The idea isn't new; the U.S. Department of Agriculture established an "economic ornithology" unit in the 1880s to study birds for pest control. But that body was disbanded in 1940, around the time synthetic pesticides like DDT were hitting the market and being hailed as wonders for controlling insects that spread disease and ruined crops.

By the 1960s, scientists were beginning to understand the serious ecological effects of those chemical compounds. Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 book Silent Springdetailed how DDT built up in birds and made their egg shells too thin to protect chicks, and its title raised the prospect of a future deprived of birdsong. A decade later, DDT was banned, and populations of raptors and other birds began to rebound.

But other pesticides hit the market. Currently more than one billion pounds of pesticides are used in the U.S. each year, and more than 5.6 billion pounds are used globally. Scientists increasingly point to potential health hazards of this widespread use—as certain pesticides have been linked to genetic changes, cancers, endocrine disruption, nerve disorders, mental health issues and reproductive problems.

In response, some food producers and researchers have grown more interested in the on-farm benefits birds can provide.

At this point, it's not clear how much pesticide use could be offset by partnering with natural predators, said Lindell, who describes beneficial birds as "one tool in the toolkit" of an integrated pest management approach.

However, she and others caution that if farmers are drawing in predators, they should avoid toxics to control pests, since the poisons can work their way up the food chain and kill birds and other animals. A study by the state of California found that three-quarters of raptors, bobcats, coyotes and other wildlife tested positive for rodenticides.

"People love to think that we've got to have poison in the toolbox, and we say you can't have both," said Lisa Owens Viani, director of Raptors Are the Solution, a California-based project of the nonprofit Earth Island Institute that works to stop rodenticide use. "We think it's unfair to put up an owl box and lure an owl to a place where there's poison being used. The bottom line: Do we want them to help us control rodents, or do we want to poison them?"

Owens Viani said that, at least in some cases, raptors alone are enough to control rodents. She pointed to a recent study by California's Ventura County Watershed Protection District, which works to control burrowing rodents that can degrade levees and dams. In findings published last December, the agency reported that levee sections where workers had installed perches to attract raptors had substantially less damage from ground squirrels than areas treated with rodenticides. The report called for replacing the poisons with raptors system-wide, noting that the county would save $7,500 a year for each mile of levee.

In another California study, barn owls essentially formed a colony at a research site after nest boxes were installed, with the population at one point reaching 102 owls on a 100-acre vineyard. The birds killed more than 30,000 rodents over the course of three breeding seasons, for a fraction of the cost of trapping or poisoning them, said lead researcher Mark Browning, a biologist formerly with the Pittsburgh Zoo who now owns the Barn Owl Box Company, which sells the nest boxes.

That suggests, at least in some situations, natural predators could make rodenticides unnecessary, he said.

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Photo from Pexels. 

Please enjoy and share our updated list of Oregon seed companies offering organic, heirloom, non-GMO, open-pollinated, and open-source seeds.

Being as there are numerous small farms in Oregon that offer seeds and bulbs, we’re sure we’ve overlooked some of them. If you have a farm, or know of a farm that offers seeds of this variety that should be listed as a resource, please contact us! And let us know of any corrections.

We're a small group of volunteers working to create a robust local food system and part of that process has been to update this chart annually to help support Oregon farmers and seed breeders, as well as the environment, pollinators, biodiversity, and the nutritious food that flows from this nexus.

We know about open-source software and hardware, but can the concept – decentralized development and open collaboration for the common good – be expanded to address other global challenges? The nonprofit OpenSourceSeeds based in the German town of Marburg has just launched a licensing process for open-source seeds, to create a new repository of genetic material that can be accessed by farmers around the world, in perpetuity.

We spoke with one of the leaders of this initiative, Dr. Johannes Kotschi, to learn more about exactly how the open source model was adapted for seeds, and why this initiative is so important in an era of increasing global concentration of power in the agriculture industry.

Can you tell me a bit about the open-source seeds movement in Germany as well as around the globe? How big is it, is it growing, and who are the members?

Open Source Seeds (OSS) is a newly created organization, and we had our launch on the 26th of April in Berlin. We launched with a tomato called Sunviva. A tomato is quite a good symbol – everybody likes tomatoes, and everyone can grow a tomato. From all over in Germany we got requests from gardeners, plant breeders, from open-source activists for our open source tomato.

We are an offspring of AGRECOL, [which] is about 30 years old and focuses on sustainable and organic agriculture – mainly in the developing world. Within AGRECOL we started working on open source seeds about five years ago – first as a small working group. 

There is a similar initiative in the United States – the Open Source Seeds Initiative, based in Wisconsin – but they are not licensing, they are giving a pledge to varieties. We have different strategies, we, OSS, pursue the legal strategy, and they pursue the ethical strategy, but we are working closely together.

