Book Review: Saved by Seeds, Embracing Diversity, Adaptation, and Resilience.  Chris Smith. Chelsea Green.

“Seeds compress future potential and deep past into miniscule abundant objects” (Dr Courtney Fullilove.)

I always enjoy Chris Smith’s writing and speaking, ever since his first book The Whole Okra. This book includes his love affair with okra, as well as beans, tomatoes, and sorghum seed growing. Also here are six chapters exploring aspects of seed saving, seed sovereignty, preserving purity, encouraging diversity, adaptation and resilience and seed selection. For those drawn in to the seed saving community, the appendices provide details hard to find elsewhere.

Chris’s home in Asheville, NC is a 5-hour drive from the nearest coast and was thought to be a climate haven. A place that would be less impacted by climate change than many other places in the US.  But on 15 September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene moved over Asheville and by some measures caused a 30,000-year flood. Many lives were lost as entire towns were swept away. Felled trees devastated the energy infrastructure, flood waters and landslides ruined water distribution, and cell services were unavailable for weeks in some areas.

We cannot avoid climate change and have reached the limits of adaptation to it. We urgently need to work on quick recovery and mitigation.

In 2018 Chris founded the Utopian Seed Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating, researching, and celebrating resiliency in food and farming via crop diversity.

This is not a text book on growing seeds, although it has that information too. It’s an inspirational book on why and what if we challenge the current orthodoxy of heirloom preservation. Chris is neither advocating for heirloom preservation, nor advocating for hybrid seeds, either.

Heirlooms are not the David champion against Goliath hybrids, although Chris admits that publicly critiquing heirlooms is like picking a fight with everyone’s favorite granny. See the book for a comparison of seed savioring vs. seed saving. Don’t hold on to what was but seek what can be.

Seed strains can usefully and pleasantly evolve, with deliberate or accidental crosses, as has been happening over much of human history. The strict heirloom preservation movement is a more recent phenomenon. Chris started there, and moved to embrace diversity, adaptation, and resilience to find varieties adapted to his garden.

Slow adaptation doesn’t pay in this time of climate change. We need seeds that are highly adaptive and resilient (and therefore include more diversity). Back to “landraces”: local varieties of plants or animals that have distinctive characteristics born from development and adaptation over time to the local geographic region and that typically show greater genetic diversity than types subjected to formal breeding practices.

Heirlooms can be sirens, distracting us from what we actually need to seek –  varieties that are rare may be rare for a reason! Not everything is worth keeping!

Chris says “I’ve been deep in the seed world for over a decade, and from the start I’ve heard and read (and regurgitated) countless stories of the importance of heirlooms, while exploring diversity still feels fringe.”

There’s a concept in journalism called Hallin’s spheres, developed by Daniel Hallin, which describes how systems of status quo define the boundaries of acceptable discourse. I find the spheres to be a useful framework for thinking about our relationship with seeds.

• The Sphere of Consensus generally maintains or protects the status quo and is collectively assumed to be true.
• The Sphere of Legitimate Controversy includes areas of acceptable debate, but all remain “serious” topics.
• The Sphere of Deviance includes ideas that are either invisible or dismissed. In mainstream circles, these are often considered unscientific, impractical, or purely ideological.

Ideas can move between one sphere and another. “Ideas in the sphere of deviance may be considered deviant just because they disrupt the status quo or current political regime . . .   At the time of writing, reporting has documented widespread edits to federal agency websites, including the USDA and EPA, where language related to climate change, diversity, and Indigenous communities has been flagged, removed, or replaced. I think it’s time to be deviant and disruptive.”

In Dr. Bennett’s book Plant Genetic Resources, she wrote: “ I see no special advantage in conservation in the form of seed apart from the very eminent one of convenience, and I think that attempts to find other merits in the “steady state” which seed storage represents, seem to come dangerously near to adopting museum concepts.”

“A freezer full of seeds is the literal version of putting all your eggs in one basket.”

“Bennett and others advocated for seeds to be grown and saved by communities in order to maintain the people-seed connection so that the seeds could continue to adapt and evolve.”

We need in situ preservation for ongoing adaptive change. The world of community-centered plant breeding ecosystems points to a vision of a better world.

“Early American plant collecting and farmer adaptation is often romanticized, but American agriculture was built on stolen land, largely by stolen people, and in some cases, stolen seeds.”

“The Emergence Network asks, “What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?” One of the responses to the impact of the green revolution on crop diversity has been to preserve crop diversity. But this style of preservation feels similar to billionaire bunkers or an escape plan to Mars. We can and should preserve seeds, but the systems driving their loss are still very much in place.”

“The 2017 Census of Agriculture reported that 95 percent of US farm producers are white, while a 2018 National Agricultural Workers Survey reported that 83 percent of all farmer workers are Hispanic.”

As well as How-to, the chapters cover the history of seeds in the US, botanical and technical info to help seed-savers succeed, examples of seed-saving for some main crops, an overview of diversity, adaptation and resilience applied to seeds, a step-by-step sequence of exploring seed diversity, and more about genetic diversity, including using ultracrosses.

Here you will find the information you need to prevent accidental cross-pollination, save seeds, dry them and grow them next year. The science you need is there. The explanations are clear and amusing (grow enough of your grandma’s rare bean seeds so you can give some away and dilute the risk of her haunting you).

