Bringing Biodiversity Back

Category: Old Site Archive

The Cabbage Coalition

“Crop varieties incorporate the values of their creators. When you grow varieties bred by others, you propagate their values along with their varieties. Today’s professional plant breeders – university and corporate – are breeding plants to facilitate and serve the modern megafarm agribusiness pattern. These varieties produce well in huge moncultures grown with massive doses of herbicides and chemical fertilizers. Bred into the varieties are the values of their creators – that more is always better, that monocultures are best, and that pollution, biodiversity, and sustainability don’t matter.

“It is time for new patterns – new patterns for agriculture, and new patterns for plant breeding. It’s time for the rising up of a new generation of plant breeders out of the soil of our farms and gardens. It is time for farmers and gardeners everywhere to take back our seeds, to rediscover seed saving, and to practice our own plant breeding. It is time to breed plants based upon an entirely different set of values.”

Carol Deppe
Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2000

Why am I growing thirty different varieties of winter cabbage? Well, I like cabbages. I also believe that the world stands on the cusp of a plant breeding revolution – in the values which inform it; its purposes; its strategies and tactics. Here’s an edited and enlarged excerpt from recent emails to a couple of friends, outlining some of the context for the shift I perceive.

Very recently, a stranger asked me who my heros were. Without hesitating, I heard myself say, “plant breeders.” As circumstance would have it, the years have gifted me the friendships of some of the key food plant breeders Stateside who, for several reasons – local ecology among them – are concentrated in my bioregion. These are the greenworld equivalent of IT open-source developers – a fiercely independent tribe whose lives are devoted to breeding open-pollinated, organically bred varieties of food plants. They happen to be some of the more remarkable souls I have ever met.

What I’ve been attempting to hang words on of late is that Wendell Berry’s observation that we can have agriculture only within nature, and culture only within agriculture (“At certain points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another”) is a great deal more than a tidy philosophical maxim. What fundamentally underpins the behavior of our civilization is nothing less than the literal, embodied fabric of the germplasm which sustains it (for IT hands, read OS). And because it is food crops which sit at the very apex point of our most immediate (thrice) daily interface with the greenworld, so our attitude and approach to co-evolving with our foods determines the very nature of the meme-foundation of our lives.

In the realm of archetypes, the same rules hold true through all spectrums and dimensions of experience, don’t you think, and it was when I was pondering patterns around information technology that I began considering evolutionary ontology, in earnest. What I recognized then was an implicit direction toward evolutionary drift – toward, put simply, openness. Hence, for example, the explosion of the web and the open-source movement in recent years – phenomena which proffer a timely, exacting and quite prophetic ‘rules-analog’ for the behavior of our cultural engagement with the greenworld. My strong sense is that these same evolutionary pressures are set to take the plant breeding community by storm and in so doing will refashion the fundamental fabric of that which sustains us.

No plant breeder worth her or his salt will pretend that the major imperative behind plant breeding strategies is not an economic one. This has had profound implications for the foundational genetic structure of our world because the vast majority of commercial companies sell food crops that are not open-pollinated (that is, they are not the greenworld equivalent of open-source). Instead, the overriding focus of recent decades has been on fashioning breeding techniques to create plants that are hybrids – life forms that are literally, structurally, proprietary. When we save seed from a hybrid, the ‘temporary holding pattern’ of a cross between two typically highly-inbred parents, and replant it, the resulting progeny is highly unstable. It does not breed true. What we get, instead, is a highly variable mess that also ‘disguises’ the genetic inheritance of the parental lines. Hence, farmers and, more specifically, competitors, see little benefit in ‘growing out’ hybrids. Hybrid vendors therefore literally lock a recurring annual profit into the structure of life and their balance sheet.

Why this technology is interesting to me is because evidence strongly suggests that the defining plant breeding motif, one that so far has put a great deal of money in people’s pockets, nevertheless flies fundamentally in the face of evolutionary trends. Not only do we see this in the the fact that plants naturally tend toward greater OP-ness where they are able, we see it most particularly in the essential nature of hybrid behavior. Hybrids are inherently, intrinsically, degenerative. They are designed, deliberately, to lack evolutionary resilience. In a nutshell, hybrids have no sense of place.

