Saving More Than Seeds

Practices and Politics of Seed Saving

Catherine Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409446514
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317059400
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Saving More Than Seeds advances understandings of seed-people relations, with particular focus on seed saving. The practice of reusing and exchanging seeds provides foundation for food production and allows humans and seed to adapt together in dynamic socionatural conditions. But the practice and its practitioners are easily taken for granted, even as they are threatened by neoliberalisation. Combining original ethnographic research with investigation of an evolving corporate seed order, this book reveals seed saving not only as it occurs in fields and gardens but also as it associates with genebanking, genetic engineering, intellectual property rights, and agrifood regulations. Drawing on diverse social sciences literatures, Phillips illustrates ongoing practices of thinking, feeling, and acting with seeds, raising questions about what seed-people relations should accomplish and how different ways of relating might be pursued to change collective futures.

Chapter 1

Starting with Seed

In the simple act of planting I was engaged in one of the most universal – and certainly one of the most important – of all human activities. I share the act of planting and my hope for a harvest with most of the world’s population and with unnumbered previous generations. People must eat. And the chain of production processes that finally delivers food to our mouths – long for the New Yorker, short for the Thai peasant – begins everywhere with the sowing of the seed.

Jack R. Kloppenburg Jr., First the Seed

When I was a child I engaged in an experiment with my class, an experiment common in grade schools across Canada (perhaps other places too). In the exercise, we took several bean seeds and pressed them against the sides of a glass jar with a moist paper towel. The glass jar was placed in a sunny window. We made sure to keep the paper towel moist, and were rewarded as the miracle of sprouting was slowly and amazingly revealed. I remember that some of the children were surprised and delighted by the idea that plants (and ultimately food) came from seeds. This insight was not news to me.

My father, continuing the subsistence practices of his parents, had a food garden while I was growing up. For us the produce was not necessary for survival, but caring for the crops was taken seriously (though we often had fun doing it). I watched my father hand-sow his garden and another at my grandmother’s place and, when I was not busy making mud pies or playing with rabbits, bugs or other children, I helped sow the seed and care for the plants. My father sometimes even went to the trouble of marking the area of seeds I had planted so that I would be able to see what resulted. Sometimes I enjoyed gardening, other times it felt like a chore. As an adult though, I remember it fondly. So, it was not news to me that seeds grew into plants that made food. However, while I watched and tended my beans in the school window, it was quite wonderful to see the process that had been hidden from my view by soil.

The growth of roots, the splitting of the seed, the quest of the sprout for light was revealed day by day and I watched very intently. The lesson, of course, was meant to relay the practical use of plants in supplying our food and to convey some of the biology of plants, and it achieved those aims. But, for me, the experiment also brought with it an engagement with the amazing abilities of seeds.

* * * Flash forward twenty-odd years * * *

You find me again in a classroom, doing an exercise. But now I am the one facilitating, in a university class. Here is the task I outline: Imagine the last ‘meal’ you had. Draw it. (I know, lots of people get nervous at this point. Do it anyway. It is an exercise not a test. I’m doing it too, and I am not a skilled artist.) Now, somewhere around that drawing list the things that went into that meal. Keep it simple. If the last thing you consumed was coffee and toast, for instance, you might write: coffee beans, water, sugar, milk, bread, butter. If you are feeling ambitious, you might break it down further – bread into flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar and butter, for instance – or you might add things that were part of the process – electricity, cup, knife and so on. But really, it will get complicated soon enough, so you might want to save that for later.

Take some time to think about the ingredients you have listed. Try to follow them back through their journeys to you – through retailers, distributors, producers and such. Put those on your drawing somehow. Where will the things go after you? Add that too. Now ask yourself some questions. Are there gaps in your knowledge? Where? Is there anything you are surprised that you don’t know, or that you do? Anything you would like to find out? Who produced those fair trade coffee beans perhaps? What standards they had to meet? Where do all the grounds go? What might they be used for? Do you know some of coffee’s history – like where it was domesticated? Or perhaps how diverse the crop is? And what about the water? You get the idea. Talk to your neighbour, think it through together.

