Dan Jason wants to ensure that seeds survive in the face of corporate ownership
by Sarah Cox
Dan Jason sees hope for a world where people, not corporations, hold onto the seeds.
Photo by Derrick Lundy
Strange things are happening. Last summer, a purple tomato variety grown on Salt Spring Island bore crimson fruit. Seed collector and gardener Dan Jason thought the colour change was related to climatic conditions on Salt Spring, until he discovered that the purple tomato had mysteriously turned red in gardens elsewhere in North America. That metamorphosis took place 10 years after one of Jason’s apprentices found a phosphorescent pink pod pea growing merrily between rows of green peas at the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga, where Jason oversees a one-hectare organic garden. The pea, named Tanya’s Pink Pod after the apprentice, is now one of hundreds of varieties included in Jason’s seed catalogue and mailed to gardeners across the continent. Some people have a green thumb. Jason has two.
City dwellers rarely give a thought to seeds, even as we fill our grocery baskets with conveniently palatable seedless oranges, seedless grapes, and seedless watermelon. (Trivia question: How old were you when you last spied a seed in a banana?) Yet troubling events are fast unfolding in the world of seeds, and not just at the caprices of a stressed and protesting Mother Nature.
If diminishing oil and water supplies are grounds for increasing world conflict, ownership of seeds represents an emerging third pinnacle in a triangle of survival. Jason, author of seven books on food and gardening, believes that an Oryx and Crake world, in which corporations control life-giving necessities like seeds, is closer than we think. As the Canadian federal government sheds its traditional role as a seed custodian, and Monsanto and other companies race to patent seeds and make it more difficult for farmers to save seed, Jason has taken matters into his own deft hands.
Two years ago, on Salt Spring Island, he created the Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada. The refuge defies the common image of a sanctuary as a safe house for people fleeing persecution or a slice of Borneo’s jungle set aside for endangered orangutans. This sanctuary consists of crowded shelves of film canisters, vitamin bottles, and plastic containers stuffed with seeds of all colours, shapes, and sizes: some so tiny you could fit several on the head of a pin, others so large you can only grasp a dozen or so in the palm of your hand. “You can get a quarter of a million seeds from one amaranth plant,” says Jason. “If you start to put your mind around how much food you can produce from one plant … that’s the beauty of it all.”
Tall and lean, Jason exudes the windswept air of someone who gets his exercise outdoors and not on a cross trainer with a Walkman clipped to his ears. Talk to him about food and you quickly realize he is not the sort of person who snacks on Cheezies or cookies (unless, perhaps, they were baked with locally milled amaranth flour or heritage Red Fife wheat). The wholesome recipes Jason concocts from homegrown beans and grains, with names such as Quinoa Tabouli and Black Soy Express, are enough to send most people scurrying to the nearest fast-food joint for a burger and fries cooked in saturated week-old oils—and, for heaven’s sake, hold the omega 3s.
A salad, instead? Forget those clear plastic take-out boxes with anemic lettuce and tomatoes as hard as wood. Supermarkets typically carry iceberg and romaine lettuce and three types of tomatoes: cherry, plum, and … um … the big, round, red ones. Jason grows 257 tomato varieties and 82 types of lettuce in his valley-bottom garden. His tomato varieties each carry a name as distinct as the fruit they bear: the petite cherry tomato called Pomme D’amour; a red 100-year-old heirloom tomato from the Canary Islands; and Lollipop, a lemon-yellow, sweet variety. There are novelty tomatoes such as Green Zebra, a tangy plant that produces green fruit with gold/green stripes; medium-sized early to mid-season tomatoes such as Santa Cruz Kada, a Bay area heirloom famous for its blight resistance; and Manitoba, a Canadian heirloom that is meaty, juicy, and, like Canadians in general, fares well in all conditions. There are also tomato varieties with compelling names such as King Umberto, Siberian Pink, Purple Smudge, Gold Dust Orange, and the very unlikely Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter. “This guy, Charlie, in the southern United States, had a nickname, Radiator Charlie, and he paid off his mortgage growing these tomatoes,” Jason explains.
Every seed variety has a story, it seems, and this is precisely Jason’s point. We are intrinsically connected to the food we eat, whether it is the Trail o’ Tears beans Jason cultivates—small, shiny black beans with a splash of white that were carried by the Cherokees during their tragic winter dislocation—or the Ruckle Bean, a flavourful white kidney bean grown a century ago by Salt Spring’s famous pioneer farming family. When the Iron Curtain fell, notes Jason, a plethora of seeds tumbled out and were shared around the world.
We owe our existence to seeds just as much as we do to water. Jason stores more than 1,000 different types of seeds, but these represent only a snippet of the globe’s fast-disappearing food diversity, threatened by the twin demons of monoculture and the industrialization of farming. The danger of monoculture, says Jason, is illustrated by the Irish Potato Famine, when blight wiped out potatoes and caused the death of millions from starvation and disease. During breeding programs, it was found that a wild potato species could confer resistance to the fungus responsible for the blight. Then there is the story of the common banana. The long, yellow, and sweet banana sold in supermarkets across Europe and North America—the Cavendish variety—lacks the genetic diversity that could confer resistance to Panama disease, a blight that is destroying banana plantations throughout Southeast Asia and whose arrival in the Americas is considered to be inevitable.
The disappearance of diversity boils down to one axiom, says Jason: It is most profitable to sow and market one crop variety, usually selected for its large size and post-harvest durability. “Whatever you see in the store isn’t really grown for consumers,” he says. “It’s just the easiest way to make money.” There are 450 apple varieties cultivated on Salt Spring Island alone. Most people, however, will sample no more than a handful or so of apple varieties during their lifetimes.
