The Progressive Farmer: A Long Row’s Hoeing into Lespedeza

By Cary Fowler

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979, pp. 4, 29-32

Southern politics in the 1880s was alive with the fever of a native-born Populism. Led by the Southern Alliance (renamed the National Farmers Alliance in 1887), the Populists gained political control of several Southern states and burgeoned into a national organization. Across the South literally hundreds of pro-Alliance newspapers and magazines sprang up with names like Comrade (La.), Toiler’s Friend (Ga.), Weekly Toiler, (Tn.), Revolution (Ga.), People’s Party Paper (Ga.), Southern Mercury (Tx.), and the Weekly Advance(Tx.)

Perhaps the most influential farm magazine in the country today, the Progressive Farmer was founded in the passion of the 1880s by a leader of the National Farmers Alliance. Clearly, its founder, Col. Leonidas Polk, saw the magazine as a weapon in his fight for the farmer. Polk was a native of Anson County, a poor, sun-baked, sand hills county bordering South Carolina in central North Carolina. A soldier, a farmer and a politician, Polk was also the national president of the million member Alliance. Under Polk the Alliance became increasingly critical of both major political parties, calling for reforms such as the nationalization of railroads and the establishment of a commodity credit scheme (later enacted by Congress in 1933). In the Progressive Farmer Polk urged farmers to organize and participate in politics. Meanwhile, Polk, who was North Carolina’s first Commissioner of Agriculture, was himself becoming a prominent and influential political leader on the national scene. Then, without warning, on the eve of the 1892 convention that would have nominated him as the first Populist Party candidate for president, Polk died. With his death, the Progressive Farmer lost its founder, its editor and eventually, much of its passion. The magazine was only six years old.

Hacking at Populist Roots

Progressive Farmer was handed down to Polk’s son-in-law who edited the weekly for the next eleven years until Clarence Poe, a young North Carolinian staff member and four others bought the magazine during hard times in 1903 for $7,500. The memory of Polk must have been fading fast, for the Progressive Farmer was quickly transforming itself into a big-time publishing business. Less than thirty years after Poe took control, Progressive Farmer had gobbled up fifteen other publications and increased its readership over one hundred fold.

Under Poe, Populist politics were drained from the veins of the Progressive Farmer. The magazine’s editorials were nominally well tempered and responsible. Support was given to parity, and the evils of drink and the credit system (“a greased runway to debt and poverty”) were discussed in some detail. But by the 1920s more and more of Poe’s writings were focusing on farming customs and practices. As the nation’s farmers entered one of their bleakest periods in 1929, Poe turned his attention to the virtues of planting lespedeza and red clover in crop rotations. He called for a 13 month calendar of 28 days each. And he began to attack what would endure as his life-long enemy, “one arm farming” – the lopsided emphasis of Southern agriculture on plant production and the shunning of livestock production.

By the end of the 20s, the price of cotton had dropped to a nickel a pound. The depression had arrived. In Washington, new agricultural policies were in the making – policies which would form the basis of our present-day agricultural system. Enacted into law in 1933 under the name of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, these laws encouraged farmers to take land out of production, and offered government payments as incentives to limit production and drive up prices. Land planted to cotton declined from 39 million acres to 29 million acres in one year. The law was a success. The results were disastrous.

Across the South, hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were no longer needed and were expelled from the land. At the time, Southern agriculture was unmechanized – fewer than 20% of the nation’s tractors were to be found on Southern farms. Government payments to farmers participating in set-aside programs provided the capital to mechanize and modernize Southern agriculture. And this machinery provided the means to push even more farm laborers off the land. Distribution of income within the farm sector swung heavily towards the big landowners, while small farmers held on by their fingertips.

In the rich, flat Arkansas delta, the dispossessed began to gather in the humid, mosquito-filled night. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers organized meetings near little towns like Tyronza and Marked Tree. Against obvious and overwhelming odds a union – the Southern Tenant Farmers Union – was born, struggling against government policies that were driving people from their land and livelihoods. It was 1934.

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In April, Poe, still the editor of Progressive Farmer, focused the magazine’s lead editorial on the “Six Great Issues Confronting Agriculture.” Sadly, the plight of the tenant was not one. By the middle of the summer, editorials were calling for more family reunions to be held. And by the fall of 1934, the reader was being given editorials with titles such as “Schools Must Educate for Leisure.” For the conscientious tenant there was the “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” column offering tips on how to beautify tenant shacks.

