Seed is the vital link to our agricultural past. All of the changes that have occurred in the domestication of our crops are a reflection of the ingenuity and perseverance of our agricultural ancestors. This is even more wondrous when we realize that all of the plants we rely on for our very existence are derived from wild plants that were not usually succulent; in fact, they were often bitter or sour, far beyond what our modern palates would tolerate. The modern crops that grace our tables daily are all derived from a much larger number of plants that were found to be edible and were used extensively by our hunter-gatherer forebears. While natural selection had already shaped these wild plants, the selection pressure of the people who first grew them under cultivation further changed them to better suit their needs. Certainly these early farmer-breeders were interested in plants that were easier to harvest, were more productive, stored better, had better texture or flavor, and had larger fruit, seed, shoots, buds, or leaves, depending on which part of the plant they harvested as food. But natural selection was still the dominant selective agent. These early crops were grown in very rustic agricultural conditions with few or no inputs. The environmental challenges of drought, predation, low-nutrient stress, and excessive heat or cold were ever-present and played a central role in the evolution of our crop plants for thousands of years in the development of agriculture.
Through many generations of cultivation, crops changed based on both the selection pressure of the environment and the selection of humans to meet their cropping methods, culinary needs, and cultural preferences. While some of the early crop domesticates flourished under agriculture, other potential crops were abandoned. The most promising crop plants spread across the countryside via trade and human migration. This dissemination placed these budding crops into many diverse environments under the stewardship of people of different cultures, who often had quite different goals in their selection criteria. What is amazing to ethnobotanists (or anyone who studies the spread of cultivated plants around the globe) is just how genetically diverse, elastic, and adaptive all of the widely cultivated crop species became in a relatively short period of time. The variation that unfolds as diverse challenges of natural and human selection are applied seems to yield an unlimited array of genetic possibilities. Certainly the evidence presented by the fantastic spectrum of shapes, colors, flavors, and sizes, as well as the range of climatic adaptation of our crops when compared with their wild ancestors, is proof positive of this.
Cecilia Joaquin, a Pomo woman, using a seed beater to gather seed into a burden basket, 1924. Edward S. Curtis/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Curtis Collection
Over thousands of years of practice, agriculture became increasingly sophisticated. The cultural methods used by many agricultural societies moved from hand tools to implements drawn by animals; out of necessity a number of farming communities devised sophisticated irrigation systems; many learned the value of nutrient cycling; and all improved the genetics of the crops they used. Most agricultural societies developed deep traditions and ritualistic methods of gathering seed that were carefully handed down from one generation to the next. In many cases there was an emphasis on how to select for important, desirable traits from the correct number of plants without too much emphasis on any particular type of plant. But despite the increased sophistication in agricultural production and accumulated wisdom in maintaining and improving seedstocks, the forces of natural selection remained the dominant factor in shaping the crops that they grew right up until the industrialization of agriculture in the 20th century. The best farmers knew this instinctively and worked in concert with natural selection. If the crops they relied on weren’t suited to the local environment and growing conditions, then the farmers would have to abandon them for something else that might work.
Selecting seed corn in the field allows for selection of both plant and ear traits. Bain News Service/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Bain Collection
Seed as Trade
Trade in seed has been a key component in the spread of crops since very early in the domestication process. Seed of a promising crop has probably been a large enticement in many bartering situations. The commercial sale of seed, however, didn’t become commonplace in North America and Europe until the second half of the 19th century, and the seed trade of that era consisted almost entirely of small packets of vegetable, flower, or herb seed that served as starter packets for future seed-saving activity. The growing and saving of farm and garden seed was as much a part of any agricultural pursuit as was working the soil and planting in the spring. With the advent of commercial seed companies, farmers and gardeners bought seed of specialty and hard-to-find items. Sometimes they purchased seed of a particular species that was difficult to produce in their climate. And sometimes people purchased seed packets to try something new, exciting, and full of promise.