This, I sense, is where we encounter the not-insignificant cultural implications of dehybridization, among other practices. It’s my unshakeable sense that the fundamental essence of effective cultural regeneration will be underpinned, literally, by nothing less than an evolution in food plant breeding strategies – that in deconstructing food crop breeding as it stands, by applying strategies and tactics that honor ecological truths as distinct from synthetic ‘economic’ falsehoods, we do nothing less than deconstruct civilization and refashion it in the image of freedom, openness, sharing and the regenerative power of Nature; because our approach to seed, of course, is the foundational archetype upon which our culture is sustained. I believe this claim is not unsound.

Everything I’ve learned since even before I began my working life hopscotching around the deepest reaches of the international capital markets tells me that hitching a survival strategy, in this day and age, to breeding strategies that are fundamentally closed, is a Loser’s Game; that “the irresistible march of evolution” as Teilhard de Chardin puts it, has our economic imperatives beat. Hands down.

For complicated reasons, what it takes to raise food genotypes with a deepening capacity for co-evolving intelligently with local ecologies through the years, as distinct from ‘self-destructing’ after one season, isn’t simply a question of tweaking our existing approach: it will require a fundamental re-engineering of our culture and the assumptions which sustain it. A shift in collective conscience, perhaps. But as we move toward the evolutionary inevitability of inherently sustainable – as distinct from unsustainable – foodsheds, the plant breeding story moves center stage because it, of all human activities, provides us with a tangible, navigable cultural roadmap into the roots of authentic health.

Quite how this transition in breeding tactics and strategies, and the profound cultural shift it embraces, will unfold, I have absolutely no idea. We are all steering, after all. Tim Peters’ work is one example of what we might describe as a ‘deeply contextual’ approach to breeding – one which comes closer than most to annihilating the distinction between breeding plot and the harmonic chaostrophy of wild nature – as distinct from the moncultural segregation that conventional breeders typically seek to foster. What kind of lifestyle and awareness does it take to breed plants in this way?

And here in Eugene-Springfield, we are now co-ordinating growouts among the various non-profit teaching gardens in town. This is affording us the opportunity, for example, to work simultaneously with several crop types of Brassica oleraceae (which include, among others: kale, cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, kohlrabi and rutabagas). This species is highly problematic for small scale independent plant breeders, given that it accounts for an extraordinarily high percentage of our food crops, yet brings with it cross-pollination-isolation concerns that are typically only assuaged by spreading growouts, expensively, across disparate, isolated plots – one of several factors contributing to the very great paucity of independent efforts to develop depth in OP B. oleraceae especially, in recent years.

Stateside in particular, independent breeders’ efforts to develop B. oleraceae (particularly of the heading types) have, with a tiny number of notable exceptions, been paltry. Let us hope that in time, conventional breeders will bring their remarkably sophisticated array of knowledge, expertise and passion to bear on the OP B. oleraceae story.

Of course I’m aware of the fundamental structural resistances standing in the way of such a transition. As a plant breeder with the Dutch transnational powerhouse, Bejo Seed- and one of the more impressive souls lurking around the PNW plant breeding scene – responded politely and matter-of-factly to me a few weeks ago: “Plant breeders need to be paid.”

The man’s concerns are as deeply valid as care for one’s family get – especially, goodness, in this day and age. But we live in an evolving universe, and the life forms which sustain us are not economic abstractions, even as our dominant cosmology treats them as such. As Terry Tempest Williams puts it:

“We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.”

And these abstractions, if insufficiently faithful to life, are innately harmful and intrinsically unsustainable. Look about us: a Reckoning with such false idols was always predetermined.

We can, however, choose to be servants of, rather than slaves to, this Reckoning: because, blessedly, this challenge amounts to one and the very same thing as our great responsibility, our great opportunity, our great salvation. Conscious, generous-hearted work with the plants that hold up our world points us to the heart of a pathway into authenticity. It gifts us a pathway toward “ontological concurrence with the facts of the world” as George Steiner puts it, toward fashioning the cornerstones of our lives in the harmonious image of Nature rather than in the image of an incoherent and, as it happens, quite temporal abstraction – the authority of the bottom line.

As Tessa Gowans at Abundant Life told me when she gifted me seed to carry on my 2001 cross-country seedswapping adventures: “Seed wants to be free.” Interestingly, this is an exact analogical echo of philosopher Stewart Brand’s prescient observation: “Information wants to be free.” Regard seed: regard information. Perceive how they work. Perceive how this seed of an idea works. (“Seed-syllables travel and carry certain efficacies” – Anne Waldman.) Life, indeed, wants to be free: and will be free. This, we can be certain, is an evolutionary inevitability. The fight to fight, is lost.

