become extinct once they are dropped in favor of
introduced seed. That extinction can take place in a single year if the
seeds are cooked and eaten instead of saved for seed stock. Quite
literally, the genetic heritage of a millennium in a particular valley
can disappear in a single bowl of porridge.
Dr. Jack Harlan, retired professor of plant genetics, University of
Illinois, concurred:
These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale
we can not imagine. In a very real sense, the future of the human race
rides on these materials. The line between abundance and disaster is
becoming thinner and the public is unaware and unconcerned. Must we wait
for disaster to be real before we are heard? Will people listen only
after it is too late?
We were lucky to come across these writings when we were young and
idealistic and wondering how we could make a difference in this world.
We decided to see if we could find other people who were also keeping
heirloom seeds. We found there is an tremendous heritage of this type of
material in this country; that whenever farmers or gardeners immigrated
they invariably brought the best of their seeds with them. It was a link
with the old country and allowed them to enjoy the foods they knew well.

There are some areas very rich in these materials; usually its really
"backwoods" areas; especially mountainous areas, "poverty pockets" if
you will, where people don't really have the money to buy seeds. These
can be real treasure-troves of heirloom varieties. We've found isolation
can be religious as well. Traditional people such as Mennonites, Amish
and Hutterites are also keeping quite a few heirloom varieties within
their communities. I've also been pleased that as trust has grown in
Seed Savers, a lot of Native American people are starting to offer their
seeds through the exchange. This has been really gratifying to me. Many
Native Americans don't share their seeds because they believe they are
sacred--as well they should because seeds are the sparks of life that
feed us all.

What Diane and I have done these past 21 years is to put together a
network of some 8000 people who are now working to collect, maintain and
distribute heirloom varieties. In 1986 Seed Savers purchased a farm near
Decorah, Iowa. The collection of seeds we have now is sort of out of
control. We have 17,000 varieties right now including over 4000
tomatoes, 700 peas, 700 lettuce, 120 watermelons, 600 potatoes....It is
getting to the point where we have already seen almost everything coming
into the collection from North America. We regrow about 2000 varieities
a year for their seeds. Last summer we grew out our entire lettuce
collection; four heads of each variety. We photographed each one so we
would know what we have in the collection.

Most gardeners in this country don't have a clue as to what their true
heritage as gardeners really is; most have never seen this type of
diversity and when we bring people into our garden and show them 2000
plant varieties and tell them it is because of gardeners just like
themselves that all this material is still available then they really
understand the problem and are willing to help.

In the past five years we've been doing quite a bit of collecting in
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. When that material started
flowing into the collection it was so different it was just amazing.
Some of the tomato varieties have foliage that looks like a carrot. We
have been getting into quite a few tomato varieties from Russia that are
black. They have an enzyme under their skins that turns darker and
darker with the sun and the heat.

We are keeping a large selection of garlics from Eastern Europe. The
collection in Georgia has just been flattened by civil war.
Nationalistic fighting is really taking a toll. For instance, the
international potato collection in Peru had to be evacuated in small
aircraft because Shining Path guerrillas were knocking off their staff.

We had a fellow from Azerbaijan over. He worked for the Institute of
Genetics and Selection in Baku. He and other scientists had collected
all over Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is in the Caucuses south of Russia. It
is an incredibly rich country; it runs from 14,000 feet elevation on the
west to sea level on the east; the whole country is in this monstrous
mountain valley. The micro climates through it all would be the
equivalent of southern Minnesota to northern Florida. It is so
genetically rich it is just incredible. After they collected all over
the country the scientists made the mistake of storing the material in
an agricultural institute in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave
engulfed in vicious fighting since 1991. The Armenians first used the
agriculture station for their troop headquarters and before the Russians
ran them out, they cut down the orchard collection so the Russians
wouldn't have it for food. Then the Russians occupied the station and
all of the collection has been lost.

We are going to see more of this kind of thing in the years ahead. Who
knows what will be left of the genetic resources of the former
Yugoslavia when all the fighting is done? While we see the televised
carnage on the evening news, what we don't see is the silent erosion of
the genetic material that is taking place in the background. These are
varieties that might have helped save the world from famine.