I have used a variation of this exercise in several social sciences classes now – some oriented specifically around food, others with more distant connections. Sometimes a short version provides a start or break for a lecture, other times it is part of deeper investigations done over the year. The exercise points to one of the approaches often used these days to understanding food – looking at a particular item from ‘field to table’ or as part of a commodity chain. It is a version of ‘following-the-thing’ in which a commodity’s paths, altered forms, revaluations and connections are traced (Cook et al. 2006). This exercise, in its various forms, has evoked some fascinating conversations, and some inspiring projects. But often seeds are hiding in the resulting stories. In that listing of coffee beans, for instance, it could just as easily have read coffee seed. It would in one sense be more accurate – since those beans are really seeds from fruits of the coffee tree that have been dried and roasted. But seeds transform into plants or become food, and sometimes their lives as seeds are forgotten along the way.

The combined utility and wonder of seeds was highlighted for me in that early school experiment, but often this importance of seeds is ignored as an obvious, everyday thing or obscured as part of distant agricultural systems. Kloppenburg (2004) at the opening of this chapter reminds us of the importance of seed. The transformations of wild seeds into cultivated ones that are saved and resown year after year fundamentally altered both plants and people. Domestication goes both ways, in complex interrelations among seeds and savers.¹ Humanity’s survival – biological and cultural – has become tied up with the lives of seeds. Seeds are indispensable as a means of reproducing food, as food themselves, as part of ecosystems that support and constrain us, and as part of our cultural heritages. Seeds (and their plants) are part of the socionatural challenges we face in loss of biodiversity, maintaining food security, adapting to climate change, and sustaining rural and urban livelihoods. The histories and destinies of both seeds and people have become entwined. Questions of how people relate with seeds are vital to understanding what agrifood possibilities arise or are shut down.

Food production begins with seed sowing, as Kloppenburg (2004) and my classroom exercises suggest, but this does not tell the whole story. The act of planting seed to get food (or gardens) seems simple. Seeds are planted, they grow into plants, plants (or parts of them) are eaten, plants produce seeds, seeds are stored, repeat. But the seeds being sowed, the knowledge of how to grow and save them, the methods and tools used, and uses of seeds are not at their beginnings. Rather, they are always changing and exist always in relation with others. Savers choose seeds for things like textures and tastes, adaptability and appearance, storability and cultural suitability, making changes to ecologies and agrifood cultures as they do. And seeds, for their part, alter human physiologies, tastes, cultures and production practices.

Seeds, like people and other nonhumans, have histories that condition their existences and their present embodiments suggest their possible futures. Visible or not, seeds exist as part of plants, as potential foods, as governed beings, as a metaphor for beginning anew, and more besides. How seeds are spoken about and viewed depends on the time in their lifecycle as well as such factors as the experiences, purposes and knowledges of the persons involved. Even at the same point in a lifecycle, seeds can be renamed based on their purpose – dried beans or poppy seeds ready for cooking, for example, are also seeds waiting to be planted. Shared labours of seeds and savers, bringing together their relative capacities and dispositions, results in the diversity and interdependencies at the base of today’s food and agriculture.

Seed saving provides the focus of this book. I use ‘seed saving’ as a shorthand term for a complex set of practices including the planting, tending, harvesting, storing, eating and replanting of seeds (and other propagating material),² as well as the attendant processes of exchanging and knowledge-building. ‘Seed savers’, or the men and women growers – farmers or gardeners – around the world who cultivate and keep seeds as primary or ancillary activities repeat these practices year after year. However, seed saving is more than a simple technique. What seems like an obvious and straightforward activity that takes place in various gardens and farms around the world is, like the seed itself, far more significant and complicated than it may appear. The art and science of seed saving are fundamental to our agrifood networks, and all of the collaborations of previous savers and seed generations come together in each enactment as savers and seeds reconstitute the cycle anew, looping forward together.

Fig. 1.1 Saved seed – poppy and bean

Seed saving is a set of practices that raises vital ethico-political questions: who has access to seed and for what purposes?; whose knowledge is valued and how?; who/what participates in arranging seed relations and how? These questions surrounding seed saving are being asked within international, national and local arenas. They are expressed in louder and more urgent tones as seed saving becomes increasingly constrained and controversial with the reordering of agrifood through, for examples, corporate priorities, governmental policies and changing agricultural practices. Seed saving, once common practice but now often considered outdated, has become an ecological, economic, cultural, political and survival issue for many. I came to do this research on seed saving within this context, and it is why I continue to pose questions about the relations among seeds, growers, eaters, seed saving and agrifood orders.