Starting in the 1880s and continuing into the 1920s there was a steady increase in the number of start-up seed companies in North America. In addition to many new companies entering the vegetable and flower seed market, there were also companies specializing in seed corn and other agronomic staples on a scale that hadn’t been seen before. It is impossible to get a comprehensive list or an accurate count of all of these companies—some were quite small, and some only lasted a few years—but by the 1920s literally hundreds of them had sprung up in every agricultural region of North America. These companies were all regionally based, and they concentrated on supplying seed of crop varieties that were regional standards as well as finding unusual or unique varieties that would give their customers something new or exotic to grow. Most of the seed was grown within the company’s geographic region (a small amount was imported from Europe and elsewhere), and a company would rise and fall on the quality of its seed. Quality had two components:
1. The seed had to be relatively clean, free of debris, and undamaged, as well as offer a decent germination rate.
2. The seed had to have reasonably good varietal integrity, being true to type, largely uniform, and able to perform in the field with some semblance of what the catalog claimed.
Standards for seed quality and varietal integrity were not nearly what they are today, and standards for uniformity were much more forgiving, but farmers did notice differences and knew good seed from bad.
Concurrent with this growth in commercial seed was a series of innovations in cultural practices, science, and engineering. These set the stage for a revolution in agriculture that would change the fundamental landscape of farming in the 20th century. Toward the end of the 19th century the first commercial pesticides became available, with Bordeaux mixture being used for fungal diseases of fruit, and various forms of arsenic and pyrethrum used to control insects in a number of high-value crops. At the beginning of the 20th century came the rediscovery of Mendel’s principles of heredity, which laid the foundation for genetics and modern plant breeding. By the 1910s several American manufacturers were making gasoline-powered tractors; the first synthetic nitrogen fertilizer was being produced in Germany by harnessing atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia using the Haber-Bosch process. Throughout this entire period hundreds of smaller hydroelectric dams were being built across North America, laying the groundwork for the large irrigation projects yet to come.
These changes didn’t “take” with farmers overnight. First of all, many of these inputs were expensive, and most farmers were not operating on a cash-intensive system—they produced all or most of their own fertility, feed, and seed for their farms. Pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, and even tractors wouldn’t become commonplace on North American or European farms until after World War II, and even later in other parts of the world. The main source of fuel on the farm was the grain and hay produced on-farm for horses. It’s hard to believe now that only 100 years ago, even in countries that were rapidly industrializing, most of the population lived on farms that were largely self-sufficient, breeding their own animals and growing their crops from seed they had grown.
The Change
Many social, cultural, and political events occurred between the 1920s and the end of World War II that had a profound effect on agricultural practices in many industrial societies. Modern plant breeding came of age during the 1920s, and the development of hybrid corn received most of the attention. Much of the early breeding work in corn concentrated on improving its stalk strength and ability to produce under challenging conditions. This proved invaluable in many areas of the Corn Belt when several cycles of drought, extreme heat, and high winds conspired with poor farming practices to create the Dust Bowl crisis in the American Great Plains during the 1930s. The Dust Bowl, coupled with a worldwide economic depression and a near collapse in world markets for wheat, corn, and cotton, shrank many farmers’ profit margins and forced many people off the land. Further displacement of people from farms occurred throughout many industrialized societies with the onset of World War II as young men left to fight, people moved to cities to work in factories for the war effort, and whole nation-states were occupied by invading forces. This set the stage for increased agricultural mechanization when wartime demand for agricultural production became crucial to the Allies as the conflict in Europe became a world war.
Efforts to increase production during World War I are reflected in this famous 1918 poster of Liberty sowing seeds. James Montgomery Flagg/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
The war pushed industrial and scientific development to the hilt in dozens of areas. Many American factories were built solely to produce enough ammonia for gunpowder and bombs used by Allied forces worldwide. US agricultural production played a pivotal role supplying troops and allies with staple foods. Production was bolstered through federal programs such as the Lend-Lease Act, which promoted a more industrial farming model geared toward maximizing yields and raising quality standards of important agricultural commodities. American farmers increased production as much as possible with limited resources throughout the war. Seed production for a number of crops boomed on this side of the Atlantic, with vegetable seed for war-torn Europe in high demand. Some cabbage seed growers in the Puget Sound region of Washington State were said to have paid off their mortgages with three good crop years during the war. By the end of the war tractors outnumbered horses on American farms for the first time. Agriculture in industrial societies was changing.
The Postwar Industrial Agriculture Model
In the aftermath of World War II there was a gap to fill in the wartime industrial output, and agriculture came to the fore. Factories that had produced ammonium for explosives switched their production to nitrogen fertilizer. Organophosphate insecticides and herbicides that were newly developed before the war became inexpensive and widely used after it. Hydroelectric dams that were started as Works Progress Administration projects during the 1930s realized their full agricultural potential as western states expanded acreage, developing irrigation districts and building canals and ditches to adequately utilize the water.
