permaculture

[venaurafarm <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

AMEN to this!

I will start this year purchasing only open pollinated seeds for my
kitchen and market gardens.

LL

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [permaculture] FW: Dave Jacke - This just in from Facebook: 
Johnny's selling Monsanto seeds!?
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2013 10:02:54 -0700
From: Jason Gerhardt <jasongerhardt@gmail.com>
Reply-To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Yep, this is the other thing, I forgot to mention in the previous thread.
As Monsanto has continued buying up smaller seed houses, the varieties that
those smaller companies sell now become Monsanto's property. And since many
farmers have grown attached to those varieties, companies like Johnny's are
forced to sell them, via supply and demand. It doesn't actually mean that
Monsanto has tampered with or manipulated the seeds themselves, but the
money chain does end up at Monsanto's door step.

This makes the work of people like John Navazio and the many other small
organic focused plant breeders even more important. It is seriously time to
get off hybrids and start rebreeding the workhorse varieties for use in our
small scale agriculture.

Here is another sad fact, when we go to the farmers market or co-op or
whole foods even, we are mostly buying hybrid vegetables. Try this: go to
your local farmers market and ask your farmers what vegetables they have
for sale that are grown from Open Pollinated seed, then buy those. Strike
up a convo with them and tell them you want non-hybrid vegetables. They
tend to listen. As with decentralizing anything, the power rests in our
hands. We need to know the names of hybrid crops to neglect them. We need
to know how to save seed and perform (rather simple) classical plant
breeding.

--
Jason Gerhardt
Designer and Educator