In the meantime, the Universe has accorded me the immense privilege of living a life which aspires to what Jim Corbett referred to as the Quixotic Principle: “To open the way, a cultural breakthrough need not involve masses of people but must be done decisively by someone.” Right now, I am growing 30 different varieties of winter cabbage, together. Mostly hybrid. I hope to let this array of characters cross, and to use the immensely rich genetic squishfest which results, a de-hybridizing ‘grex’ we call it, to provide the foundation for local, grassroots efforts to segregate out stable, ecologically resilient, open-pollinated winter cabbage varieties over the long-term. The seed will be free. Succeeding seceding seeding, you might call it.

“I want death to find me planting my cabbages – caring little for it and even less about the imperfections of my garden.”

Montaigne

(…edited and enlarged from thoughts shared in email conversation, August 2006, with john chris jones and Richard.)

Experiencing Local Medicine: The Roots of Healing

Experiencing Local Medicine: The Roots of Healing

The following article appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Permaculture Activist, #55, devoted to ‘Learning from Our Mistakes.’

“Life, my little man, lacks rehearsals. That ís why it so often fails. Now, in the theater . . .” Rene de Obaldin, Exobiographie

Seminal adj. Of, relating to, containing, or conveying semen or seed. 2. Of, relating to, or having the power to originate; creative. 3. Highly influential in an original way; constituting or providing a basis for further development: a seminal idea in the creation of a new theory. (American Heritage Dictionary)

One afternoon, this past July, when the earth was warm and I was warm, I found myself weeding onions across from two men and then later, harvesting milk-thistle seed together. Wise, gentle, and deeply devoted to the green world, these two magnificent souls. I swam in their companionship and our work and, as we shared around the topic of plants and health, talk quickly became naked, confessional. It wasn’t long before I learned that the third member of our group, a new face, has also been dealing with chronic prostate/reproductive health issues.

A majority of men have trouble with their prostate sometime in their lives. James Green writes: “It is said that men ‘push their worries into their prostate,’ our uniquely male chamber of silence where we store our most private concerns.” And much as recent years have born witness to a great increase in cancer, depression, and auto-immune disorders among others, intuition does suggest that that both my and my friends’ individual prostate health is also tied inexorably to a story much larger than ourselves, to a malaise of our epoch, to a genuine crisis in the masculine spirit. As the introductory words to Stephen Harold Buhner’s book, Vital Man: Natural Healthcare for Men at Midlife, put it: “I cannot write about men’s health without also writing about being a man; the two are inextricably intertwined.”

It came as no great surprise to me that three of us, men between the ages of 20 and 42, are dealing with a health issue typically labeled as middle- and late-aged concern. One reason I was not as surprised by the discovery of our shared struggles as I might have been is because I knew a little bit about the life and work of these two men. They are, fundamentally, healers, and the archetype of the wounded healer not only defines so much of their and my own trajectory but so very many of the tribe we move among. As we say of the shaman-healer, “The shaman’s ability to deal with disease stems directly from her or his intimate experience of it,” an echo here, of Nietzsche’s “Whoever has built a ‘new heaven’ has found the strength for it in his own hell.” Where sickness originates is where health can be regained, and in the self-cure is the healing wisdom that makes of us healers not only of ourselves but, potentially, of others.

Could it be that our culture’s blindness to this truth stands at the heart of a crisis in perception, paralyzing our efforts to respond constructively, both as individuals and collectively, to the Errors of Our Ways?

Wisdom traditions have useful insights here. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross observes, “There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.” In fact, as our understanding of the nature of the world and existence evolves, so the whole kit and caboodle of knee-jerk assumptions bound up in the label “mistake” begin to look very hasty and superficial indeed. As Blake noted, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”

Not a few wise souls insist that unfortunate turns of event aren’t simply opportunities for growth, but essential for it. The Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa goes so far as to say, “Disappointment is the best chariot to use on the path of the dharma.” Others concur. John Ralston Saul: “I do not sense that we seek the comfort or the false freedom of denial. We understand the truer comfort of a permanent psychic discomfort in which we seek to identify reality. And we deal with reality through the creative tensions with which we attempt to balance our qualities. This is our eternal movement toward equilibrium.”