A Fair Shake For The Big Boys,

As the Progressive Farmer became more remote and insensitive to its own roots, it came to identify increasingly with the interests of the big farmer as opposed to the farm worker or small farmer. In 1943 the National Farmers Union was singled out for criticism. “The National Farmers Union might be fairer to our larger farmers.” The editorial went on to chide NFU’s president for asserting (incorrectly?) that “the profits are going to the big farmer.” By 1960 the division between big farmers and farm workers was clearly seen. “How much can wages paid farm workers be increased without decreasing the farmer’s net income?” was the question posed by an editorial entitled, “Farm Workers Union Poses New Problems.” Ten years later the Progressive Farmer was still at work looking out for the interests of the big farmer. It termed the Senate’s vote to limit subsidy payments to a maximum of $20,000 per farmer “a blow to U.S. agriculture” and called on the government to give a “fair shake” to the big farmer.

And Girls …

The Progressive Farmer did not ignore all dispossessed or oppressed peoples, however. Shortly after women won the right to vote, the Progressive Farmer in a column entitled “What Farm Women Need to Know” was advising its women readers that “good taste consists in being inconspicuous.” Today the Progressive Farmer boasts that it was the first farm magazine to hire a trained home economist (read woman) as “Woman’s Editor.” Despite such evidence of progressiveness, Progressive Farmer’s treatment of women has been both scant and traditional. In 1960, Progressive Farmer bestowed its “Woman of the Year” award on a deserving but surely unexpecting recipient. It was the first time the award had been given since 1939 – only the second time it had ever been given. No fewer than

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five men were given “Man [sic]of the Year” awards that year.

And Darkies

Progressive Farmer‘s treatment of Black people has been less scant and more controversial. To its credit Progressive Farmer editorialized against lynching in the 1920s. Lynching it seemed was bad because it gave a poor image to the South. The magazine noted that lynching dissuaded business and industry from locating in the region. At one point, Progressive Farmer even suggested that lynching be declared illegal, as though murder itself were not already illegal enough.

At the same time the reader was being given anti-lynching editorials, the Progressive Farmer was offering up praise for the region’s good race relations. The old plantation owners were described as “sensitive,” “compassionate,” and “humane” masters by one writer, the son of a Confederate colonel. Ironic praise for these good race relations was given to the victims: “A fine spirit of harmony between the two races has always existed in our South Carolina piedmont section. No race riots and few heinous crimes can be traced to the Negroes here.”

By the 1930s standard garden variety racism permeated the magazine. On a single page in a 1933 issue, Blacks were termed “Negro,” “colored,” and “darkie.” An ad for Oliver plows announced, “Here Are The Tools For Your Boys And Mules.” Meanwhile the covers of the magazine celebrated a style of life increasingly out of reach of both Blacks and Whites – ladies with parasols chatting at the gateway of the stereotypical Southern mansion midst graceful live oaks festooned with Spanish moss.

As repugnant as such forms of racism are, they do raise an important, perhaps unresolveable dilemma: how severe can our criticism be of Progressive Farmer‘s racism during a period when this “style” was so commonplace? To what extent can we expect this magazine to have diverged from the norm of its time?

If our criticism of Progressive Farmer‘s stance on racial questions in the twenties and thirties is tempered by our knowledge of the times, so too must their positions in the fifties and sixties be judged in light of the events of those decades. School desegregation dominated the headlines of the fifties. Progressive Farmer was against it, explaining that “Certainly everybody must have noticed how much more quickly a group of Negroes will get to talking, laughing, and joking than a similar group of White people. They are happier in their own group.” In an early sixties’ editorial, Progressive Farmer assured its readers it was “vigorously opposed to school integration.” The ominous title of this particular editorial proved the point: “Abolish Public Schools Only As Last Resort.”

Progressive Farmer had its progressive moments. A 1960 editorial voiced support of voting rights for Blacks. But the editors could not be content with letting such a strong stance stand alone.

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They added that with these new rights would come responsibilities -Blacks would have to solve “some of their problems of morals.”