Perhaps the most profound change in this postwar era was the mind-set of the new generation of agricultural innovators. In America the returning soldiers were given generous benefits, including the opportunity to go to college with their tuition and most of their living expenses paid for by the GI Bill. Many soldiers who took advantage of this had been raised on farms, and a fair share of these farm boys chose studies in agriculture. Among those who excelled in school, a good number went on to graduate school in agriculture. With great increases in federal funding for agricultural research at universities and the USDA, as well as rapid expansion in all areas of agricultural business, many new positions were being created at this time. These led to leadership roles in both public and private agricultural policy and research in the postwar era for this new generation of young agronomists and scientists that had returned from wartime service. Among this generation there was a real sense that all of the problems in agriculture could be solved with innovations created through scientific understanding, technology, and modern industrial muscle, if coupled with the same “can-do” spirit that had helped the Allies to beat the Axis powers during the war. It was an innocent time, with blind faith in scientific solutions to vexing problems. The skeptical questioning of technological fixes in agriculture that has become the norm, especially amongst the organic farming movement since the 1970s, was virtually nonexistent at this time.
In the postwar era the Marshall Plan, a massive US foreign aid program to help rebuild the economies of war-torn Europe, spread this industrialized model of agriculture across Europe and beyond. Conceived as a way to boost reconstruction of all aspects of each European country’s economy, industrial capacity, and infrastructure, this plan had a strong agricultural emphasis. Hunger was the immediate problem at war’s end, and flour, fuel, and cotton were among the first shipments to Europe from America. The next shipments were of manufacturing and mining equipment, farm machinery, fertilizer, and seed. A priority of the Marshall Plan was to stimulate agricultural production to offset the balance-of-trade deficit that existed in these countries. American technical advisers were sent to Europe to assist farmers in the use of the modern agricultural equipment. These advisers also served as ambassadors for modern farming methods and the use of external inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides, and the seed of modern crop varieties that were being developed during this era. (Also remember that inputs like nitrogen fertilizer and DDT were relatively cheap—they were based on petroleum, and oil was extremely cheap in the postwar boom years!)
Seed at the Crossroads
As productivity increased with the new industrial model, many aspects of agriculture became more specialized. Seed was no exception. With the rapid success of hybrid corn before the war, the stage was set in this postwar era for seed companies to offer improvements in other crops that would convert more and more farmers into purchasing seed every season. It should be remembered that, even at this point in the transition from traditional farming to what we now refer to as modern agriculture, farmers still grew most of the seed to meet their own needs. This was as true of farmers in industrialized societies as it was in true agrarian societies in the mid-20th century. For farmers, producing their own seed was clearly an integral part of their operation. It was a part of every farm. The ability to maintain good seedstock, which is fundamental to producing a good crop, was a testament to their true ability as farmers, much as the breeding and upkeep of their livestock. It was woven into the fabric of the farm. The seed was part of their farm and their farm was part of the seed. Each variety that was selected over time to meet the environmental conditions and the farmer’s needs became part of the whole system used on the farm. That was the way it had always worked.
This 1917 poster presents saving seed corn for replanting as a patriotic duty, with Uncle Sam advising and supporting the American farmer. Scott Printing Company/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
The process of replacing farm-grown seed with seed developed somewhere else was gradual and only occurred when the new seed had a quality that made it hard to resist. This process would still take another 30 or 40 years in even the most industrialized agricultural areas, with seed of some crops such as small grains and cover crops still often produced on-farm today, long after growers have become accustomed to buying vegetable, corn, or pulse seed.
Seed in the Postwar Era
The American seed companies that grew considerably during the war were keenly aware of the benefits that had been realized during the intensive scientific breeding efforts applied to hybrid corn by both university breeding programs and corn seed companies in the 1920s and 1930s. With the exception of corn, almost all modern plant breeding in the prewar era was done by a relatively small number of genetic researchers at universities. Most seed companies at that time sold seed of established, public-domain crop varieties, with new varieties only occasionally developed by astute stockseed personnel at the companies or by farmer-breeders. Before the war most seed companies did not have trained plant breeders. After it, given the sharp increase in the number of plant-breeding programs at universities, there was soon a great increase in the number of young plant breeders being trained. This coincided with a demand for professional plant breeders at many of the larger seed companies, which had prospered and wanted to develop new varieties in order to successfully compete. The zeitgeist of modern agriculture at this moment in time was placing a strong emphasis on seed and the promise of plant breeding to solve problems.
