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In the face of rising temperatures and worsening drought, the world’s repositories of agricultural seeds may hold the key to growing food under increasingly harsh conditions. But keeping these gene banks safe and viable is a complicated and expensive challenge.

During the 872-day German siege of Leningrad in World War II, in which an estimated 1.1 million civilians died, a small band of workers devoted themselves to safeguarding a priceless trove of 200,000 seeds at the Institute of Plant Industry. Then the world’s largest seed bank, the collection had been amassed, in large part, by famed Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov during expeditions to 64 countries.

As the siege wore on and starvation became epidemic, workers at the institute refused to eat the seeds and protected them from hungry citizens.

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Seeds stored at a gene bank in Mexico.

Nine of Vavilov’s seed bank colleagues ultimately died from starvation.

Seventy years later, in 2012, employees of a gene bank at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas in Syria (ICARDA), heroically duplicated irreplaceable wheat, barley, and lentil seeds and spirited them out of the battle-scarred country to the frozen Svalbard Seed Vault, located inside a Norwegian mountain. Last year, the vault was opened for the first time to retrieve those seeds in order to re-establish ICARDA’s gene banks in Lebanon and Morocco.

From war, to civil strife, to natural disasters, seed banks around the world face crises that, with surprising regularity, befall these genetic repositories that are the lifeblood of the international agricultural community. With 9 billion people to feed by 2050 and with crops facing increased stress from rising temperatures and drought, plant breeders must marshal all of the available crop diversity to continuously develop new varieties of wheat, maize, rice, and other foods.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto Losing Its Grip?

March 28, 2016

Monsanto Losing Its Grip?

The earnings warning was just a precursor.

Monsanto, the world’s largest seed manufacturer, is not having a good year. The company recently slashed its 2016 earnings forecast from the $5.10-$5.60 per share it had forecast in December to $4.40-$5.10, claiming that about 25-30 cents of the reduction was due to the stronger dollar. But judging by recent trends, a strong dollar could soon be the least of its concerns.

Across a number of key markets, the company is facing growing resistance, not only from farmers and consumers but also, amazingly, governments.

In India, the world’s biggest cotton producer, the Ministry of Agriculture accuses Monsanto of price gouging. It even imposed a 70% cut in the royalties that the firm’s Indian subsidiary could charge farmers for their crop genes, prompting Monsanto to threaten that it would withdraw its biotech crop genes from the country.

If Monsanto’s threat was a bluff, it’s just been called. According to Mandava Prabhakara Rao, the president of the National Seed Association of India (NSAI), Monsanto’s threat came as a big relief:

All these years, the company has restrained us from using technologies other than the one developed by it. It forced the seed firms to sign the licence agreements that barred them from using other technologies.

India’s government also seems unconcerned by the prospect of Monsanto’s withdrawal.“It’s now up to Monsanto to decide whether they want to accept this rate or not,” said Minister of state for agriculture and food processing, Sanjeev Balyan. “We’re not scared if Monsanto leaves the country, because our team of scientists are working to develop (an) indigenous variety of (GM) seeds.”

India’s pushback against Monsanto is part of a gathering global backlash against Monsanto and the GMO industry as a whole. Even in the U.S., where GMOs are estimated to represent more than 90% of corn, soybean, and cotton acres, the trend is no longer Monsanto’s friend.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tips On Saving Seeds

March 18, 2016

Tips On Saving Seeds

There are no guarantees in this world we live in today. We can’t rest assured that the grocery store will always be there or that its shelves will always be stocked full of food. We can’t count on our local home supply store having rows and rows of different seed packets to choose from if we were to ever need to grow our own food. We need to face the reality that things may “go south”, and if they do, we’ll only be able to count on ourselves, and the skills and knowledge we have acquired, in order to survive.

In this, my first guest blog for TheSurvivalistBlog.net, I’d like to share with you a few tips on how to store your own seeds. These are tricks I’ve picked up from my mother and grandmother, other survivalist and organic gardeners I know or have known in my lifetime, or just simply by me learning the hard way and adapting my methods.

Well, to start with, I just need to say it, don’t use genetically modified seeds in your garden; use heirloom seeds. Humans have survived and flourished for thousands of years planting heirloom seeds, and why we decided to start messing with seeds 40 or 50 years ago is beyond me. If we are ever thrown into a world where we need to grow our own food to survive, trust me, you want plants that are grown naturally and contain the most nutrients. Hybrid seeds, and the plants they produce, have been shown to contain much less nutrition than organically grown plants, and often, they require much more maintenance to grow successfully.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto and the Heirloom Seed

February 4, 2016

Seeds in baggies

MONSANTO AND THE HEIRLOOM SEED

“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “Control food and you control the people.”