If the sanctuary preserved only native North American food crops, it would be fairly sparse. Only a handful of commercial crops are endemic to the continent—among them cranberries, sunflower seeds, and, despite its geographically deceptive name, the Jerusalem artichoke.
Jason stocks wheat from Egypt, winter leeks from Denmark, barley from the Himalayas, and quinoa from the Andes. He sprouts blue-tinged wheat from Ethiopia, cultivated from three kernels that travelled to Salt Spring in the palm of his hand from a trip to the eastern African country more than a decade ago. Among his prolific seed collection are 1,000-year-old carbon-dated tobacco seeds found sealed in a sacred Native burial site in Ontario and mailed to Jason. The miniature seeds miraculously germinated, producing a short, squat plant with huge leaves so different from any other plant that visitors immediately point to it. “It takes people aback and makes them say, ‘Wow, what is that?’” says Jason.
Seeds have been part of our common heritage since homo erectus began to cultivate crops around 8500 BC in Southwest Asia’s “Fertile Crescent”. Only in the past two decades has the age-old practice of saving seed been challenged by companies bent on gaining intellectual property rights. Indian scientists, fretting at corporate attempts to patent food, are racing to fingerprint 72 basmati rice varieties to prove genetically that they are quintessentially Indian. Already, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has mapped DNA for 30 mango varieties and 243 banana varieties. “If we can prove that ordinary farmers have been growing these plants for I don’t know how long, a corporation can’t just come in and take out a patent,” Jason explains.
The seed sanctuary is housed in an unheated wooden hut as rudimentary as a Central American shack. (Duplicate seed containers, as insurance against loss, are stored at two other Salt Spring locations.) On an overcast day in December, melting snow pings off the window of the hut, an old blanket strung across its open doorway. In the adjacent garden, fenced to keep deer at bay, pepper plants flash seasonal red and orange. Kale, mustard, and arugula poke up from a crust of snow.
Beyond are rows of carrots, one of the crops that started it all for Jason when he was growing up in the 1950s in suburban Montreal. At 12, besotted by a seed catalogue that arrived in the mail, Jason cajoled his parents into giving him a backyard plot to grow vegetables. “I still laugh when I remember showing my aunt the beautiful carrots that came out of that little patch of dirt and her telling me she thought carrots grew on trees,” Jason writes in his forthcoming book, Saving Seeds As If Our Lives Depended On It.
Jason hopes the sanctuary, with its five-member board of directors and 150 members-at-large, will be “the kind of authority the government used to be.” Two decades ago, according to the Canadian National Farmers Union, the Canadian public sector oversaw 95 per cent of plant breeding in Canada and 100 per cent of breeding for cereal crops and oilseeds. Slowly, the government has relinquished responsibility for plant breeding to the private sector and whittled down the scope and contents of federal seed banks. Now the government promotes corporate interests over the well-being of family farmers and market gardeners, says Jason. Last February, for instance, the Canadian government attempted (unsuccessfully) to overturn an international moratorium on terminator seeds: seeds genetically engineered to be sterile after the first harvest.
The farmers’ union reports that the right of farmers to save, re-use, and exchange seeds is under attack. Monsanto and other seed companies are proposing new Canadian laws. These laws could force farmers and gardeners to pay royalties on seed for every planting and criminalize the age-old practice of exchanging seeds with neighbours or saving seeds from a bumper crop to sow the following year. The goal is to encourage Canadian farmers to buy more certified seed; one suggestion is to link the annual purchase of seed to crop insurance, so that farmers who re-use seed would pay higher insurance premiums.
The Canadian government, like the U.S. government, also promotes genetically modified crops whose genes have been manipulated to incorporate a new trait or to silence an existing trait. Genetically modified squash, potatoes, corn, soy, cotton, canola, flax, wheat, and tomatoes are all approved for sale in Canada. Among approved GM foods are Flavr Savr™ tomatoes, in which a gene has been dismantled to delay ripening and prolong shelf life. Although the tomatoes were approved for sale in Canada in 1997, Jason notes with irrepressible delight that you are probably not eating them. The Flavr Savr™ tomato was a bust. “It had no flavour whatsoever,” Jason says with a chuckle.
At the Salt Spring Centre, where Jason began working in the mid 1980s, beans, grains, and medicinal plants flourish along with more typical fruit, flower, and vegetable crops. The garden supplies food for the yoga centre’s dining room, local stores, and markets. It also furnishes seed for Salt Spring Seeds, Jason’s 18-year-old heritage and heirloom seed company.
In summer, the valley bottom is a kaleidoscope of colour. Tall amaranth plants, bronze and burgundy, look like exotic foliage that would fetch a high price at the florist, rather than harbingers of a protein-rich grain. Stroll through meandering rows of plants and your five senses are instantly engaged. You smell ripening tomatoes and, stooping, hear the buzz of pollinating bees. This garden en-tices. It beckons you to get your hands dirty, throw off your city job, and dig in the dank earth.
Jason’s latest book could be interpreted as a post-disaster survival manual, something you might want to tuck into your fallout shelter along with extra batteries, power bars, and bottled water. It contains detailed instructions on how to save seeds, from the simple task of plucking fuzzy seed heads of lettuce flowers to the more challenging fermentation of ripe tomatoes. Jason has chosen to self-publish his book early in 2006 rather than wait up to another year for a publisher to release it. The goal is quickly to preserve as many seed varieties as possible: not two by two, as Noah rescued animals from the coming flood, but one by one.
Sarah Cox is a Victoria writer who is taking stock of her weedy backyard vegetable patch and heritage apple tree.
