THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAS BEEN:
A SOFT TUTORIAL ON SEED SCIENCE
When it comes to which seeds are healthy for the ecosystem and our own bodies, a great many fictions have been sowed into the minds of the would-be gardener over the last half century or so by Big Ag propaganda and its oppositional force, anti-Big Ag propaganda.
An unfortunate result of this is a largely unfounded malignment towards much of what agricultural science has discovered over the last hundred years, the same science that has ensured that there is enough food to feed you and everyone you know (and would be enough to feed everybody else too in a more equitable economy). If you were to argue that the invention of agriculture and the innovations made therein are the root of everything that is destroying our planet and our integrity as a species, I wouldn’t even argue with you. I would actually mostly agree. And yet here I am, writing about growing food almost every month and selling you food plants to grow yourself. The thing is, if we hadn’t created and advanced agriculture over the last 10,000 years, I wouldn’t be here to write this piece, you wouldn’t be here to read it, and none of us would be here to argue about it. For better and worse, seed saving and breeding techniques are at the core of what has enabled us to thrive as a species.
We’re going to address six kinds of seed today, backwards chronologically, to make the most sense to your propagation propaganda-addled brain. We have genetically modified seed (GMO); hybrid seed (F1); heirloom seed; organic seed; open pollinated seed (this is “seed” as you generally know it for herbs, vegetables, and a fair portion of other plants that you have come across any place humans have ever been). Finally, we have seeds that have adapted completely naturally, untouched by human meddling, known as landrace seeds. Let’s break down all these terms and why they’re bad or good for agriculture, your body, and the planet.
Genetically Modified Seed
If you’re reading this you probably have a general idea of what GMO seeds are, or at least a notion that they are bad. And if you live in the U.S. you probably eat things derived from them unless you are trying very, very, extremely hard not to. Also, before we get into it, Soil Ed (F/K/A Dirt Nerd) company line: Virtually all food seed is genetically modified. More on that later.
In common and current parlance, GMO is any living thing whose DNA has been altered using laboratory biotechnology (genetic engineering). We have been doing this to plants commercially since 1994, mostly in order to make commodity crops immune or highly resistant to herbicides and pesticides. This makes factory farming far more efficient, as farmers can just spray everything on their land willy-nilly with chemicals to get rid of the “bad” things without affecting the “good” things. What this means for your body is you are going to ingest a lot more chemicals proven to cause all sorts of harm to your body if you consume GMO products. What this means for the planet is these harmful chemicals are used exponentially more carelessly and liberally than they once were, thus poisoning far broader swaths of the world with stuff designed specifically to kill pretty much everything that isn’t modified to be immune to it.
What this means for agriculture is…. bad. In every way it is bad. There are probably 5,000+ academic papers from every academic angle you could perceive written every year about how and why it is bad.
And you’re probably eating it and there’s not much you can do about it aside from grow all of—and I mean all of—your own food. But silver lining: GMO seeds are NOT commercially available to the home gardener or farmer, so there is no world (for now, anyway) in which you are going to accidentally grow and eat your own genetically modified foodstuff.
Hybrid seed (F1)
I am including the F1 here because it sounds very scientific, and it is on most hybrid seed packets, some of which won’t say “hybrid” on them. Seeing that F1 can either scare the buyer away because it sounds like science and is therefore bad, or it can be ignored because who-cares-cool-car-name, and they’ll buy something they didn’t want. F1 means “first filial generation.” Basically, when two specific plant varieties meet and share their parts with each other, they make something very special that can only be made again by those same two plants sharing with each other again. It is conceptually very similar to a mule or a liger, respectively the babies of horse and donkey, and tiger and lion. These mammalian offshoots cannot breed again. Hybrid plants are a better version of this. They can breed again, but what comes out of them will not be the same as them or their ancestors, and could be anything at all, usually something that is not particularly desirable to the human eater or grower.
Hybrid plants are a fantastic advancement in agricultural science, as exceptionally vigorous, weird, beautiful, and tasty plants have been bred this way. And they are totally cool to eat, I promise. However, they are not cool for seed collecting to create new generations of similar or better, more adapted plants. They essentially offer one time use, not because they’re shooting blanks, but because they’re shooting (probably) unlovable weirdos.
Heirloom Seed
Sort of, kind of a more established hybrid plant, heirloom plants are varieties that have been bred to certain specificities over a long period of time that are also genetically stable. Everybody loves them because they are nostalgic and cottagecore and generally exceptionally tasty and hardy as heck (at least in the regions where they’re derived from, but oftentimes far beyond their hometowns too). Their genetic stability means that you can keep their seeds and plant them and get the same plant the second time around, and many times after that (though they are still capable of adaptation, evolution, and crossbreeding for new and exciting and better things). They are absolutely NOT necessarily organic. I am only stating this because they sort of get lumped into the same cultural space as “organic,” like for example tankies and libertarians. That said, they are definitely also never GMO.
Organic Seed
Organic seed simply means that the plant from which a seed has been collected was itself grown organically. That is to say the seed’s mother plant was grown without the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides (though the legal truths of what qualifies as USDA organic are very relative and loophole-filled, a tale for another day).
This has no impact on the food that you grow with organic seed whatsoever. A plant that was grown from organic seed might just maybe have a little bit more adaptive resistance to life’s slings and arrows because its parent seed had to struggle a little harder to survive. But unless that organic seed was also grown in a similar ecosystem to yours, it’s not going to make much of a difference.
That is not to say buying organic seed isn’t important. It is absolutely one of the most effective ways you can “vote with your wallet,” as the main thing you are doing when you buy organic seed is stating that regular growing practices are evil and you want to support a brighter future. You are definitely doing more to save the planet when you buy organic seeds than you are when you buy Mrs. Meyer’s cleaning products or whathaveyou.
Open Pollinated Seed
This basically means everything else, and so is most of the seed available to buy on an individual consumer level. These seeds have been cultivated by humans for millenia to become what they are, can adapt and evolve easily to become something else, and can have seeds collected from them to grow very similar plants.
Landrace Seeds
These are the root plants from which all human-bred plants come from. There existed a single wild mustard from which all brassicae come from, a single nightshade from which all nightshades come from, a single corn plant from which all corn comes from, a single strawberry… you get it. Pretty much every food—for real, every single plant food at all that you’ve ever eaten—exists because of human breeding over millennia, and every single one of them has an original plant that you would not enjoy eating or growing, but we would be lost without their seeds. These are the only seeds out there that are truly not genetically modified.
Every new beginning is some other beginning’s end.
illustrations by Rachel Speck