The remainder of the sixties provided more of the old-fashioned rhetoric on the issues of race. Editorials coming out of Progressive Farmer‘s all White editorial and business staff bore titles like, “Is NAACP a Credit to Negroes?” and “Lawless Chickens Come Home to Riotous Roost.” The first Black person to be pictured on a cover of Progressive Farmer in the sixties appeared in 1965 – two Black farm workers were shown spraying an orchard with pesticides. The following month, Blacks were shown picking vegetables under the watchful eye of a White supervisor. These were Progressive Farmer-approved Blacks – Blacks who had stayed at home to roost, credits to their race.

The Farmer As Consumer

Over the course of Progressive Farmer‘s long, 93-year history, the magazine has lost sight of the interests and needs of the small farmer, not to mention the farm laborer. Ironically, it was Progressive Farmer‘s longtime editor, Clarence Poe, who on the occasion of the magazine’s fortieth birthday, observed that the Progressive Farmer was not and should not be just a “piece of property” or a business, but should strive to be “an educational institution devoted primarily to human service.” But Progressive Farmer was already quickly becoming a big business and destined to be even bigger. As if to prove the point, Emory Cunningham, Progressive Farmer‘s current president and publisher was elevated to that post from his position in the advertising department.

One can witness the big business trend of Progressive Farmer in the content of the magazine itself. As chemicals developed for use in warfare during the two world wars became available for farm use, Progressive Farmer was in the cheering section. The new capitalintensive, ecologically-destructive methods were hardly questioned. To read Progressive Farmer, one wonders how agriculture survived 20,000 years before the introduction of chemicals. “Organic” agriculture (the type all farmers practiced when the magazine was founded) was seen as impossible. “Some fruits would disappear …. Farmers are fed up with sharecropping with insects and other pests,” the editors warned. When Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, appeared suggesting that modern agriculture was backfiring, creating resistant super-pests while poisoning the environment, Progressive Farmer responded with vicious editorials and cartoons portraying a world over-run with insects. “Don’t let them get to first base,” the magazine advised.

Progressive Farmer presented the new chemicals as safe and effective. A Gulf Oil ad for one insecticide even pictured an employee gargling with his company’s product. From the twenties to the present date, ads for farm chemicals have become more and more prominent. The hand that feeds is rarely bitten. Despite genuinely useful articles promoting sound management and technical practices, the magazine continues to promote a form of agriculture increasingly relevant to fewer and fewer farmers – the specialized, large-acreage, wellcapitalized boys.

By the 1960s, Progressive Farmer‘s editorials were concentrating more and more on narrowly defined farm issues and “nonpolitical” agricultural questions. The politics that remained was conservative. As early as the 1940s, Progressive Farmer began urging its

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readers to join the nation’s largest and most conservative farm organization, the Farm Bureau. Farm Bureau platforms were even printed in the magazine. But gradually the lure and comfort of the technological as opposed to the political captured the minds and hearts of the men of Progressive Farmer. The implicit message of decades of Progressive Farmer has been that if farmers will just use the right equipment and the proper chemicals and plant the appropriate crops, all will be well. But, as Progressive Farmer was encouraging its farmers to be good consumers, the farmers were steadily losing control of agriculture to the machinery monopoly, the petro-chemical industry and the various varieties of middlemen. Good markets disappeared. The new market system forced whole regions to specialize in the production of one or two crops like a banana republic. The diversified farm of old was killed . Land prices exploded as speculators entered the market. Farm debt skyrocketed. Farmers got squeezed. When they were down, the government kicked them. And when they organized to fight back, the Progressive Farmer was silent.

Along the way the Progressive Farmer lost sight of its original goals and repudiated its own roots. Worse yet, it seemed willing to poke fun at its history if a buck were to be made. Progressive Farmer‘s review of its own recently published collection of editorials, articles and ads from 75 years of the magazine was entitled, “Nostalgic Book Offers Chuckles.”

Were Colonel Polk still with us, he would not be chuckling. Nor would he be content to ignore the sad lot of the small farmer. Doubtless he would be using Progressive Farmer to spread the advice the Kansas Populist Mary Lease offered to the readers of her newspaper. “Farmers,” she said, “should raise less corn and more hell.”

Cary Fowler works at the Frank Porter Graham Agricultural Training Center in Anson County, North Carolina. He is author of the Graham Center Seed Directory.