Put simply, all circumstances, even the most trying, are tools for wisdom to work with. Trungpa again: “We must surrender our hopes and expectations, as well as our fears, and march directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it and make it our way of life.” Likewise, a contemporary Sufi: “If we’re paying attention (learning), then nothing is a mistake. If we’re not paying attention (learning), then everything is a mistake. The lessons that we tend not to forget are the most painful. When we realize this, pain becomes pleasure, for it is the best teacher. The broader our perspective the less mistakes seem like mistakes, rather they become the instruments for evolution.” Naturally, this also holds true of our attitude to others’ errors and to life’s ‘blameless’ circumstances as they touch us.

Of course, no one suggests that broadening the perspective in this way comes easily. The transpersonal psychotherapist John Welwood: “When we explore the roots of disappointment, we tend to come up against the pain of a tangled pattern of actions and reactions, accumulated conditioning, habit, unconsciousness and fear. As one spiritual wag put it, ‘Self knowledge is always bad news,’ at least initially.”

As I worked alongside my men-friends in the dirt, what I already knew of their lifestyles told me they were on the healing path, even as the deep stories informing their trajectory remained unclear to me. What of their childhoods? Their relationships with their fathers? I’m keenly aware that I simply lack the poetry to communicate the great, poignant meaningfulness of life’s twists and turns, but in my own instance, I have come to see that my own prostate dysfunction is less a symptom of two decades of sexual obsession than of the agonies informing it: the sorrows, fears, regrets, and griefs unresolved, the legacy of early wounds and my own stumbling, often shabby efforts to embrace the givens of my life. As an Old Soul might put it, a message of chronic prostate problems in one’s thirties might be, “You are mistaken. The healing you seek as a man is not to be found in the way you have chosen to live. Try again.”

A Personal Pathology

Because I live the life of a mendicant and because no insurance policy, public or private, claims me, the for-profit healing establishment simply puts itself out of the running for me, no matter what its strengths. Dealing with chronic health issues in recent years, I’ve always been forced to walk toward the free. As it happens, I’ve found this “straightjacket” to be the greatest of blessings because I find myself, willingly or not, constantly ushered into an ecological or “root response” to what ails me, toward fundamental changes in sensibility and lifestyle. I am not able to buy myself out of my symptoms.

At the time my own reproductive problems first surfaced, I looked to address the immediate pathology. Much, deep pain. My ejaculate, a bright, deep crimson. Life-threatening, I thought. How in the heck am I going to tackle this one? I began by turning to where I’ve always been able to find care, to the heart of the local botanical medicine community. To the women. And it was there that I found a lesson in the making.

I quickly discovered that while there exists a mother-lode of both general and highly localized know-how around the use of botanical medicinals for women, the men are, quite simply, out in the cold. Many are the reasons for this. For one, as you may already be aware, the witch-hunts of the ages have been predominantly male endeavors. “Witches” were, for the most part, simply the midwives and herbalists of their day. Francis Bacon, the founder of the modern scientific method, had a governmental role as overseer of juridical torture of accused “witches.” It was he who suggested that torture devices be used in interrogating women to find nature’s secrets. I’m told that many of the earliest herbals emerged around this time—the details tortured from women. “Nature must be placed on the rack, tortured, and forced to give her secrets to the scientists, put in constraint, made a slave, and controlled” said Bacon, in words that still stand as a definitive critique of the sensibility informing the Modern Method. The paradigmatic legacy of such thinking, and the consequences for the direction and focus of botanical medicine, are still felt to this day. When I visited Michael Moore’s website (one of the web’s richest touchstones of botanical medicine-making know-how) to research formulas for reproductive health, along with the many for women, I found not a single formula for men. Prostate cancer is the number two killer of American males.

[Afterward edit, August 2006. It appears my use of the quote from Bacon above, is mistaken. I did not check my sources for this quote, when I lifted it from the work of another writer. Evidence suggests I did the memory of the man a great disservice, even as the quote does, I believe, indeed reflect the spirit of inquiry of the time.]

Although times are a’changing, there’s still very little in the way of relevant gnosis around men’s botanicals to be found. A couple of key, generalist texts, and that’s it. The mainstay fallback for 99% of men’s health formulas for western herbalists is saw palmetto, the berry of a palm, Serenoa repens, found commonly in semi-tropical, coastal Florida. No one could tell me much more.