Modern plant breeding in the mid-20th century used an assortment of methods based on genetic concepts that had been developing ever since the rediscovery of Mendel’s principles of inheritance in 1900. Plant breeding certainly provided a way to incorporate any number of important traits such as disease resistance, climatic adaptation, nutritional quality, and yield potential into a single crop variety in relatively few generations. It was also possible to produce crops with a greater degree of uniformity than was the norm for that time. Many farmers didn’t strive for this level of uniformity in their own seed selection, as it wasn’t that important in their own crops. In vegetable crops much of the production of this time was done using diversified cropping systems with multiple harvests for local consumption. Very little mechanization was used in these systems, and standards of varietal uniformity for commerce were not as strident as they would later become. The uniformity that came with the new wave of breeding, in both hybrids and the new open-pollinated varieties that were being created, certainly fit the bill with many of the other new industrial elements that were quickly coming into agriculture.
Professor George F. Sprague was a prominent figure in plant breeding research at Iowa State College and trained many of the best postwar plant breeders during his career. Ames, Iowa, 1942. Jack Delano/Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection
While seed was beginning to be shipped far and wide during this era, with American seed routinely going to Europe due to the postwar rebuilding efforts there, seed companies were still predominantly regional in their focus. Most crops were still produced and used regionally, and thus a regional emphasis on offering seed of varieties with climatic adaptation, ones that satisfied market preferences for a particular region, was a solid business strategy. Especially in vegetable crops regional production was still the name of the game, and postwar prosperity across North America only increased the regional demand for vegetable seed. In Northern Europe and Japan the story was much the same, with vegetable seed companies that had prominence before the war emerging from the ashes, becoming regional powerhouses, and eventually starting up breeding programs during this postwar period.
The Golden Age
of Plant BreedinG
With the boom in seed sales both during and after World War II, the most progressive corn and vegetable seed companies wasted little time building a whole new infrastructure with improved stockseed departments, technicians accustomed to working with plant breeders, and highly skilled plant breeders, who were emerging from the handful of top agricultural schools with a wide-eyed enthusiasm for their craft and its potential to change the face of agriculture.
This new generation of seed-company plant breeders was concerned first and foremost with supplying the growers with varieties that worked for the soil, climate, cultural practices, and markets in the region where each company was based. Most of these breeders had been raised on farms, and they had a real sense of the needs of the average farmer and understood how the variability of the land and the weather across seasons demanded genetic resilience to adapt to all farmers’ needs in any one region. They knew that most of the farmers they were serving didn’t have the best growing conditions for their crops. Perhaps they didn’t have ideal soil, their fertility was uneven, or the soil moisture was erratic, as most growers didn’t have irrigation at that time. The best of these breeders didn’t treat their breeding materials with kid gloves—instead they did their breeding under average field conditions with minimal external inputs, testing and evaluating across several environments in their region. The resultant varieties were usually genetically elastic and often proved to be workhorse varieties that adapted to the environmental variability that could be expected within the region. Yet even when these field-tough varieties were sold outside their area of intended use, they frequently performed well due to their built-in adaptive capabilities. Despite the specialization that was occurring in seed and the steady increase in seed sales outside their specific regions over the next 30 years, the production-research seed companies that emerged in the post–World War II era remained largely regional until the 1970s.
The Ownership
Conundrum:
Seed as Big Business
Selling agricultural seed had become a good business in the middle of the 20th century. It wasn’t exactly fast money, since profits were made based on the quality and volume of seed sold. Yet if a seed company offered good varieties that catered to the farmer’s needs and sold seed of varieties that met high quality standards, then it was sure to have a place at the table when farmers laid down their hard-earned cash. Seed companies were run by seedsmen, as they were then called, and indeed they were a special breed, with a connection to seed that far surpassed their business interests.