In this book I follow seed saving through fields, governmental policies, international economies, and elsewhere. I am interested in how seed saving is enacted, enrolled and remade in various ways. The seeds themselves are present in different ways – as commodities, food, biodiversity, living beings and so forth – as are savers – showing up as consumers, activists, conservers and rights holders. In attending seed saving and its practitioners, I explore the idea that seed saving practices may offer ways of living that are vitally different from those presented through neoliberal, corporate orderings. What people and seed do together, how they enact their shared worlds, the meanings that are recreated, and the possibilities that emerge through the process of saving seed form the core of this study.

Thinking Through Seed Saving

Social studies research on seed saving has concentrated on how contemporary restructuring of seed systems toward privatisation, industrialisation and commodification impacts primarily global South countries and peoples in various (usually negative) ways (see Brush 2000, 2004; Fowler and Mooney 1990; Kloppenburg 2004; Shiva 1993, 1997, 2000). In comparison, global North growers, as participants in ‘modern’ agrifood orders, are expected to stop saving seed and purchase them instead each year as inputs. Studies of seed saving in the global North have begun to trouble binary thinking of this kind (see Mascarenhas and Busch 2006; Nazarea 2005; Vellvé 1992).

While seed saving may be a less popular practice with global North growers than it once was, it is a set of practices with which some farmers and gardeners still engage and that many support. Seed saving is gaining some attention in the global North as savers share their own stories of living with seeds (Jason 2011; Whealy 2011), and academics begin to notice (Carolan 2011: ch.4; Nazarea 2005: ch.4; Phillips 2005, 2008). Hence, studies of seed saving are relevant to the global North as well, in ways both related to, and distinct from, those applicable in global South contexts. Sustained attention to the practices of seed saving, with its implications for savers, seeds, and their shared worlds, is as yet, underdeveloped. This book contributes to developing an understanding of seed saving, particularly within Canada, and situates this within broader international trends.

A range of academic theorists serve as inspiration to better understand seed savers’ practices, and the contexts within which they operate. Though some of this book’s chapters rely more strongly on particular theorists and ideas, the various conceptions I explore run through the chapters and each other, overlapping and blending in diverse ways. Not all the theorists whose writing I use agree; rather, each chapter offers support, depth and/or connection to other insights. Three theoretical threads run through the book: everyday practices; nonhuman agency; and ethico-political engagement. Versions of these themes that I find particularly helpful are explored more fully in the next chapter, but here I offer a sketch.

To begin, this book evolved from learning about the everyday practices of seed savers. Scholarship on everyday life suggests that lived experience brings together the inane and exceptional, and that it is through practices that support for, and resistance to, dominant societal relations manifest (de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1984). Moreover, as we do what we do we recreate the worlds we inhabit and ourselves, the other people and things we relate with, and the worlds in which we engage, each of which, in their turn, influence our possibilities. In this sense, our worldly engagements are always already part of relational worlds in which change, conflict and collaborations occur in multiple ways. In this book part of my interest is exploring how seed saving shapes and is shaped by its practitioners and world relations.

I speak about seed saving as a set of everyday practices, by which I mean first, that it is an activity that requires engagement in the world with other things – like seeds; and second, that this engagement is repeated, never in exactly the same way but recognisably sustained through time and space. There is significant intellectual interest in everyday practices (performances, enactments, et cetera) across social studies (cf. Borgmann 1984; de Certeau 1984; Haraway 2008; Hinchliffe et al. 2005; Leidner 1993; Mol 2002; Schatzki 1996; Shove et al. 2009). Highlighting how practices matter, Ursula Franklin argues that what is being done may be less important than how it is being done: ‘One has to keep in mind how much the technology of doing something defines the activity itself, and, by doing so, precludes the emergence of other ways of doing “it”, whatever “it” might be’ (1999: 9). Following Franklin, the doings, knowings and possibilities of genebanking, for instance, differ from those of seed saving, though both may be (in part) aimed at conserving diversity. In these works, and in this book, there is a focus on practice and on the process of how things are done, as well as an expectation of change through altering materialities, senses, knowledges and relations. However, this book examines not only what people do, but also what they think about what they do. The meanings and values that people find through their engagements with seeds as savers have a strong role in this book.