This book doesn’t shy away from complicated things such as mutations and sports, random genetic changes that occur unbidden and you may not even notice. If you do, you may form an opinion: is this a Good Thing, a Bad Thing or an Interesting Thing? Chromosomes carry genetic information, usually in pairs. Brassica oleracea has 9 pairs, Brassica rapa has 10 pairs. Usually if a B rapa and B oleracea cross the result will not be stable.  A mule is a cross between a donkey and a horse and cannot produce any offspring of its own. Occasionally in the plant world, a new tetraploid species (with two sets of paired chromosomes) forms and fertility is restored.

This book explains many details of genetic and epigenetic changes as well as inherited seed biomes and the mysteries of non-neuron-based intelligence. Don’t let these complex ideas deter you. You will marvel at our world after reading this.

Chris says “I am quite a pragmatic (non-woo-woo) type of person, but. . .” I’m similar. Plant communication is strange and amazing, challenging to what we were raised to believe. Chris asks “What is possible if we approach seed saving and plant breeding as a partnership between people and plants?” This could perhaps lead to the development of more resilient crops, very much needed in this time of climate chaos.

“We need genetic diversity at the variety level, especially for adaptive systems. Inbred heirlooms and uniform hybrids aren’t going to cut it.” There is a lot of value in diversity. Regeneratively-Grown Climate Blend whole wheat flour is a blend of unique wheat varieties grown using regenerative practices that improve soil health. Climate Blend showed no drop in yield in the 2021 heat dome over the Pacific NW. Other growers reported a 40% drop. “If we have a chaotic climate, our strategy is to have genetic chaos in the field,”

This kind of diversity is the same as the Landrace concept in indigenous farming: diverse populations that always succeed in growing a crop, depending on the conditions. “The term landrace is used in many contexts but generally it describes domesticated crop populations that have evolved intergenerationally (that is, over long periods) through traditional farming practices and natural selection in specific local environments.”

The book includes a description of Chris’s multi-year okra trials, which you can read more about in The Whole Okra.

You can also read in this book about Ultracross collards, Ultracross okra; the development of a Purple Peach tomato with delicious Cherokee Purple flavor; the okra progeny of Puerto Rico Everblush (a round, velvety pod with red blushing and tasty flavor) and Aunt Hettie’s red okra (a robust, chunky okra pod with great flavor and high productivity) and more. Chris is breeding for resistance, flavor and more. Diverse seeds create a breeding ecosystem that can quickly evolve, adapt to local conditions, and bring resiliency.

“We must do everything possible to rapidly mitigate our collective human impact on the climate. If we don’t, it’s game over for life as we know it.”

Community-based seed keeping has declined, and with that we have lost a traditional way of advancing seed genetic diversity. It’s time to reestablish seed-keeping as a community activity: everyone a seed saver instead of a handful of seed saviors; infinite seed options instead of a limited number of “perfect” varieties. Chris reports that he resisted being called a plant breeder for a long time because of the term’s strong association with what he perceived as elitist corporate and academic systems. He came to realize that it’s a term that seed communities should reclaim. “The human history of plant breeding is long and vibrant; its narrowing to a pursuit of profit and purity is a recent phenomenon.” Chris recommends Adam Alexander’s book The Accidental Seed Heroes, which I also enjoyed (and reviewed).

During the rise of Monsanto and genetic modification, independent plant breeders and researchers began discussing how the ideas behind open-source software could be applied to seeds. The idea of protecting seed freedoms with open-source concepts led to the formation of the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI), which was officially established in 2012. They named four seed freedoms:

1. The freedom to save or grow seed for replanting or for any other purpose.
2. The freedom to share, trade, or sell seed to others.
3. The freedom to trial and study seed and to share or publish information about it.
4. The freedom to select or adapt the seed, make crosses with it, or use it to breed new lines and varieties.

To protect these freedoms, OSSI created a system for plant breeders to register their varieties with OSSI. When seeds registered with OSSI are shared or sold, the OSSI pledge goes along with them. No one can claim ownership in order to profit from a cultivar and prevent others developing it.

An issue has arisen of indigenous seeds used for private profit in a mostly white-led seed industry. If your beliefs include recognizing seeds as ancestors, or as beings embedded within specific cultural and spiritual lineages, then the idea of seeds as the common heritage of all humankind can be deeply inappropriate. This debate led to the Culturally-Informed Community Seeds Pledge, for seeds from plants that have retained ancestral, traditional, or cultural relationships with specific communities and places of origin.

The pledge states, “I respect the natural rights of seeds and their people by producing CICS-Pledged seeds under the pledge’s culturally-informed practices and code of ethics.” People receiving CICS-Pledged seeds are asked to follow the same guidelines.

Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) identified all the varieties they held that had a tribal affiliation. They then asked First Nations community members if they were okay with their seeds being distributed to non-tribal people. All but one respondent said no, they were not okay with it. So SSE took those seeds out of general circulation and reserved them for Indigenous communities.

Appendix A is a US Timeline of the Biological and Legal Enclosure of Seeds from 1790 to 2018. Until 1924, the US government ran a free seed distribution program, leading to profit-based seed companies. In 1889 The US commissioner of patents had ruled that it would be “unreasonable and impossible” to patent “the trees of the forest and the plants of the earth.” In 2018 The United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which recognized the rights of peasants to maintain, control, protect, develop, save, use, exchange and sell their own farm-saved seeds.

Appendix B provides population sizes and isolation distances for common vegetable crops.

Appendix C lists crop types and promiscuity

Appendix D lists seed companies selling Ultracross seed and other genepool collections.

The 8-page Glossary, a bibliography, an index and chapter notes round out the offerings in this remarkable book.

Thoughtful, inspiring, and of practical help, this is a book to treasure.