To cut a long story short, I consistently find that the aspiration to go local leads me toward deeper authenticity in all areas of my life. And when I’m being honest with myself, I try always to seek alternatives to healing modalities that call on non-local medicine. I tackled the Pacific Northwestern palm geeks. A Serenoa was spotted close to my whereabouts some years ago, but palm-geek consensus seems to be that we lack the heat hereabouts for it to fruit. There’s an outside chance we might pull something off under plastic—is there a hardier variety lurking somewhere? But plastics aren’t my long-term cup of tea, I haven’t yet stumbled into a hardy Serenoa, and I’m not up to moving to Florida. What are the local alternatives I need to be moving towards?

As it happens, no one could tell me. And our local lay of land speaks a very great deal about the poverty of men’s wisdom around this topic, everywhere. Sneeze in my neighborhood and you’ll more than likely find a medicine-maker taking you by the elbow and handing you a hankie and an herb. It’s not that we don’t have fine herbalists who are men, but perhaps that, until one or several local male healers wrestle mightily with chronic reproductive health issues, we will never have a first-class source of experiential bioregional know-how around men’s health concerns, a gnosis prioritized and informed by personal and pressing need.

Admittedly, I can be accused of suggesting the challenge rests with someone else, but surely, the current crisis in male reproductive health is a collective incoherence that necessarily begs a collective response. More to the point, it’s impossible for any individual to have this story in hand: It’s simply too big to be lived by any one of us. In the very simplest terms, what’s our local ecology telling us now about how it can help us? Which plants does it make sense to cultivate, which to wild-craft? Which plant and lifestyle combinations work best in the dance of inner and outer ecologies? There exist a myriad of factors relating to the unfolding of an effective healing modality—to birthing, fundamentally, a healthy male culture—and we’re all steering. What we do know is that existing male reproductive formulas are driven by non-local protocols for the most part, and that few of the pieces of the bioregional dimension to male health have so far been assembled, never mind synergistically combined in an integrated healing melange.

As such, when I found myself in that field with those two men, one of whom is a master-herbalist in the making, I felt the universe had finally stumbled me into a concerted step forward in the cause of “bioregional prostate support,” for want of a better phrase. Between us, and our close associates, we have the beginnings of a solid sense of how the gentlest local medicinals for men might be crafted, and a compelling personal rationale to explore this route together.

I sense that our current local endeavors are not without implications that extend through space and time to the very heart of the co-evolutionary impulse in our bioregion, and elsewhere. My personal experience, for example, suggests that moving toward a local response to chronic health concerns actually reveals an intimate relationship between my healing as an individual, and the healing of the culture in which I live, both human and green. This journey has been inextricably tied to a deepening awareness of permaculture’s role in advancing the evolutionary image of what it is, fundamentally, to annihilate the distinction between inner and outer healing.

What do I mean? As I have begun to explore which local plants, synergistically combined, make good medicine, I’m also looking at how to grow them, in combinations, synergistically, in the garden. What are botanical medicinal formulas, which resonate with human systems. telling me about potential plant guilds, which resonate with greenworld systems? Do functional taxonomy/herbal ecology geeks hold an important key to restoring lost links in the Great Chain of Being? Which combinations of plants, just like those in herbal formulas, can be planted together —guilded—synergistically to help damaged ecosystems? Immune system stimulants? Adaptogens? I’m finding that Traditional Chinese Medicine has a great deal to say about formulas, as well as specific medicinals. Is the foundation for a marriage of Eastern and Western (and indigenous and Ayurvedic and other) healing modalities to be found in a communion of Eastern and Western deep gardening know-how, and vice-versa? And by extension, might such an adventure in beauty and truth presage a truly gentle communion of global cultures—one rooted, harmoniously, in the dirt? What other co-creative patterns interconnect and nurture our inner and outer ecologies?

There’s nothing new to this notion of inner-outer symbiosis to the indigenous crew, of course. I’m reminded of the Lakotan term, wakonda, variously translated as a divine object; the life force—and at other times as the process manifested to invoke that force; or “making medicine,” where the act of healing a person, either oneself or someone else, is ultimately regarded as the same act as healing the earth, where making medicine locally has the ability to heal us in particular ways by linking us directly to the healing spirit of where we live. Stephen Buhner tells me: “It’s no coincidence that St. John’s Wort grows around depressed alcoholics so much, nor that it tends to congregate in depressed ecosystems.” Our reproductive health and the regenerative health of our ecosystems are intimately related. We exist in analogical context: healing is an ecological act.