Acknowledging nonhuman agency is vital to broader debates that unsettle dualisms between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, active and passive. By now, many have recognised that nature is not a realm in and of itself, nor is it constructed or controlled solely by people. Environmental philosophers and ethicists have challenged anthropocentrism through arguments in favour of the intrinsic value of individual and collective natures, recognising that beings and things other than humans have purposes of their own and that these purposes should be recognised, encouraged and facilitated (cf. Callicott 1986; Leopold 1949; Plumwood 2002b, 2007). Evidence of nonhuman tool-making, communication, planning and altering behaviours based on different scenarios each contradict notions of humans as the only possessor of active agency. The example of crows demonstrating intelligence by using cars travelling down roads to crack nuts for them is, by now, famous (Attenborough 1998). Challenging human-centredness does not suggest that nonhumans have the same agentic capacities as humans; rather, the aim is to find ways of recognising nonhumans, their lives and relations, for what they are in and of themselves, to acknowledge differing and uneven experiences of affecting and being affected. It is increasingly recognised that, as Haraway (1992: 67) states, ‘all of the humans are not “us” however defined’ and ‘all of the actors are not human.’

The idea that agency is more distributed and relational rather than concentrated in people brings together otherwise disparate studies through an interest in ‘relational materialities’. An underlying shared interest exists in understanding how different things and beings interact, and how their relations shape themselves, others, and the worlds in which they exist. People, documents, technologies, birds, whatever else, each has the potential to create change in the world through their relations with others. Scholars have discussed in this way the complex relations of things such as bacteria (Hird 2009) and mushrooms (Tsing 2005, 2012), door closers (Latour 1988) and markets (Callon 1991), buffalo (Lulka 2004) and elephants (Lorimer, J. 2010). A few have even addressed seeds in some fashion (Clark 2002; Katz 2006; van Dooren 2012; Whatmore 2002: ch.5, 6).

Seeds do have their own lives, and in some cases present opportunities to people – think for example of a plant going to seed offering a chance to save seed for next year or for the seed to drop to the ground. But it is not only a concern with nonhumans and their agency that is of concern here. While individual and collective agency is relevant, as Mol (1999: 87) reminds us, considerations of agency also require exploration of how particular beings and things are ‘defined, measured, observed, listened to, or otherwise enacted.’ The point then, is to examine orderings and practices, as well as particular agents’ actions (positive and negative).

This book is part of ethico-political engagements in two different ways: first, it explores the ethics and politics of seed saving; and second, it is an effort to challenge our thinking about present realities and future possibilities of seed saving. Concerns about (among other things) food, biodiversity, development, genetic engineering and climate change each relate with plants and seeds at various scales and times.

Important implications arise once we allow for nonhuman agency. Efforts to recognise how nonhumans and humans might work together to improve their shared worlds have been elaborated recently for instance in Bennett’s (2010) vibrant matters, Haraway’s (2008) response-ability and shared suffering, Latour’s (2004a) proposed parliament of things, and Hinchliffe and Whatmore’s (2006) convivial, cosmopolitical world. These explorations bring together insights from environmental, philosophical, feminist, sociological and geographical accounts. In general, arguments for creating more ethically responsible and sustainable ways of living with nonhumans mandate two interrelated shifts: respecting differences and learning to be open to others, and possible futures. How to achieve these related shifts comes down to mindfully and regularly engaging with others in our everyday lives while ‘taking seriously’ those with whom we relate. The argument is that ‘ontological and ethical considerations are inseparable’ (Wolch and Emel 199...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Starting with Seed
• 2 Rethinking Practice, Agency and Worldly Engagements
• 3 Reordering with Corporations
• 4 Configuring Rights
• 5 Securing Accessions
• 6 Learning Seed Saving
• 7 Reconstituting Worlds Together
• 8 Resisting, Remaking and More
• 9 Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix 1: Summary Characterisation of Seed Saver Interviewees, by Pseudonym
• Appendix 2: Sociodemographic Characteristics of Survey Respondents
• Appendix 3: Food and Forage Crops Listed in Annex I of the ITPGRFA
• References
• Index