N.I. Vavilov was probably the greatest plant collector the world has
ever known. He started his first collecting expeditions in 1908 and
before the second world war he had personally collected 165,000 seed
varieties. Vavilov taught there were "genetic homelands" for different
crops. Vavilov was one of the first ethno-botanists. He wasn't concerned
with just the seed; he also cared about the cultural context.

Vavilov was imprisoned right before World War II. He had come into
conflict with Stalin over the flawed genetics of a pseudo-botanist named
Lysenko.

During the 900 day siege of Leningrad 600,000 Russians died. People were
reduced to eating rats and glue from furniture joints and wall paper;
whatever they could find. During this time 14 scientists of the Vavilov
Institute died of starvation at their desks rather than eat any of the
tons of edible seed stored around them. They didn't think they had the
right to deprive the future of the genetic resources.

Seed Savers is funding collecting expeditions involving the scientists
at the Vavilov Institute. While Seed Savers has been very successful in
North America collecting heirlooms from a fragmented ethnic patchwork
surrounded by mechanized agriculture, there are areas of the world much,
much richer genetically. I started going to Russia in 1991 and I've made
nine trips to Eastern Europe since then. The extent of genetic resources
that still remains in the former Soviet bloc is pretty well dependent on
the extent of Stalin's collectivization efforts. In 1928 he began to
sweep the Soviet Union clean of peasants and landowners. He starved
millions to death in the Ukraine and shipped millions of others, mostly
farmers, to Siberia and let them die of starvation there. After he swept
the countryside clean he put huge collective farms in place; 50,000
acres; whole villages farmed them.

But there were places too rough for collective farms. In Romania only
half the farms were collectivized; in Poland only a quarter. In the
unaffected areas traditional agriculture goes back to the very beginning
with all seeds still being produced by gardeners and farmers. When you
have the type of situation with a really wet mountainous climate with
thousands of microclimates, the genetic diversity is just dazzling. But
what is happening right now is that agriculture technology is flooding
into these areas, along with American, Japanese and Dutch seeds. The
diversity is going to be gone so quickly it will be unbelievable.

We funded a woman who is head of the vegetable department at a Polish
university. She was wonderful. For $1500 she collected for 30 days in
the southern mountains, on the north side of the Carpathians. I know she
was just living in her car and eating sausage. She would go into remote
mountain villages and say, "I want you to introduce me to the old woman
who still supplies you with the old seeds." Invariably she'd find some
elderly woman who had huge collections of vegetable and flower seed. But
even in 1993 she was running into salesmen from Cargill selling rye and
other agriculture seeds door-to-door in the most isolated places.

This last May we carried in about $20,000 in hundred dollar bills to
fund three different collecting expeditions: the area around the Aural
Sea, the Volga Valley and in Ukraine against the backside of the
Carpathians.

Right now is a real critical time for all this material, whether you are
talking about heirloom varieties in the U.S. with older people on the
farms still maintaining seeds and all of the young people having moved
to the cities; or whether you are talking about half way around the
world where this material is going to be lost so quickly. This is all
the material we are ever going to have to breed food crops for the
future. Think of this as an evolutionary race with the plants in one
lane and pests and diseases in another. When we dose the plants with
massive amounts of pesticides we breed pesticide-resistant pests. We are
going to need all the genetic resources we can possibly muster to
overcome what we are going to face in the future. We really believe we
are stewards of an incredible heritage and its going to be disastrous if
all this material dies out in the next decade or so mainly because of
short term economic considerations. We would really be pleased if any of
you would like to join us to keep this material available.

Kent Whealy is the director of Seed Savers Exchange, a grassroots
network of over 7000 gardeners, farmers, orchardists and plant
collectors who maintain and distribute endangered vegetable and fruit
varieties. Kent has spent eight years developing Heritage Farm, an
educational facility near Decorah, Iowa that maintains and displays
extensive collections of heirloom vegetables, apples, hardy grapes and
rare live- stock. SSE's genetic preservation projects are the model for
similar projects and organizations in more than 30 countries. This
article is taken from his keynote address at the Tilth Producers Annual
Conference last November. Seed Savers Exchange, 3076 North Winn Road;
Decorah, Iowa 52101.