The Seed Farmer: A Complete Guide to Growing, Using, and Selling Your Own Seeds, by Dan Brisebois
How many farmers save their own seed? There’s no way to answer this definitively, but a good guess is that almost all pre-WWII farmers did and very few today do. Dan Brisebois begins his book The Seed Farmer acknowledging this: “A couple generations ago, all of this would have been obvious to farmers….”
There are many reasons for this. One is simply that saving seed is one more task on the farm. Doing it well requires specialized equipment, time and a lot of hard-earned experiential knowledge. Brisebois points out that the workflow of a seed business is nearly the opposite of a temperate-climate vegetable farm — lots of tasks in the winter and early spring, with less to do in the middle of the summer. In an age in which we’re encouraged to outsource everything except the most essential tasks in order to make ends meet, adding seed saving back to the to-do list seems like a big ask.
Yet Brisebois aims to convince farmers that saving seed is not that hard and that there are a number of significant benefits to doing so. He does this not with high-minded rhetoric about seed sovereignty and the need to preserve biodiversity but rather by encouraging farmers to simply learn how to observe their crops. To identify the right time to harvest seed. To know how to efficiently handle plants in order to extract clean seed. He acknowledges the difficulty of adding more tasks on the already-busy farm, but his case for saving at least some seed is, on the whole, persuasive.
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