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Entomologists call it the windshield phenomenon. "If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen," says Wolfgang Wägele, director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. Today, drivers spend less time scraping and scrubbing. "I'm a very data-driven person," says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon. "But it is a visceral reaction when you realize you don't see that mess anymore."

Some people argue that cars today are more aerodynamic and therefore less deadly to insects. But Black says his pride and joy as a teenager in Nebraska was his 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1—with some pretty sleek lines. "I used to have to wash my car all the time. It was always covered with insects." Lately, Martin Sorg, an entomologist here, has seen the opposite: "I drive a Land Rover, with the aerodynamics of a refrigerator, and these days it stays clean."

Though observations about splattered bugs aren't scientific, few reliable data exist on the fate of important insect species. Scientists have tracked alarming declines in domesticated honey bees, monarch butterflies, and lightning bugs. But few have paid attention to the moths, hover flies, beetles, and countless other insects that buzz and flitter through the warm months. "We have a pretty good track record of ignoring most noncharismatic species," which most insects are, says Joe Nocera, an ecologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada.

Of the scant records that do exist, many come from amateur naturalists, whether butterfly collectors or bird watchers. Now, a new set of long-term data is coming to light, this time from a dedicated group of mostly amateur entomologists who have tracked insect abundance at more than 100 nature reserves in western Europe since the 1980s.

Over that time the group, the Krefeld Entomological Society, has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. Perhaps it was a particularly bad year, they thought, so they set up the traps again in 2014. The numbers were just as low. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites.

Such losses reverberate up the food chain. "If you're an insect-eating bird living in that area, four-fifths of your food is gone in the last quarter-century, which is staggering," says Dave Goulson, an ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, who is working with the Krefeld group to analyze and publish some of the data. "One almost hopes that it's not representative—that it's some strange artifact."

No one knows how broadly representative the data are of trends elsewhere. But the specificity of the observations offers a unique window into the state of some of the planet's less appreciated species. Germany's "Red List" of endangered insects doesn't look alarming at first glance, says Sorg, who curates the Krefeld society's extensive collection of insect specimens. Few species are listed as extinct because they are still found in one or two sites. But that obscures the fact that many have disappeared from large areas where they were once common. Across Germany, only three bumble bee species have vanished, but the Krefeld region has lost more than half the two dozen bumble bee species that society members documented early in the 20th century.

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The Open Seed Source Initiative (OSSI) is a direct response to the fact that many of the world’s crop varieties are being developed, patented, and sold by the Big Six seed and chemical companies. Five of the Big Six are likely to merge into just 3 very powerful seed and chemical giants (ChemChina & Syngenta, Bayer & Monsanto, Dow Chemical & DuPont), and would own more than half of the world’s seed supply.

In only 80 short years (from 1903 to 1983), the U.S. has lost about 93% of our unique seed varieties to industrial agriculture. 

Our food security is at risk. “Having so few people making decisions about what biodiversity is planted on the agricultural landscape is scary. We’ve been shown that when many people rely on too narrow a germplasm pool, we know the risk of plant disease is much higher.” -Claire Luby, plant breeder and executive director of OSSI

'SEED,' now available for live streaming, shares the life-saving power of seed diversity and the work of passionate seed keepers.

Vital and miraculous, seeds sustain life on the planet. “If you have seeds in your pocket, you can walk, and you can eat the seeds. But if you have money, you cannot eat the money. This is gold,” said Emigdio Ballon, who runs Tesuque Pueblo’s agriculture programs, while clutching ancient seed varieties during the filming of the documentary SEED: The Untold Story.

SEED: The Untold Story takes viewers on a global journey from America’s Indian country to India, Peru, Hawaii and beyond. The documentary features indigenous guardians of ancient seeds, including Rowen White, Mohawk founder of Sierra Seeds; Hopi Nation leader Leigh Kuwanwisiwma; Louie Hena, a Tesuque Pueblo seed keeper; Winona LaDuke; and Native Hawaiian teacher Malia Chin, among several others.

SEED: The Untold Story, premiered on PBS last night, April 17, and is now available on DVD and online streaming at seedthemovie.com/watch. The documentary emphasizes that “the diversity of our seed stocks is as endangered as a panda or a golden eagle or a panda bear right now.”

In the last century, 94 percent of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared. The last study to count U.S. seed diversity was in 1983. There were 544 cabbage varieties; 28 varieties remained. There were 158 varieties of cauliflower; nine remained. There were 55 varieties of kohlrabi, three remained; 34 varieties of artichoke, two remained; 288 varieties of beets, 17 remained; 46 varieties of asparagus, one variety remained.