Reaping What We Sow

By Cary Fowler

Vol. 5, No. 6, 1983, pp. 14-18

American agriculture is imported. All the major food crops grown in North America originated elsewhere.

It is believed that agriculture began independently in Southwest and East Asia, Mesoamerica, and probably South America and Africa in prehistoric times and gradually spread to other lands (see Chart A). The different grains and vegetables as we know them did not exist, for their present form is the result of thousands of years of evolution and domestication.

The conscious planting and harvesting of plants for food over wide geographic areas helped create enormous natural, genetic diversity in crops. Some of the seeds of plants that had successfully survived the growing season were not eaten, but saved to be replanted the following year, thereby perpetuating their own characteristics. Thus, countless genetically distinct varieties of each crop developed in response to different ecological conditions and human needs. Natural defenses evolved to the different pests and diseases encountered in each locality.

Modern agriculture changed all that.

Sacrificing Seeds

By the early 1950s, major efforts were underway at research centers supported by private and government sources to breed grains which would produce high yields when pumped full of fertilizers and water. Food crops, especially vegetables, were also bred to fit the demands of brutal harvesting machinery and the rigors of long-distance transportation. Taste and nutrition were forgotten, even scorned.

Modern agriculture needs predictability; therefore, plant breeders strive for uniformity. Plants are bred and inbred to develop the desired characteristics. The result has been the creation of new varieties that are extremely genetically limited.

These new varieties have quickly spread around the globe, replacing old, traditional varieties. “Suddenly in the 1970s,” writes Garrison Wilkes of the University of Massachusetts, “we are discovering Mexican farmers planting hybrid corn seed from a midwestern seed firm, Tibetan farmers planting barley from a Scandinavian plant breeding station, and Turkish farmers planting wheat from the Mexican wheat program.”

Seed companies, governments, and international aid agencies have gone into areas where traditional varieties predominate and promoted the new plants, often calling them “miracle varieties.” Convinced of the “superior” qualities of the new variety, the Third World farmer or peasant ceases to grow the traditional crop. Instead, leftover seeds of the traditional variety may be used as food for the family or their animals. In a moment’s time, thousands of years of crop development and seed selection become meaningless, as another variety becomes extinct.

As food crops become more uniform, so do cultures. Foods and crops are an important part of a people’s heritage; they perpetuate and enrich its customs. As food crops become more uniform, so do people. As traditional varieties become extinct, human cultures lose something very special and irreplaceable.

The Ultimate Gamble

Where thousands of varieties of wheat once grew, only a few can now be seen. When these traditional plant varieties are lost, their genetic material is lost forever. Herein lies the danger. Each variety of wheat, for example, is genetically unique. It contains genetic “material” not found in other varieties. If, because of genetic limitations which result from inbreeding, new varieties are no longer resistant to certain insects or diseases (conceivably even insects or diseases never before known to attack wheat), then real catastrophe could strike. Without existing seeds which carry specific genes conferring resistance, it may not be possible to breed resistance back into wheat, corn, or any other crop.

Serious problems result from lack of genetic diversity. We now know that the Irish potato famine of the 1840s was caused by such lack of diversity. The two or three varieties of potatoes introduced to Ireland had come from the five thousand plus varieties growing in the Peruvian Andes, original home of the potato. It took many years for the spores of the potato fungus–the black rot–to reach Ireland from South America. When it did, the results were catastrophic. The genetically vulnerable potatoes were wiped out. Although wealthy landlords still had traditional crops to export out of the country, the potato-dependent poor had nothing.

By the mid 1840s, two million Irish had died, two million more had emigrated and the remaining four million faced a bleak future.

In 1970, a corn blight struck in the U.S. Old, open” pollinated varieties were not affected, but most farmers were growing the new hybrid models–all of which were susceptible to the blight. Nearly fifteen percent of the nation’s crops was destroyed. In some Southern states where the corn smut found weather conditions favorable, the losses topped fifty percent.

A study the next year by the National Academy of Sciences showed that just six varieties of corn accounted for seventy one percent of the acreage planted. This same lack of diversity is seen in all the major crops in American agriculture. Could it happen again? Listen to what is being said:

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The key lesson of 1970 (year of the corn blight) is that genetic uniformity is the basis of vulnerability to epidemics. The major question the Committee on Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops asked was, “How uniform genetically are other crops upon which the nation depends, and how vulnerable, therefore, are they to epidemics?” The answer is that most crops are impressively uniform genetically and impressively vulnerable.