Just now, as I reflect upon my ecology of healing in recent years, I’m surprised to note how work with the seed archetype has become central to my life. The accompanying sidebar hints at some aspects of the dance and illustrates, perhaps, how the journey toward authentic health manifests as a transformational archetype rooted and seamlessly interrelated in all realms of experience—the physical, the mental, the spiritual and the emotional.

In a garden recently, I was sharing about anger with one of the men whose character and horticultural life I respect deeply. We were admitting some harsh truths about ourselves, about our reflection in the world in which we move. And this icon to me confessed that last year he came to despair that every time he went near a plant, he seemed to hurt it. After a pause, I responded. “Yes. That feeling is not unfamiliar to me. Remorse is a feeling that informs much of my experience around the Garden.” Deep gardening for this man, and myself, is a monumental struggle, a constant step into our Shadow. Rumi cuts right to the heart: “An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits, when they are held up to each other, that’s when the real making begins… Don’t turn your head… That’s where the light enters you.” As Jung observed, it is only by bringing our Shadow into the light of truth that we are healed. And my friend and I know that although the Garden may be merciless in her grace, she is also an eternally forgiving lover who steadfastly ushers us, in our failures, not into a simulacrum of health in body and mind, but the real thing, folks.

In truth, “dealing with yer stuff” has long been recognized as the foundation stone of authentic religious practice—the disciplined application of techniques designed to transmute our “poisons” into, for want of a better turn of phrase, the flowering of integrity. Sages actually speak of the manifest advantages of having negative traits with which to work. Simply put, the more we have to recycle, the more compost we bring to the garden. The benefits of bigger compost piles are alluded to in the religious adages: “Better to have fallen and learned, than never fallen,” and, “At the end of the valley of sin, do not be surprised if you find virtue standing.” Do not inhibit, but transmute, say the Sages. Do not entertain the insanity of the Sages.

And men, of course, do not compost alone. In the blessed living trajectory that has carried me through the gutters and palaces and loving arms of cultures the world over, in countless sharings, I have come to see clearly that the wounds which stand at the heart of that which separates women and men from beauty, are the wounds of our sex. And in the inimitable words of Robert Bly: “Our wounds are our gifts.” So much in the way of wisdom, gentleness and compassion is yet to be born in this crucible of shared sorrows and joys.

And, surprise, surprise, this common ground of the red-blooded masculine and feminine experience finds archetypal communion in the green-blooded garden. It transpires that many of the herbs for female reproductive health are the very same herbs that work for men. As the wisest women and men concur, the healing of the deep masculine is intimately related to the healing of the deep feminine, and likewise. We meet in Nature and in a shared, active, localized, relationship with healing into our ground of being—the way out of our problems is the way into our solutions, as above so below, as inner so outer, as male so female. We are reflections, one of the other.

This is more than a tidy ontological truth relating specifically to the regenerative health of women and men and our world. As Jelaluddin Rumi observes: “All our defects are the ways the glories get manifested.” Indeed, the story around the reproductive archetype suggests not only, as John Keats insists, that “Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success,” it also shines the brightest of lights on another key law governing our linked existence—the more diverse and varied the ailments of humanity, whatever they are, the richer and stronger the integrative, healing impulse and co-intelligence we can transmute into the healing of Gaia; and vice versa. With the subtlest of shifts in perception, we rebaptize our negative traits as positive ones. The answer, in other words, uproots the question. As deep gardeners, we simply seek beauty twice-realized or, as William Irwin Thompson puts it, the collapsing of two-dimensional vanities. The Universe, most elegant in economy.

Nick Routledge is a seedsman in Springfield, Oregon.

The Future of Farming


The future of farming:

These thoughts are derived from a June 2004 posting by Nick Routledge to the Eugene Permaculture Guild listserv, in which he described some of the insights garnered from the years he spent walking among local gardeners and farmers who are consciously engaged in stewarding the communion of food crops and landscapes:

The art of authentic seed stewardship is evolving rapidly. We are learning, for example, that for-profit growing regimens have blinded us to revolutionary insights into the way Nature co-evolves. Put simply, it transpires that the most effective seed stewardship approaches are, of necessity, small-scale, highly-localized, inextricably related to the long term care of the larger ecologies in which they are embedded, and beyond the ecological reach of Big Money.