World food control is almost in place thanks to the reduction of seed diversity with genetically modified seeds being distributed by only a few transnational corporations. Genetic engineering has made proprietary control through the use of intellectual property rights possible over the seeds on which the world’s food supply depends on. To cover these costs, food prices are raised.

Monsanto is a leading corporation in agribusiness has been gradually taking over smaller heirloom seeds suppliers in addition to trademarks acquisition of a number of heirloom seeds. This started several years ago and it’s continuing. There’s significant probability that when buying seeds from a local store, one may get a genetically modified product.

Monsanto was formed in 1901, that’s more than a century ago, in the year. Throughout the ages, Monsanto has emerged and secured its reputation as a face of corporate evil. Demonstrations have been held globally by environmental activists and when Monsanto introduced Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) seeds. Monsanto modifies a plant or crop artificially, making it immune to a specific, all-purpose poison through genetic engineering. It’s expected that the modified crop stays safe with the use of pesticides while everything else is killed.

SAMSUNG CSC

THE MONSANTO CONTROVERSY

The controversy that lies with Monsanto is not recent; the company used to be a chemical company which produced Agent Orange and its main poison, Dioxin. The company was also involved in selling DDT, dairy cow hormone rBGH, the carcinogenic Aspartame sweetener, and PCBs in the past.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tips From A Survivalist On Saving Seeds

January 4, 2016

Tips From A Survivalist On Saving Seeds

In addition, hybrid seeds can’t be saved. The majority of them turn out to be duds, and when new plant life should be growing in your garden, you’ll be faced with a less than 20% growth rate. Yeah, you may survive that first year, but when year 2 comes along, you’ll be starving.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to Harvest Your Own Seeds From Fruit and Vegetables for Propagation into Nursery

October 12, 2015

How to Harvest Your Own Seeds From Fruit and Vegetables for Propagation into Nursery

Harvesting your own seeds from fruit and vegetables for propagation into a nursery significantly reduces your costs by over 50 percent. In order to reap the maximum benefit, you must give your plants the help they need to produce healthy seeds. Harvesting and storage techniques require particular attention because they impact seed quality. To achieve the best results, one must harvest at the right time, clean with the proper techniques, and dry and store in optimum conditions. Prior to harvesting, keep in mind the following recommendations.

• SEED TYPES

If you are planning to harvest your own seeds, then you should avoid purchasing hybrids, which are artificial and usually designed for only one planting season. Instead, purchase heirloom and/or open-pollinated varieties, which are natural and produce crops that yield continuously reproducing seeds. After planting, clearly mark each type with a nametag so you can monitor how different varieties perform.

• DISEASE CONTROL

Most seeds will germinate and grow to become plants. Some plants will contract disease. During harvesting, do not collect seeds from disease-infected plants; whatever ailment infected a plant will be transmitted to all future ones.

• SEED SELECTION

Select seeds from the healthiest plants. Characteristics such as total fruit yields, size, disease resistance and early fruit-bearing/maturity are reliable indicators of good health. Identify robust plants with a special wooden tag, ribbon or loosely tied string.

• SEED RIPENESS

It is advisable to allow seeds to fully ripen before harvesting. Allowing them adequate time to mature enables them to store sufficient nutrients for germination and healthy growth. This will help to ensure that they achieve the best germination yield for the following season.

• DRYING

Dry your seeds before storing. A moisture content of about eight percent is recommended; however, a range of 5-13 percent is also good. You will need to use your best judgment to assess moisture since scientific methods are expensive.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s Why a Prepper Homestead May Not a Good Plan for Survival

October 6, 2015

Here’s Why a Prepper Homestead May Not a Good Plan for Survival

Lots of preppers are convinced that they’re going to “live off the land” should the world as we know it come tumbling down around our ears. Seed banks are stockpiled, books are purchased, and people are confident that they’ll be able to outlive everyone else based on the sweat of their inexperienced brows.

But no matter how hard working you are, farming takes time. Time for learning, time for mistakes, and time for your plans to come to fruition. A prepper homestead is something that must be built over a period of time – it’s absolutely not a plug-and-play solution, regardless of the number of survival seed packets you have carefully stashed away. Farming for survival is not a good plan if you have never done it before.

If a prepper homestead is your survival plan, let me give you some advice: STORE. FOOD.

You are going to have to have something to get you through that first year when your farm doesn’t produce diddly squat.

As anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows, my family is prone to new adventures. We’ve moved from a large city to a cabin in the North Woods, where I discovered I knew nothing about building fires and living in the wilderness. We drove across the continent to move from Ontario, Canada, to the West Coast, where I had to rebuild my preps from the ground up, since US Customs would not allow us to bring our food supplies across.

This year’s adventure is food production. My daughter and I recently moved to a small farm, eager to polish up a new skill set and build that idealized prepper homestead that many of us dream about.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Doomsday” Arctic Seed Vault Tapped For First Time In History As Syrian Civil War Threatens Biodiversity

September 25, 2015

“Doomsday” Arctic Seed Vault Tapped For First Time In History As Syrian Civil War Threatens Biodiversity

With Russian boots officially on the ground at Latakia and with rumors circulating that the PLA may arrive within weeks, Syria has officially replaced eastern Ukraine as the most likely theatre for the start of World War 3.

While we certainly hope that cooler heads will prevail, the determination on the part of Washington, Riyadh, and Doha to oust the Assad regime simply isn’t compatible with Tehran and Moscow’s efforts to preserve the existing global balance of power which means that something will ultimately have to give and if it becomes clear that Iran is set to benefit in any way from whatever the outcome ends up being, expect Benjamin Netanyahu to make another trip to The Kremlin, only next time, he won’t be so cordial.

For those who – much like a certain CIA “strategic asset” – are looking for signs that Syria’s four-year old, bloody civil war might mark the beginning of the apocalypse, look no further than the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which was tapped for first time in history in response to the uncertain future of Aleppo. Here’s Reuters:

Syria’s civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of seeds from a “doomsday” vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies, officials said on Monday.

The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.

“Protecting the world’s biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Chilling Thing an Industry Insider Said about Glyphosate, GMOs, and Why He Sold His Conventional Seeds Company

May 27, 2015

The Chilling Thing an Industry Insider Said about Glyphosate, GMOs, and Why He Sold His Conventional Seeds Company

Dan Romig, who along with his father co-founded Trigen Seed LLC in 1993 and bloodstresold to Limagrain Cereal Seeds in 2010, is an insider in the seeds industry. His father was head of R&D at Northrup King, a subsidiary of Syngenta, which Monsanto is currently trying to acquire.

The combined Monsanto-Syngenta behemoth would control a third of the globe’s seed and pesticides markets.

Among the controversies surrounding Roundup, Monsanto’s flagship product, and largest selling weed killer in the world, there is this one: the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a component of the UN’s World Health Organization, declared that glyphosate, one of the active ingredients in Roundup, is “probably carcinogenic.”

Don Quijones, in his article on WOLF STREET, Monsanto Bites Back, vivisected the implications of the Monsanto-Syngenta deal and issues surrounding glyphosate.

Dan Romig then commented on the article from his insider point of view, and in doing so also told the story of his company and why they ended up selling it. It’s a chilling, insightful, and important read:

By Dan Romig:

Glyphosate is now being used by grain producers to desiccate their fields before harvest. Four days before running the combine, growers spray their fields to kill weeds and their plants in order to have an easier harvest. But in so doing, glyphosate then enters the final product (wheat, barley, oats, and others). Almost every human being has it in their bloodstream.

Dr. Stephanie Seneff [Senior Research Scientist at MIT] has led the way in research on what this does to a person. As glyphosate gets into the digestive tract, it kills much of the beneficial bacteria and produces intestinal permeability, or ‘leaky gut syndrome.’ It also chelates minerals such as aluminum, and then ‘cages’ the aluminum which goes into the bloodstream, and finally ends up in the pineal gland. Look at the correlation between when RoundUp was invented in 1970, put into mass use around 1979 and then unleashed into GMO crops in the late 1990’s, and the rise in Alzheimer’s and autism among other neurological disorders.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto Bites Back

May 25, 2015

Monsanto Bites Back

Monsanto, the U.S. agribusiness giant that controls a quarter of the entire global seed market, could soon be even bigger and more powerful than it already is, following renewed speculation over its interest in Swiss agrichemicals firm Syngenta. The logic behind the deal is clear: Monsanto ranks as the world’s largest purveyor of seeds while Swiss-based Syngenta is the world’s largest pesticide and fertilizer company.

A Monsanto-Syngenta tie-up would “deliver substantial synergies that create value for shareholders of both companies”, said Monsanto president and COO, Brett Begemann, adding that cash from these side deals would make an acquisition easier to finance. It would also be the largest-ever acquisition of a European company by a U.S. rival.

