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.
After a balanced pep talk about the reasons for saving seed, and an encouragement that this is a task farmers can reclaim, Brisebois details the basic principles he and his team on Tourne-Sol Farm in Quebec use to save many of their seeds. Fruiting crops, flowers, leafy greens and root vegetables each get separate treatment, with plenty of photo descriptions of the exact processes the team uses. Much of this information is available in a variety of sources, but it’s always helpful to learn exactly how someone else is doing something — particularly at the farm scale, since most seed resources are written for home gardeners.
By far the most important part of the book is the final four chapters, though, in which Brisebois presents more advanced discussions of techniques, tools and planning considerations for farmers seeking to scale up seed production either for their own use or for commercial sales. Tourne-Sol gets about half its revenue from seed sales; this is a potentially profitable avenue for market farmers looking to diversify.
The first of these chapters covers tools and advanced growing techniques. Brisebois explains how their seed business gets itself organized with an efficient tracking system, advanced harvesting and extracting techniques, equipment for scaling up a seed operation, procedures for germination testing, and how to design optimal seed storage facilities.
The next chapter details breeding techniques for developing unique varieties. While not for everyone, breeding presents exciting opportunities for market farmers, and Brisebois presents case studies of several new varieties he’s developed.
The advanced section continues with a chapter on crop planning for seed farmers, which includes examples of spreadsheets Tourne-Sol uses. All farmers use crop planning tools of some sort, but most will not be familiar with the considerations particular to a seed operation.
Finally, Brisebois offers a chapter on how to sell seeds and how to make your seed operation a viable, profit-making part of your farm. While he wisely doesn’t make any grand promises, the mere fact that his farm is 50 percent focused on seed production means that this is a feasible enterprise that others could emulate. The chapter includes the detailed ins and outs of selling bulk seed to a seed company vs. selling small packets directly.
This book fills a niche in the farming literature, providing detailed information that isn’t readily available elsewhere. Its only possible downside is that it fails to discuss one of the most important reasons for saving seed — something that we consider often here in Acres U.S.A. magazine — the importance of plant-seed-microbe associations that are critical for healthy plants and that are passed down from seed to plant to seed. Brisebois does mention that there are ecological benefits of letting some plants go to bloom — providing pollinator habitat and nectar while the plant is producing seed — but he could say more about how breeding your own seed ensures the transfer of millions of beneficial microbes from your own soil. As mentioned above, modern farmers are encouraged to outsource every non-vital task. What if we discerned, though, that seed saving, for the sake of encouraging healthier plants because of this plant-seed-microbe interaction, is one of those indispensable elements of the farm?
As Brisebois notes, saving seed is “easier than you think.” You already have seed growing on your farm — all you have to do is let plants mature and then collect their seed. The Seed Farmer is an excellent resource for showing you how to do this — and potentially for helping you turn seed saving into a separate, profitable on-farm enterprise.