Recently, I found myself across a bed from a local farming couple, weeding and sharing. This couple have been one of my key sources of indigenous food knowhow over the years because they have a closer relationship with their own food than anyone I’ve encountered in this bioregion – or anywhere else for that matter. They raise almost everything that they and their animals eat. Their reverence for life plays out in many ways. They are conservatives. They use a watering regimen far, far more frugal than anything I’ve encountered in my years of pottering about the local veggie growers scene – watering all their crops, once a week, for a five hour stretch; whereas I’m used to seeing some farmers overhead-water their lettuce for four hours every day during the high heat of summer – eight hours for raspberries, and suchlike.

Necessity is the mother of revelation perhaps and, as you might expect, going frugal with the water has pushed these farmers along a wisdom path that holds useful lessons for all of us interested in growing food well. Some of their insights are modest. Which lettuces are deeply drought-tolerant? “What about celery?” (the great water hog) I ask them, “Do you plant it somewhere different and water accordingly?” “No,” they say, “We grow it the same as the rest but don’t harvest until after the winter rains have arrived and the plant has had a chance to fatten up.” This small but revealing piece of intelligence is one you’re unlikely to hear from other growers, myself included, because we’ve never gone that route; because the general agricultural, and indeed horticultural tendency, is to bring the fattest crop to table or market as quickly as possible – which typically means throwing as much fertility and water as we can profitably get away with, at our dirt – pushing our harvest as far as the seasons, front and back, will allow. “Let’s give our plants the mostest!” we chant, mantralike, and so we slap on the goodies. One consequence? We’ve been prisoners to our experience. We know little about the strengths an alternative approach may be hiding.

What, then, if our current perspective on what makes for a healthy harvest – raising the fattest, biggest, quickest greenest veggies we can, now – has been based on a limiting understanding of how to nurture health at large, over the long term? Indeed, what happens once we begin incorporating the saving and replanting of seed as a defining priority in our relationship with our food – when we carry over the “memory” of our co-evolutionary relationship with our food, from year to year, and can witness how our choices, each season, affect the quality of the germplasm in our stewardship?

George Stevens, the farmer-seedsman Sage out of northern California observes: “From my experience of 12 years of growing food and seed crops …Imbalanced [high] fertilization results in an effect referred to as “leveling the playing field,” where natural selection is defeated by pumping up plants to uniformity. With moderate fertility only the strong will survive and make seed. A low-input approach may at first be lower yielding …but aspiring seed savers shouldn’t be discouraged.” In other words, an ‘immoderate’ regimen produces high yields now, but suppresses the intelligence which allows us to see and help usher forth the germplasm possessing the deepest sense of health-in-this-place. Currently, we ‘suppress’ the natural health and intelligence of the plants that hold up our world. Simply put, the experiences of those who are rediscovering what it is to embrace the Long View more fully, suggest that a deeper understanding of our ecological context, and a shift in the priorities associated with raising our food, are one and the same thing.

The increase in yields that accompanies an attentive localization dance doesn’t take very long at all. I see clear evidence in the seed I carry and grow. Take Painted Mountain flour corn, for example, the result of Dave Christiansen’s remarkable 30-year corn breeding effort in the mountains of Montana and a crop I see in many of the avant-gardens in our bioregion. (Painted Mountain Flour Corn is also a cornerstone of many localized corn breeding efforts as the rich genetic motherlode it offers is segregated out to suit the exigencies of personal taste and local ecology – Dr. Alan Kapuler’s Painted Mountain Sweetcorn, a cross between it and Luther Hill, being one fine example.) As I have moved around the seedgeek crowd of late, being gifted this corn from friends who have been growing it out locally over recent years, I’ve been holding it and looking at it.

And wouldn’t you know, the palm of my hand tells a story. As I weeded with my farming friends, I was able to alert them to the fact that the Painted Mountain seed they gifted me was noticeably fatter than the seed I’ve picked up from any other grower in our bioregion. Because they’re not a peripatetic seedcarrier nipping at the heels of southern Willamette seed geeks and their stashes, they had no idea how their seed compared. Remember, their corn isn’t fatter because they’ve been throwing steroids, even organic steroids, at it. Wherever I find a deepening tendency toward conscious stewardship of the foundations of our world, I witness a story of marked increase in health and yield, with less in the way of management and input, over time.
 