From the late 1940s to the 1970s there was unmitigated growth in all matter of agricultural goods globally, and seed was no exception. The spread of modern agricultural techniques such as mechanization and the use of inputs like synthetic fertilizer and insecticides spread to many of the major commercial agricultural centers around the world during this period. Seed of modern crop varieties bred in the United States and Europe wasn’t far behind. Plant breeders had learned that when crops were selected and evaluated across environments, they could produce varieties with wide adaptation. Occasionally these varieties would have such good adaptation across environments and geographic regions that they would perform well in numerous locations around the world. Indeed, the breeders involved in the Green Revolution designed their breeding programs around this model; a number of their rice and wheat varieties spread across several continents.
Unfortunately, there was an emphasis in much of this breeding work on coupling the use of modern farming techniques and increased external inputs with these widely adapted varieties. As varieties were selected and bred under high-input regimens, they tended to perform best with the cash-intensive, purchased inputs. But as these modern methods of farming spread, so did these seed, and the market for seed became big business.
Since the inception of seed companies in the 1800s, many companies that offered seed of unique varieties had been interested in finding ways to own or “protect” these varieties. Until the advent of hybrids there was no way to prevent your competition from buying seed of your newest variety, then turning around and growing it for seed and producing their own version of it to compete with you.
The earliest breeders of F1 hybrid varieties of corn were simply looking for the fastest way to isolate favorable traits, combine multiple traits, and get them into a uniformly true breeding strain that would benefit the farmer. It was the shrewd business owners of several seed companies who saw that hybrid varieties could give them de facto proprietary ownership as the hybrids did not produce seed that is a true breeding version of the F1 variety. Hybrids are usually produced from two inbred parental lines (which are unique extracted versions of normal crop varieties that have been purified by repeated inbreeding) that are not available to anyone outside the company of origin. Therefore, above and beyond the sales pitch that hybrids had superior uniformity and vigor, there was a powerful incentive for breeding hybrid varieties based on their instant proprietary status by virtue of their genetic makeup. The uniform F1 progeny hold a heterozygous set of uniquely different genes from these two different inbred parents. Because of this each plant in the next generation (F2) is usually quite diverse, with many different combinations of traits due to genetic recombination.
This also explains the other great business advantage for seed companies in selling F1 hybrids, which seed companies realized right from the beginning: Farmers can’t save seed of a hybrid and expect to get the same variety in the next generation that is true breeding for all of the same traits. So farmers have to repurchase seed of the hybrid variety each season. Best of all for seed companies is that producing hybrids in and of itself is a form of proprietary ownership with no need for formal legal protection or the cost of lawyers. As long as a seed company has plant breeders capable of producing good F1 hybrids from their own elite inbred parental lines that are kept secretive and under their control, it is possible to have unique proprietary varieties that no one else can produce.
The combination of a steadily expanding world seed market and this new form of proprietary ownership of seed began to be noticed by large agricultural companies in the 1970s. To them it really made sense to include seed as part of their marketing of everything from fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides to machinery or in some cases processed foods or commodities. Adding seed companies, especially those with a research-and-development emphasis, was an essential component of vertical integration in the quest to control agricultural markets across regions and around the world. Seed was truly in the process of becoming just another external input like fertilizer and pesticides, one that all farms would need to purchase on a continued, seasonal basis.
In 1970 the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) was passed in the United States as a form of intellectual property protection for non-hybrid, seed-propagated crop plants. The PVPA allowed farmers to save seed of protected varieties for their own use and allowed breeders to use these varieties as parents in their breeding programs. While these exemptions are unusually lenient by today’s standards, the PVPA did pave the way for the extremely restrictive use of utility patents for protecting gene sequences in crops and even specific crop traits such as heat or drought resistance.
In the 1980s major oil, agrochemical, and pharmaceutical companies started to buy many of the major seed companies worldwide, having recognized that seed was an untapped intellectual property resource of major proportion for the future. Seed company mergers became the order of the day, and by the mid-1980s Royal Dutch Shell, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, became the largest seed company in the world.
Decisions on the direction of research or the types of services the seed companies would direct toward different market sectors were now made by corporate managers or “bean counters” and were no longer under the purview of agronomists. Many minor agricultural regions, market sectors, and crop types were increasingly ignored as the bean counters from corporate headquarters eliminated the breeding programs and crop varieties that served the least lucrative markets. Increasingly, the commercial development of agricultural seed was directed at the highest-profile, highest-profit market: farms on prime agricultural land in large-scale, centralized production areas that are favored by agribusiness. This trend resulted in a narrowing of the breeding focus by all of the seed companies. The deathwatch for regionalism in commercial seed was beginning.
