Featured Story

Growing hope for a sustainable future of food

Photo by Trav Williams, Broken Banjo Photography | Easter-colored beans.
Trav Williams, Broken Banjo Photography | Easter-colored beans.

BY CARA LORIZ

Spring on Shelter Island is a time when buds bulge and bloom, warming soils imbue the air with their potency and tiny sprouts unfurl en masse, transforming our landscape. All of this beauty and magic starts with seeds, an integral part of what we celebrate each spring — Earth Day and the environment, Easter and rebirth, Arbor Day and planting for the future.

Seeds create beautiful scenery and give life and power to our environment, but we all have a much more practical reason to appreciate them. We all eat. If you like food, you’ve gotta love seeds.

Our recent reconnection to our food — where it comes from, who grows it and how — is as exciting as it is healthy and satisfying. See it for yourself as Sylvester Manor builds community around food, showing how we all benefit when we celebrate the connections between food, people and place.

The fundamental building block of our relationship to food is seed. It is part of our common cultural heritage — a living, natural resource that demands careful management. People have long managed seed as a resource, particularly farmers, who saved the seeds of the best food plants they produced, encouraging the improvement of the vegetable variety when planted again the next year.

Like animal breeders, farmers would cross and combine related varieties, making new ones and expanding the diversity of our food. The genetic resource that is our food was stewarded and enlarged by the people who fed us.

That shared agricultural heritage has been under attack since the industrialization of agriculture in the last century, which decimated biodiversity in the name of uniformity, and more recently by genetic engineering and court decisions that allow the patenting of seeds. Instead of farmers stewarding seed, today multinational agrochemical companies own nearly 67 percent of the world’s seed supply.

From 2008 to 2013 alone, the top agrochemical conglomerates bought up 70 smaller seed companies, discontinuing the sales of some varieties that can be saved for seed in favor of patented or hybrid varieties that bring in more profits.

What does that mean to you, the eater? It means that most of the seed sold for food production enriches corporate giants like Monsanto and Dow Chemical. Even consumers of food labeled non-GMO may inadvertently be sending consumer dollars to the genetic engineering industry if they do not know their food’s seed origins.

Farmers using ecological methods want seed that works well in those systems, and that seed is in short supply due to the dominance of the agrochemical-based seed industry. Although certified organic growers are required to use organic seed when it is commercially available, most organic farmers rely on conventional seed, and on large scale organic operations, very little organic seed is used. We need more organic and savable seeds and more farmers to grow seed as part of a diversified farm business.

What you can do:
1. Support funding of organic research. Encourage your congressional representatives to increase funding of organic research in the 2018 Farm Bill.

2. Choose organic and ecologically grown food. Your consumer dollars can go a long way to encourage more resources for sustainable food.

3. Support your local farm. Ask how the farm sources its seed, and encourage them to use organic seed and to grow some of their own.

4. Grow your own food and save seeds. It’s easier than you think, incredibly empowering and gives you something to share at the Shelter Island Seed Library.

5. Stay informed. Join in a conversation about seeding a resilient future of food at the Shelter Island Library on Friday, April 21 at 7 p.m. And keep up with the latest seed news by signing up for the Organic Seed Alliance newsletter at seedalliance.org.

Cara Loriz, a former editor of the Reporter, is the Ladies bowling columnist, which she files under ever-changing nome de plumes.