The pace is quickening. We’re seeing revolutionary discoveries flowing into the hands of the local, small-scale seed saving tribe, all the time. Take the following insight, with immense implications for the future of small-scale, bioregional food stewardship, wherever it finds its home.

I tend to let intelligence find me, so when Peace Seeds’ Alan Kapuler (the Corvallis-based former research director for Seeds of Change) thrust a three page photocopy in my face and said, “Here, this just came in. You definitely ought to read it,” the klaxons were fairly tooting.

It transpires that Chinese agronomists have been putting their peoplepower to good use and, by painstakingly planting out seed saved from different locations on individual plants, they’ve discovered that where seeds on plants are harvested, has one humdinger of an impact on genetics. It is difficult to synthesize the wherefores concisely, but the tactic was born out of the newly emerging science of ECIWO biology (Embryo Containing the Information of the Whole Organism) which, in a nutshell, looks at plants as holographic archetypes. Goethe (“a flower is a leaf in love”) and the biodynamics tribe have been hip to this trip for years, of course, but the Chinese are the first, to my knowledge, to make a concerted effort to note what happens when we apply this insight empirically to seedsaving across many plant crops.

How does it work? Old timers know that if you want to birth, for example, a rosemary plant with a spreading habit, then take a mature plant and select a cutting growing horizontally off the side of the plant. Then stick it in the ground, and water. Likewise, if you’re looking for progeny with an upright habit, then take a vertical cutting growing at the top of the plant. Similarly, with ECIWO seedsaving, we’re basically looking at correlations between seed location and the habit we’re trying to encourage in progeny. So, for example, corn ears grow not on the top of the plant, or on the roots, but on the middle of the stalk. Studies show that seed selected from the middle of the ear yield anywhere from 6% to 35% more than seed taken from the lower or upper thirds of the ear.

Potatoes? The lower part of the plant is what we wish to emphasize. The Chinese have have found that by planting only the lower half of a seed potato (the distal end, the end where the umbilical was attached) yields can be upped by 20%. Wheat? Seed from the mid-spike ups yields by 14% (the awns on the spike are modified leaves which explains why seed is chosen from the middle instead of the top of the spike). Sorghum and millet? Seeds from the top of the seed head increase yield by 6.5% to 26%. I’ve seen similar stats for cucumbers, beans and turnips, among others.

The applications are revolutionary, simple, and, here’s the clincher, any gardener and farmer can use them to improve old varieties, and develop new ones. Could it be that ECIWO seedsaving is a critical key we’ve all been looking for our own smallscale seed saving efforts? Want to enhance the morphological traits of the brassica oleracea family, for example – cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts and collards? Give it a go. Perhaps some of us have ideas about how we might develop new crops from wild plants using these principles, calling forth the characteristics we wish to encourage.

It is revolutionary insights such as these that are fuelling a sudden surge in grassroots seed-saving efforts, locally. People are waking to the truth and beauty that even the smallest-scale, highly localized seed-saving efforts are whupping the dictats of the market. That’s because Nature’s truths support a deepening sense of place – highly personalized plant stewardship in ecological context, through season after season after season. This localized thread-of-return to health is an inherently uneconomic trend for big ticket seed savers, who find the direction of the evolutionary impulse smacking them up the back of the head. Put simply, the deeper insights of holism are propelling us into a field of potentialities that’s exists, literally, beyond the ecological reach of The Market. I keep coming back to the words of one of the pillars of our local farming community, “The future of farming,” he says, “is in the hands of the gardeners.”

The weekend before last I found myself at the Dharmalya permie gathering, sharing starts, most of which I’d grown up from locally-saved seed. More than a couple of people remarked on how unusually green and vital and strong these starts were. Yes, I admit it, their unusually robust vitality was a message I was hoping would register. As I keep repeating, the magic has very little to do with me and everything to do with the quality of the germplasm shining through. Wot’s more, because I know which plant comes from which seed comes from which hands, I know from experience that the more conscious the Long View surrounding a seed’s local lineage, the stronger the plant tends to be. No surprise, perhaps, but when the evidence is alive, right before your eyes, it takes on a resonance and an impact that has to be seen to be believed.