-National Academy of Sciences

The array of diseases that pose threats to wheat, rice, maize, and sorghum is formidable. Except for the case of the Irish potato when neither plant pathology nor genetics had been born, research teams have been able to move fast enough to salvage our crops from complete devastation. But, we are becoming more and more vulnerable and there is no assurance that we can always react in time.

-Dr. Jack Harlan
Professor of Plant Genetics
Department of Agronomy
University of Illinois

Thus far, as Dr. Harlan notes, scientists have been able to work fast enough to avoid major catastrophes. When new varieties have been discovered to be genetically vulnerable to pests or diseases, scientists have scurried to collect old varieties or even “wild relatives” in a search for genetic material that could be bred back in to confer resistance. In recent years, wild potatoes have been used to breed in protection against eight major pests. Wild tomatoes have similarly provided resistance to a few pests. But all over the world, the new varieties are rapidly replacing old varieties. The National Academy of Sciences states that centers of wheat diversity are being destroyed “at an alarming rate.”

New wheats and rices have washed over Asia and the Near East with remarkable speed. New rice varieties came to occupy over seventy million acres in Asia in less than a decade. In Turkey, many priceless relatives of cereal grains are now found only in graveyards and castle ruins. U.N. scientists now estimate that the, Near East, center of genetic diversity for many of our grains, will simply disappear before the turn of the century.

Much, if not most, of this genetic wipe out is occurring due to the replacement of old varieties with new ones. International trade in seeds–the sale of seeds developed in North America and Europe to peasant farmers using old varieties–is the biggest factor behind the problem.

Other factors are also involved. Tropical forests, which contain the majority of the world’s higher plant species (including valuable food crops and plants used for making modern drugs), are being decimated by agricultural expansion and reckless timbering. These forests are now disappearing at a rate of up to twenty-seven million acres a year.

Recently, a rush of mergers and corporate takeovers has hit the seed industry. Many old family-owned seed companies have been bought out by large multinational corporations. The petrochemical and drug industries–major producers of pesticides and fertilizers–have been especially active

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(see Chart B). Their interest in the seed business raises three provocative questions. First, will corporations who are big producers of pesticides and fertilizers encourage their new seed company subsidiaries to breed plant varieties that require more or fewer pesticides and fertilizers? Second, will the acquisition of small seed companies by corporations who are active around the world tend to create international seed companies that will be better able to spread their new varieties to regions where old varieties still predominate? Will they therefore speed up the process of driving these old varieties out of existence? Finally, will the takeover of seed companies like Burpee by ITT bring slick, uninformative advertising to the seed business?

Patent That Plant!

As seeds have become big business, pressure has been put on governments around the world to insure high profits for the seed industry. Until recently plants were considered “public property.” One could own a “Big X” tomato, but one certainly could not prevent someone else from raising that variety of tomato and selling it or its seeds. The seed industry has been successfully challenging that custom and at their request many nations have established a system of patents for new plant varieties. Now companies are able to patent a form of life.

In the U.S., plant patenting laws were first passed in 1970. Controversial amendments expanding the scope of U.S. laws were passed by Congress and signed into law by President Carter in December, 1980, despite strong opposition. The Rural Advancement Fund/National Sharecroppers Fund spearheaded a nationwide campaign to oppose the amendments, arguing that they would encourage seed company takeovers, lead to higher seed prices and contribute to the replacement and ultimate extinction of many traditional vegetable varieties.

But the seed industry, a powerful appendage of multinational petrochemical and drug corporations, was not to be denied a victory for its special interest legislation.

In Europe, where patenting laws were first passed, thousands of traditional varieties (including the Big Boy tomato) are being literally outlawed. Common Market countries are phasing in a system which makes it illegal for seed companies to sell the seeds of the old varieties. The crime committed by the traditional varieties is that they compete with the new, patented varieties being offered by the big companies who are entering the seed business.

Dr. Erna Bennett, formerly of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, predicts that by the end of this decade, fully three-quarters of all the vegetable varieties now grown in Europe will be extinct!