By the 1980s breeding new crop varieties for larger farms in climates favorable for the respective crop became the order of the day. As these farms began to rely on more and more external inputs and a greater degree of mechanization, the new crop varieties were shaped to fit these systems. The new varieties that were bred and selected in these systems became adapted to the ample quantities of fertilizer and water required in these high-input systems. While they were frequently bred to have resistance to one or two of the major diseases facing a particular crop, they were often overly protected from all other pathological maladies that could conceivably attack, from the seedling stage to full maturity.
Breeding for resistance to insects, however, has been largely ignored in modern crop breeding; as a result, insecticides were applied in almost all selection nurseries to ensure the absence of confounding variables during the selection process. This style of plant breeding has created crop varieties that are adapted to these external inputs and are often not field-toughened like many of the varieties bred during the 1940s to 1960s, when breeders were developing seed for more diverse, lower-input systems. These modern varieties have frequently been called “prima donnas” by organic growers, who are frustrated by their limitations.
At the same moment the seed industry was undergoing consolidation and increasingly catering to an industrial agricultural model in the 1970s and 1980s, the organic farming revolution was catching on in earnest in North America and Western Europe. Regional organic vegetable production led the charge with a rebirth of farmers’ markets and ultimately a demand for local agricultural production of all stripes—a demand that is only getting stronger each year. Many of the practices found in organic farming at the end of the 20th century were in sharp contrast to the industrial farming model that was becoming the norm in the global North. Organic farmers were producing vegetables across a much greater range of terrains, soil types, and fertility regimens than what had become the norm in the much more homogeneous, high-input conventional systems. Those organic farmers that survived and thrived were a hardy lot who devised new cultural tricks such as flame weeding and relearned old tricks such as using stale seedbeds to control weeds.
One thing that wasn’t very different between these two systems in these nascent early days of organic production was the choice of crop varieties used in the global North. Organic farmers at this time didn’t usually question growing crop varieties that were in common use in their region. In fact, the source of the seeds wasn’t questioned at all, and the common assumption was that whatever crop varieties were coming from the premier seed companies must be the best for any style of farming. The specialization of producing high-quality seed was far outside our frame of reference and we shared a blind faith that seed was being produced with our best interests in mind. We questioned many of the assumptions of farming in those heady times, but it was a rare person who questioned the goals of plant breeding. Fortunately, many of the modern varieties did have useful traits and the best organic farmers would find the best available varieties for each crop type and would cater their cropping practices to making those varieties work on their farms.
After many organic farmers had been in the trenches for 15 or 20 years they increasingly developed sophisticated, sound farming practices. They learned how to build soil fertility, structure, and health through on-farm nutrient cycling and lessened their trips through the fields applying steel to the soil. Through this attentiveness to the land and the natural systems they realized that many newer crop varieties didn’t fulfill their needs.
In the introduction to this book I mention a number of the choices that the best organic growers are now making concerning seed. Since necessity is the mother of invention, many of the strands aimed at recreating decentralized seed systems are now being woven together and such local and regional systems are being called for by farmers of many cultures worldwide who seek seed sovereignty for their agricultural communities. In fact, a number of people and organizations worldwide are working to keep crop genetic resources available to all farmers through the creation of a collective commons using the Open Source model, which is becoming increasingly important in this age of restrictive ownership of many important resources that are the common heritage of all of the peoples of the Earth.
In sharp contrast to this movement toward local control of seed resources is the use of genetic modification (GM), where the order of the day is to have corporations legally control the varieties they transform with foreign genetic trait sequences that are often from completely different species, then control the varieties through utility patents. This is the last step in making seed just one more commodity where all modern innovation is tightly held as intellectual property and controlled in large part by the three largest seed companies in the world: Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta.
Early in the 21st century we are at a juncture in the history of agriculture where the people of all agricultural societies have a choice as to which of these paradigms they are going to follow. The seed is a reflection of the farming system as it is grown, cultivated, selected, and fully incorporated into that system. Are the crop varieties and the crop genetic resources of our ancestors going to keep adapting to fit the needs of organic agriculture at the hands and through the innovation of farmers and regional seed companies that have a relationship with farmers? Or will we allow the power to go to a corporate elite that shape our agricultural future based on shareholder profits? The road ahead for agriculture will be determined in large part by those who shape and ultimately control the seed.