Saugeen River Community Seed Alliance
This is introducing a new idea, taking food security and food sovereignty to the next level to include seeds. Over the past century there has been an ever increasing tendency of seed to be grown, developed, owned and distributed by large corporations. The corporate control over grain crops is more difficult, as the crop is the seed itself, so there are many farmers able to save their own seeds for years, and trade and sell among themselves. With vegetable, herb and flowers it is different. Saving the seeds of most of these crops is an entirely separate activity. Many of them, what you grow as a vegetable or herb crop for sale, the harvest comes before the seeding process is complete or even gets started. Most market growers and home gardeners rely entirely on the seed that is available from companies that are getting their seed from large international corporations. These large conglomerates have contracted large seed growers all over the world. This makes the seed relatively cheap, but this huge complex industry is then also subject to global political, environmental and economic uncertainties, and is less and less suited to the small to medium sized grower.
There have been many ways to regain people centred control over these seeds again. In Canada, Seeds of Diversity, and the Seed Savers Exchange in the US, have gone a long way in preserving the varieties of seed that would have otherwise been lost, and empowering small scale back yard and commercial seed growers. Over the past couple of decades I have seen a great increase in small scale locally grown seed companies. The quality of seed coming from these small businesses has gotten quite good over the years, but they have a hard time providing enough seed for commercial growers. Also, this removes the joy, fascination and satisfaction that comes from growing a crop all the way to seed formation and carrying it over to the next season. As I heard a Native Elder once say, “the seeds we save for years and years become members of our family.”
Seed saving has been a passion of mine since the mid-nineties when I worked for a small, Biodynamic seed cooperative in New York. I have experimented with growing many crops for seed over the years, but as a market grower myself, I am growing more than 70 different crops each season, and often several varieties of each one, to make probably some 200 or more different varieties. If I wanted to save all these for seed for my own use, I would likely need at least three people full time just focusing on that. This is hard to justify when I can get all the seed I need for about $3,000 from the large seed catalogues. I still had a passion for seeds though, and wanted to grow more myself for the farm.
Seed has a natural social aspect, in that for most crops, in order to save seed well, there needs to be a minimum number of plants to provide a good genetic diversity. This wide number of plants prevents what is called inbreeding depression, but growing this many would provide me with more seed than I need on my farm. So I thought I would sell the excess by creating a small seed company. This didn’t quite make sense, as I was then duplicating what some other small scale seed companies were doing quite well.
Another passion of mine has been the CSA as an economic model for farming. Most people are familiar with this, but CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The basic idea with this model is that a farm figures out how many households it can provide food for, and determines how much it costs to run this enterprise, and divides the costs among the people, called members, to come up with a “share” price. People pay a fixed price for the season, and receive a weekly supply of produce. This model reconnects people to the land, and provides a real life picture of the economic relationships involved in growing food. Economic transparency is essential in this model to build trust, and to encourage a community to support a farm and a farm to support a community.
I then had the idea to combine these two passions to create a “Seed CSA.” If we transferred the exact model of Community Supported Agriculture, there would be a farm that grew the seed for a group of other growers, determining what the seed needs were, figuring out the cost of growing those seeds, and dividing that cost among the other growers. I think seeds lend themselves to a different model. There are many crops that when the seed is saved, it needs to be isolated from other plants of the same species to ensure the crop you are hoping to save seed from is the crop you end up with, and not a cross. This lends itself to cooperation. To ensure varietal purity, it is good to grow some seeds out in different locations. The consumers of a seed CSA, have the potential to be the producers as well.
This new model is based on the goal of a group of local home gardeners and commercial growers working together to grow as much seed as possible for ourselves. We are working to determine the seed needs of the group, what varieties we have in common, and how much we each need. We are also trying to figure out what crops we have the ability to grow the seeds for. Vegetable seed growing is an art and skill that most growers have given over to the large seed companies. And here in Ontario, we are dealing with a relatively short growing season, and humid climate, which is conducive to some seeds, but others can be challenging. As our capacities increase, we will hopefully be able to supply more and more of our own seeds.
We are still trying to figure out the best form of exchange. Hopfully we can find a way to balance the ideals of cooperation, fairness, and freedom of personal expression. As we work this out, I will update this page with our system of exchange.