One thing is certain. Patent laws make seed companies attractive investments for larger corporations. Shell Oil of Great Britain has bought fifty-six seed companies since passage of a patent law there would encourage takeovers in the seed industry. They need only look at what has happened in the U.S. for a preview.

Although big-time seed industry officials argue that patent laws will encourage research and development of new varieties and thus aid the public, it seems that precisely the opposite might happen. Scientists at some research centers have already noted the increasing reluctance of seed companies and other researchers to exchange information and resources.

Under existing plant patenting legislation, corporations get protective patents, royalties and vastly reduced competition. Farmers and gardeners are faced with illegal varieties, hybrids whose seeds cannot be saved and royalty fees they never had to pay for non-patented seeds. Plant patenting laws offer protection for corporate profits while further narrowing the genetic basis on which agriculture itself depends. Declaring certain varieties illegal and patenting others is a bizarre luxury we cannot afford.

The Seed Bank

All major crops without exception originated in that part of our globe we call the Third World. And it is in these areas where genetic diversity is greatest that conservation efforts are most important. For some years now primitive crop varieties and wild relatives of modern crops have been collected and brought back to industrialized countries for storage in refrigerated seed banks.

But these efforts are perennially crippled by anemic budgets. Expeditions to collect endangered wheat varieties in the Mideast are no one’s priority. Seed banks to store them in are poor competition for jet fighters in budget debates.

The U.N.-supported International Board for Plant Genetic Resources, the agency charged with coordinating the collection of crop genetic material and its storage in a system of some sixty seed banks, has an annual budget of only three million dollars. Collection of some crops like rubber and cocoa will be left to industry by necessity despite the fact that no international codes exist to guarantee access to such genetic material.

CHART B:
Update on Recent North American Seed Company Takeovers

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The flagship of the U.S. seed bank fleet is the National Seed Storage Laboratory (NSSL) located on the campus of Colorado State University in Ft. Collins. Unfortunately, the NSSL does not meet the IBPGR’s standards for classification as a preferred “long-term” storage facility. For fifteen years its dedicated staff and once modern facilities languished without any budget increase. Budget considerations hold its total staff below twenty-five. An unbelievable forty thousand dollars a year is all the U.S. government devotes to collecting vanishing resources on which the future of agriculture rests.

Dr. Jack Harlan of the University of Illinois claims that no seed collection in the world is adequate–“all are incomplete and shockingly deficient.” According to Dr. Harlan, “These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine. In a very real sense, the future of the human race rides on these materials. ” Can we entrust the responsibility for creating an international seed protection system to an under-funded staff of four? Can we rely on the Fort Collins collection? Dr. Harlan gives us a blunt answer. “If you are willing to entrust the fate of mankind to these collections, you are living in a fool’s paradise.”

Sowing Seeds of Action

Bringing diversity back to our food crops, stabilizing world food supplies, and insuring the future of agriculture are goals we should all work towards. There is not an individual in the world who cannot do something. Everyone’s contribution is important.

The debate over seed patenting proposals alerted many

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to this crisis. Through the efforts of farm, garden, environmental, and church groups, and many concerned individuals, thousands of American learned of the genetic vulnerability of our major crops, the silent crisis that stalks world agriculture. Out of this increased awareness can come solutions.

What can we do individually and collectively?

(1) Support increased funding for collection and storage of our plant genetic resources, before those resources disappear forever. Storing seeds is only a partial solution, however. We need as many varieties as possible out in the real world, growing in their own diverse environments so they can continue to change and adapt. In addition, all seeds eventually lose the life they hold within themselves. Periodic” ally, all stored seeds must be taken out of storage and grown into plants who seeds must be collected and stored afresh. This would be a monumental task; even the inadequate Fort Collins collection contains over thirteen hundred species.

(2) Help promote “plant preserves.” Here, wild ancestors of our major food crops could be allowed to live in safety much the same way that lions and elephants are protected in African game preserves. If traditional varieties are to be preserved, their environment must likewise be preserved. At present, “plant preserves” are more concept than reality. Public awareness of the need for plant preserves could help make them a reality.

