Seeds Of Life: Hybrids and the Emergence of Seed Monopolies
Excerpted from Cooking Up a Story
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Throughout much of agriculture, a remarkable span of 10,000 years, farmers were largely the stewards of the land and the crops that they grew. Seeds collected from one year’s harvest were selected, stored, and used again for successive growing seasons. As Frank Morton, an organic seed breeder explains in this segment of the Seeds Of Life series, the role of the farmer at the center of agriculture began to change with the advent of hybrid seed development beginning with hybrid varieties of corn in the 1930’s.
Frank Morton, Organic Seed Breeder
Hybrid seeds are created out of two separate parent lines, each (parent) line, incapable of producing the desirable plant characteristics themselves. Only the seeds of their offspring, provide the desired mix of traits, measured by characteristics, such as crop yield, protein content, oil quality, disease resistance, and other characteristics. Most importantly, especially to the commercial seed companies, the plants grown from these seeds do not produce useful seeds for further use.
Once grown, the plants themselves are dead ends; no further selection under the farmers control can be made to create better crops for the future. Giving new meaning to the term “free enterprise,” hybrid seeds can only be purchased from the commercial seed companies (those in control of the proprietary parent lines); nature’s inherent generosity, circumvented.
As Morton points out, beginning in 1965, a period he refers to as the end of the golden age of plant breeding, there was a push to bring crops that could be made into hybrids onto the market. This is what attracted the giant chemical companies into the seed business. Hybrid technologies, and later biotechnology innovations, conferred the special ability to prevent farmers from saving and reusing seed, making their investments in seed technologies, and closely related chemical products, almost full-proof investments.
[...] This is all part of an unfolding story, since after World War Two, there has been a massive consolidation of seed, chemical, and related industries to promote global trade.