The target, Syngenta, seems somewhat less enthusiastic. It is the second time in as many weeks that Monsanto has tabled an unsolicited offer for its Swiss competitor. The first time, on May 8, Syngenta politely but firmly rebuffed Monsanto, saying that the offered price of $45 billion undervalued the company. In response to the latest offer Syngenta said a sell-off of its seeds business would not be enough to allay regulators’ concerns about the tie-up.

The 2 C’s: Consolidation and Concentration

If the deal is consummated, the two companies combined would form a singular agribusiness behemoth that controls a third of both the globe’s seed and pesticides markets, as Mother Jones reports:

To make the deal fly with US antitrust regulators, Syngenta would likely have to sell off its substantial corn and soybean seed business, as well its relatively small glyphosate holdings, in order to avoid direct overlap with Monsanto’s existing market share, the financial website Seeking Alpha reports.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Duluth City Council Unanimously Passes Seed Sharing Resolution – Shareable

December 23, 2014

Duluth City Council Unanimously Passes Seed Sharing Resolution – Shareable.

Seed activists can put a mark in the win column. Recently, the city council in Duluth, Minnesota passed a resolution supporting seed saving and sharing in the city (see video below of the council meeting). They also requested changes in state seed law to allow seed sharing without cost or germination testing.

The resolution is in response to a crackdown that took place earlier this year when representatives of the Duluth Public Library’s seed sharing project were informed by a Minnesota Department of Agriculture seed inspector that they needed to comply with state seed laws, which include rigorous and cost-prohibitive testing of seeds. This is a growing issue for seed libraries and the seed movement. The resolution in Duluth, which is co-sponsored by council members Joel Sipress, Emily Larson and Sharla Gardner, and unanimously passed by the city council, models a common-sense solution, the key points of which are:

The City Council of Duluth supports and encourages seed sharing between community members without legal barriers of labeling fees and germination testing
The City Council of Duluth supports and encourages the Duluth Seed Library’s efforts to facilitate sharing of locally grown and saved seed
The City Council of Duluth supports changes to the Minnesota Seed Law that support the sharing of seeds between individuals and through seed libraries by removing application of any labeling, testing, and permitting requirements to interpersonal or seed library seed sharing
The City Council of Duluth seeks to work in cooperation with our state legislative delegation to achieve such changes to Minnesota Seed Law, which currently designate our Duluth Seed Library and Duluth citizens to be in violation
The City of Council of Duluth requests that the city’s legislative delegation work to make such changes in the Minnesota Seed Law

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Largest Seed Exchange in the World Inspires Change – Shareable

December 14, 2014

The Largest Seed Exchange in the World Inspires Change – Shareable.

Ethical consumers in the US are increasingly concerned with the seeds used in the production of their food. However, this has been an issue in Europe for many years. In fact, there are several transnational seedsaver networks, like Arche Noah, which have become policy reform experts on heritage seeds.

One of the most famous groups within Arche Noah’s 8,000 member network is the “live” seedbank Peliti, which has been raising awareness about endangered varieties of heritage seeds since 1995. Once tiny, now Peliti is an NGO that receives thousands of visitors for its annual seed swap where you can get a mind boggling number of seed varieties for free. It’s the biggest event of its kind in the world with an estimated 5,000 visitors last year from about 50 different countries. Recently I had the opportunity to interview one of the 200 Peliti volunteers, who are spread throughout Greece and beyond.

A typical day during Peliti Seed Swaps in Northern Greece.

They call themselves a live seedbank because traditional seedbanks store seeds under refrigeration, sometimes for up 10 to 15 years, which is “more like a seed museum than a seedbank,” according to volunteer Vasso Kanellopoulou. Peliti concentrates on keeping their seeds reproducing and germinating so they don’t fall vicitim to genetic erosion. Originally they started out with only a few hundred varieties, now they have thousands they’re saving from extiction.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seed Saving, Part 2: Practical Ways to Save Seed

November 16, 2014

Seed Saving, Part 2: Practical Ways to Save Seed.

Having learned some background knowledge on why you would want to save seeds in the first place (see Part I), you may now be wondering how to go about doing it.

There are many ways to do this, and though it can be as simple as keeping a few leftover tomato seeds from your salad, you can gain a lot more success in growing and certainty of what you are actually saving if you understand a few basic practical techniques.

Thanks to the Heritage Seed Library (1), run by Garden Organic (2), UK, I now feel equipped to share these basics in a guide which hopefully will help you to preserve biodiversity and encourage more plant growing.

Choosing your seeds: sourcing and spacing

First, it is important to decide what it is you want from your seeds. Where will you grow them? How much space will you have? Do you want them to crop/flower early in the season or later on, or a mixture?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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