(3) Multinational corporate involvement in the seed industry should be closely monitored. Manufacturers of pesticides and fertilizers should not be allowed to own seed companies. Companies that export seeds to Third World areas should be required to file statements documenting the environmental impact of those seed exports. If old varieties will be replaced, the company should be responsible for seeing that they do not become extinct. If a company will not make this guarantee, it should be prohibited from marketing m a given area.

(4) Oppose plant patenting legislation. Most governments do not expect much public awareness over this issue; therefore, a few letters expressing concern would have a big impact.

(5) Governments at all levels should be encouraged to offer marketing incentives to small farmers who grow the older varieties, for example, price supports for traditional varieties. Other government farm benefits could be offered to farmers willing to devote a small amount of acreage to endangered varieties.

(6) Farmers should consider banding together to buy bulk quantities of traditional seeds and to market the produce in bulk or through farmers’ markets. When selling the old varieties, farmers should help educate the public by labeling their produce with the name of the variety. Consumers can then learn to tell the difference and begin to put pressure on supermarkets to carry good produce.

(7) Individuals, churches, community groups, colleges, and town governments can begin to plant and safeguard the old varieties. In some areas, groups have established small “preservation” orchards devoted to traditional varieties of fruit trees. These efforts bring people together to promote awareness of the problem, while contributing to its solutions.

Planting a Future

In the end, the future of agriculture can be insured only by healthy, vibrant small farms. The old varieties are threatened today, not because they taste bad or are nutritionally deficient, but because they do not suit the requirements of the factory farmers and the food processing industry. The California farmer who grows tomatoes to be shipped all over the country cannot grow the old, tasty varieties. Their skins are not tough enough. Their insides are not hard. If the old varieties are to flourish, they must be, as they have always been, grown by small farmers and sold to a local market. This system of agriculture has provided sustenance to people for well over ten thousand years. It is an enduring agriculture that we tamper with only at great risk.

Seeds are a unique product of the efforts of people and nature. In seeds, culture and agriculture are linked. This bond dissolved, both are threatened. Our ancestors knew this and lived accordingly. Thomas Jefferson once professed his belief that “the greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” For our generation, the challenge will be to preserve the useful plants we already have.

Parent Company	Seed Company
Abbott-Cobb (USA)	Twilley Otis
Agrigenetics (USA)	Arkansas Valley
	Keystone
	McCurdy
	Taylor-Evans
Amfac (USA)	American Garden
	Gurney Seed
	Henry Field
Atlantic Richfield (USA)	Dessert Seed
Cargill (USA)	Dorman
	Kroelor
	PAG
	ACCO
	Paymaster Farms
	Tomco-Genetic Giant
Celanese (USA)	CelPrill
	Joseph Harris
	Moran
	Niagara
	Nugrains
Ciba-Geigy (Switz.)	Funk’s Seed
	Louisiana
	Stewart
Clays-Luck/ Participex (France)	Neumann
Dalgety (Gr. Bri.)	Driscoll Strawberry
DeKalb Pfizer Genetics (USA)	Clemens Farm
	Jordan Wholesale
	Sensors
	Trojan
Diamond Shamrock (USA)	Golden Acres Hybrid
Grain Processors Corp.(USA)	L. Teweles
	Americana
	Morton Sons
ITT (USA)	Burpee
	O. M. Scott
Int’l Multifoods (USA)	Baird
	Gildersleeve
	Lynk Bros.
Kleinwanzlebener SAAT (W. Ger.)	Cokers Pedigreed
	KWS Seeds
Limagrain (France)	Ferry Morse
	Advanced
	Hulting Hybrids
Monsanto (USA)	DeKalb Hybrid Wheat
Occidental Petroleum (USA)	Excel Hybrid
	Missouri
	Moss
	Payne Bros.
	Stull
Pioneer Hi-bred (USA)	Green Meadows
Reichold Chemicals (USA)	Florida Feed Seed
Sandoz (Switz.)	Northrup King
	Gallatin Valley
	Woodside Growers
Southwide Inc. (USA)	Cotton Seed Distributors
Stauffer Chemicals (USA)	Blarney Farms
	Prairie Valley
Tate Lyle (Gr. Bri.)	Seed Farm Supply
Tejon/Times-Mirror (USA)	W-L Resources
Upjohn (USA)	Asgrow
	Farmers Hybrid
	United Hagie Hybrid
Yates (Aus.)	Yates Arthur