seed nerd post

Coincidentally I've been reading this awesome book:

in which one of the chapters is written by a guy who founded the seed company "Seeds of Change".  I actually bought my corn seed from them last year, and I've bought other seeds from them too.  Well this guy, Kenny Ausubel, left Seeds of Change in '94, and in the book he states the company was bought by M&M/Mars.  So (here's where the coincidence comes in), I get the Seeds of Change catalog in the mail today.  I was totally struck by how many hybrid seeds they were selling, and you could only tell some were hybrids because they weren't labeled "heirloom".  In my mind, I had SOC linked with the other "good" seed companies like Seed Saver's Exchange and Baker's Seeds.

I did a little googling and came up with this article written by Michael Pollen in '94 (hmm, pivotal year I guess) for The New York Times.  He says: "Seeds of Change claims in its catalogue that, second to destruction of habitats, “possibly the biggest single trigger of extinctions is the introduction of hybrid seeds.” ".  Dude, sell-outs!  And they have all these packaged food products for sale now.  I guess I'm the dummy for not realizing this sooner, but I definitely won't be buying from them anymore.


One seed company I am really excited about buying from once we're in New Mexico is Native Seeds/SEARCH.  I love perusing their site and reading about all their seeds.


(Please ignore the weird font size changes, I can't figure out how to fix it and I don't really care).