The documentary hones in on corn, first domesticated in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico. Corn seeds gradually snaked up the spine of the Americas, exploding across the landscape and North America about 1,000 years ago. “As keepers of the corn, the corn has come with us on our migrations, sustaining us,” Hena said.

“Corn really is this beautiful co-creation between plants and humans,” said White, a seed keeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, founder of Sierra Seeds. “…Corn becomes so elastic and adaptive. Now we see corn being grown on every continent.”

Growing corn is spiritual, explained Kuwanwisiwma, Hopi. “The say when the corn hears you, they start dancing with you; the leafs flutter,” he said.

Even the tiniest cob, missing the majority of its kernels due to crow damage, is harvested and consumed. “People are too attracted to the big and beautiful. But the Hopi women and men say even this one is special [Kuwanwisiwma lifts a small, humble corn cob], because every seed has life,” Kuwanwisiwma said.

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Ahead of World Bank’s release of the 2017 “Enabling the Business of Agriculture” (EBA) report this month, 157 organizations and academics from around the world denounce the Bank’s scheme to hijack farmers’ right to seeds, attack on food sovereignty and the environment.

In a letter to the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and EBA’s five Western donors, the group demands the immediate end of the project, originally requested by the G8 to support its industry-co-opted New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.

“The EBA dictates so-called ‘good practices’ to regulate agriculture and scores countries on how well they implement its prescriptions,” said Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute. “But the EBA has become the latest tool, to push pro-corporate agricultural policies, notably in the seed sector—where it promotes industrial seeds, that benefit a handful of agrochemical companies,” he continued.

Only six multinationals currently control over two-thirds of the industrial seed sales, and pending agro-industry mergers stand to further consolidate this oligopoly. Further market expansion for these corporations depends on the shrinking of farmer-managed seed systems, which currently provide 80 to 90 percent of the seed supply in developing countries through on-farm seed saving and farmer-to-farmer seed exchange.

A new report, Down On the Seed, the World Bank Enables Corporate Takeover of Seeds, exposes that while the World Bank claims to promote “smart and balanced policies,” its EBA index blatantly ignores farmer-managed seed systems. Instead, it reinforces the stranglehold of agrochemical companies and Western nations by pushing for intellectual property rights in agriculture, so that private breeders profiteer from the use of their seeds by farmers.

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The EPA released a final environmental impact statement on December 7 giving the green light to creeping bentgrass, a highly invasive type of grass genetically engineered by Monsanto and Scotts Miracle Gro-Co. to withstand what would normally be a lethal dose of glyphosate.

The agency recommended the deregulation of the plant because it “is unlikely to pose a plant pest risk.” Nothing could be further from the truth, based on past experience.

The grass was developed by the companies primarily for use on golf courses, but in the past, bentgrass has escaped from “controlled” plots and invaded irrigation ditches, river banks, and the Crooked River National Grassland in Oregon. It crowds out native plants and the wildlife which depends on them, according to the Center for Food Safety (CFS).

CFS said that Monsanto and Scotts have spent more than 10 years and millions of dollars trying to exterminate bentgrass escapes, but have been unsuccessful. Despite this, the USDA seems poised to grant the industry’s request that the department relinquish any authority over the genetically modified grass.

So far, the GE bentgrass has illegally contaminated at least 3 counties, and its ultralight seeds and pollen have been impossible to eradicate, CFS said. In fact, GE creeping bentgrass was declared a noxious weed in Oregon’s Malheur County in 2016.

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food (GA) released a report, titled “Seeds of Resilience: A Compendium of Perspectives on Agricultural Biodiversity from Around the World.” Led by the GA’s Agroecological Transitions Working Group(ATWG), the publication focuses on the role seeds and seed diversity can play in sustainable agriculture, food security, and nutrition. Lauren Baker, Consultant on Strategic Initiatives and Programs at the GA, told Food Tank that the organization “believes that seeds are the foundation of sustainable, equitable, and secure food systems and that maintaining and enhancing agricultural biodiversity is critical in light of global challenges such as climate change, and food and nutrition security.”

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Read the Report >>

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

As ever more varieties of food crop die out, seedsavers are stepping in to rescue endangered plants

Will Bonsall considers his Scatterseed Project to be the Noah’s Ark of edible plants. Through it the American has saved thousands of varieties of vegetable from possible extinction. “The first time I saw bean collections I thought it was like a jewellery store. They lit up, and I’ve been dazzled by diversity ever since.”

The ethnobiologist and nature writer Gary Nabhan says that “the diversity of our seed stocks is as endangered as a panda, a golden eagle or a polar bear right now. We have the largest seed shortage in history.”

