A quiet revolution is starting, led by organizations like Seed Change, to have more Canadian-grown seed.
In this country, the majority of seeds planted on organic farms are imported from the United States, Europe and Asia. Organizations like Seed Change are looking to change that, aiming to help farmers have access to organic, domestically grown seed adapted to regional local climates and soil.
The international non-profit works with farmers globally to strengthen their ability to grow food with projects such as farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchanges, community seed banks, farmer-led research and plant breeding. Seed Change’s Canadian flagship program is The Bauta Family Initiative on Seed Security.
“The purpose of our program is to work with organic and ecological farmers across the country to help them save a greater diversity, better quality, and increased quantity of seeds that are adapted to organic and ecological farming conditions,” said Aabir Dey, the director of The Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security in Guelph.
The program has three missions: farmer-led plant breeding and trialing, farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing and seed sovereignty advocacy.
“We work with farmers to help them support research on their farms, produce seed on their farms, and to help train those farmers to help other farmers learn about seed production variety trials on farm plant breeding, all with the hope that farmers have access to better seed that works in organic and ecological farming conditions,” said Dey, adding that they mostly work with organic and ecological vegetable and field crops.
Those crops have different issues when it comes to securing domestic organic seeds.
“For [field crops], we have a lot of domestically produced seed, but what we don’t have is a lot of seed that’s available as organic or organically grown field crop seed,” explained Dey.
“For vegetables, what we’re trying to do is increase the domestic capacity for vegetable seed production altogether, and ensure that it’s organic.”
While many Canadian farmers grow vegetables, few grow their own seed, which means that there are limited options for organic vegetable varieties developed for Canada’s climate and soil conditions.
Since seeds learn as they grow, having domestically grown seeds means having seeds that are resilient in the face of Canadian-specific issues such as dealing better with late spring frosts, sudden temperature fluctuations and shorter daylight hours.
The Bauta Family Initiative has projects focused on developing varieties of organic vegetable seeds for different regions in Canada. One of their programs looks at developing varieties adapted to the shorter growing season in Thunder Bay.
“Nobody, no private multinational seed company is breeding for Thunder Bay, and so growers in those regions are even less satisfied with the varieties that are coming and that are available on the commercial market. They need to develop varieties that work in their climates, and it’s that kind of grower and farmer need that we’re trying to address,” said Dey.
He added that more broadly speaking, organic farmers are also underserved when it comes to having access to seeds that grow well without chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
“They need varieties that are adapted to those conditions, and that’s not available for the majority of farmers that are practising organically and, in the climate, here in Canada, so we’re trying to fill those gaps.”
Growing seeds doesn’t come without challenges in Canada. The country’s shorter growing season puts growers at a disadvantage to places like California, Oregon and Italy. Another issue is the different humidity levels, which can impact the quality of the seed.
Despite the challenges, there are farmers still growing seeds domestically.
“The seed growers that are producing seed here in Canada are excellent, good quality seed growers that are trying to do it organically, trying to grow a good diversity of crops that are here, and they just need more support to be able to scale it up and also be able to learn how to produce better quality and a greater diversity of seeds here,” said Dey.
“A lot of what we’re trying to do is build Canadian alternatives to varieties that we’re importing, so it doesn’t mean that we stop bringing in varieties from elsewhere, where we can just get better quality seed, but we need to have more options that are adapted to Canadian climates, and that’s the gap that we’re trying to fill.”
When it comes to the practicality of farmers saving seeds, the feasibility often comes down to crop type. There are major differences between harvesting field crops and vegetables.
“When you grow a crop like wheat in a field, the wheat that you harvest is the seed that you plant, and that’s how farmers have been doing it for forever. When you save seed from a wheat plant, you’re planting it in your field with your seeder, you harvest it with your combine, and you clean it, sort it out for grain delivery and save some of your seed for replanting. That’s kind of how it’s been done,” said Dey.
Farmers who want to pay more attention to seed quality can grow a separate plot of land for seed production with their best plants, weeding out the undesirable ones. For vegetables, the process of saving seeds is more difficult.
“The challenge for vegetable seed is that for a lot of crops the seed is harvested at a different window and maturity than the fruit itself or the finished kind of vegetable itself. So, tomato is a very easy example, but for something like cucumbers, when you eat a cucumber, I don’t think you particularly like it if you find a cucumber seed in that cucumber, right? You just want it to be soft, and you want to be able to eat the whole plant and not eat the whole fruit and not spit something out,” said Dey.
“For cucumbers, you have to wait until the fruit is overripe and that the seed is ready on the inside, and that’s not until much later in the season, way past when the food is edible.”
Challenges with other vegetables such as carrots, kale and beets come with the fact that they are biennials, meaning they have a two-year biological lifecycle. This means the plant doesn’t produce seeds until the second year of its life.
“For carrots, you harvest your carrots at the end of the season, you store them in a root cellar, and then you replant them the next year, and it’s in that next year that they’ll produce their seed, and that’ll come out through flower stalks that’ll produce seed, and you have to harvest seed from those crops,” said Dey.
The majority of vegetable farmers in Canada are growing crops to be sold as vegetables, not crops that they’ll save seed on their farms for. Part of the aim of the Bauta Family Initiative is to help farmers who want to incorporate seed saving into their farming practices.
“It’s easier to do for some crops, trickier to do for others. What we try to do is train farmers to do this for the crops that make sense on their own farms, “said Dey.
For more information on how you can be a part of the Family Bauta Initiative, visit www.seedsecurity.ca.