Bonsall and Habhan both feature in Seed: The Untold Story, an American documentary shown at the Guth Gafa international documentary film festival in Kells, Co Meath, this month.

“All seed keepers are positive, because they see the renewal of life as their connection to the planet, but it’s a David and Goliath struggle of people’s resistance to hybrid-seed manufacturers,” says one of the film’s directors, Taggart Siegel, who was a guest at the festival.

In Seed: The Untold Story Matthew Dillon of the Organic Seed Alliance explains the history of seed production in the United States. “In the 1890s over a billion packets of seeds were distributed free to farmers, to feed the rising immigrant populations, but the American Seed Trade Association hired the very first lobbyist to stop this ‘federal giveaway’, as they called it. They saw seed as a commodity to be quantified, measured, bought, sold and traded on stock markets.” Dillon says that this was a significant point in the development of the hybrid-seed industry. Hybrid seeds are produced to give bigger and better yields in ideal conditions but are unsuitable for seedsaving, because they won’t reproduce identical seed for the next season. Once farmers were using hybrid seeds, they began to take for granted that they needed to buy seeds for each harvest rather than saving them from year to year.

More than 80 per cent of food-crop diversity has been lost in the past 100 years, as ever fewer varieties of seed have been used. But the past two or three decades an international movement against industrialised seed production has gathered momentum.

Environmentalists and activists such as the Indian scientist Vandana Shiva are promoting seedsaving around the world. Her organisation, Navdanya, has helped to conserve more than 3,000 rice varieties at 60 seed banks across India.

An American, Anita Hayes, first brought the importance of seedsaving to public attention in Ireland 25 years ago, when she and her husband, the musician Tommy Hayes, set up the Irish Seed Savers Association. The association, which is based in east Co Clare, has built up a collection of 800 heritage vegetable varieties, 48 types of grain, more than 50 kinds of potato and 140 types of apple.

Although it is funded by the Department of Agriculture, the association struggles to survive with a skeleton staff.

“I understand the need for hybrid seeds, because food is valued at such a low price and farmers’ margins are so tight that they can’t deal with loss of crops,” Jo Newton, the association’s seed-bank and garden manager, says. “But hybrid crops will perform only when you have good soil, good weather and fertiliser. Certain varieties of open-pollinated seeds” – which is to say seeds collected from plants themselves – “will thrive when conditions aren’t ideal. For example, all the hybrid leeks failed in Belgium during a very cold winter recently, but an open-pollinated variety survived.” Newton is excited about the association’s new seed network: up to 25 organic market gardeners now grow seeds as a crop for the organisation’s bank. Fresh open-pollinated seeds need to be dried and stored all the time, to replenish and replace ageing seed stocks.

“A lot of growers are hard pushed to make a living, so it’s been inspiring to see how they’ve taken to saving seeds. That’s quite a breakthrough for us, and it came about after a visit from Matthew Dillon,” she says.

The importance of seed banks is probably best represented by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This huge deep-freeze, in a remote Arctic archipelago, stores the world’s widest collection of crop varieties. Although the facility was built by the Norwegian government, the open-pollinated seeds that it stores stay in the ownership of whoever deposited them.

Hans Wieland of the Organic Centre in Rossinver, Co Leitrim, says that people in Ireland aren’t particularly interested in seedsaving. “We run a workshop on seedsaving every year, and it’s hard to fill it. But when you talk about empowering people, about taking food production into their own hands – if you don’t know how to save seeds, there’s a missing link.”

Every year when Wieland returns to his native Germany he buys varieties of tomato from a seed bank in Munich to grow in Ireland. The Organic Centre is also one of four locations taking part in a trial to breed a new blight-resistant potato. This will involve saving and replanting seeds from 12 varieties.

Madeline McKeever, the founder of Brown Envelope Seeds, near Skibbereen, in Co Cork, believes that awareness of seedsaving has grown as a reaction to industrial agriculture.

However, the Grow It Yourself (GIY) movement doesn’t really embrace it – although its founder, Michael Kelly is keen to emphasise his support for organisations such as Irish Seed Savers and Brown Envelope Seeds.

“I share the concerns about the takeover of our food by the biotech industry, and it’s hugely valuable to teach people the life cycle of plants, but the vast majority of amateur growers love the process of buying seed each year, and disease and pest problems have been bred out of F1 hybrids,” says Kelly.

It would be naive to think that everyone is going to start saving seeds, but perhaps we need to respect – and fund – seed banks to a greater extent.

As Will Bonsall says, “I may discover 10 years from now that a seed in my seed bank is in huge demand because it has in its genes some resistance to some disease which is only now evolving.”

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Photo from Flickr.