What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds, by Jennifer Jewell
One can never cease to marvel how a small box of seed packets — able to be held in one hand in the winter — is going to produce most of the vegetables for a family for an entire year. It’s truly a miracle — something we’ll never be able to quite explain — how a living thing can reproduce itself in the form of a seed, and that seed then goes dormant and only comes back to life at predesigned levels of temperature, moisture and light.
Jennifer Jewell sets out to document and share her reflections on the genius of seeds in her new memoir, What We Sow. Per the subtitle, she leads readers through her personal exploration of the importance of seeds, both ecologically and culturally.
Jewell writes in the style of a memoir, a genre that is appropriate, but somewhat neglected, for many books that touch on agriculture. While introspection can certainly be overdone in our therapeutic age, personal reflection draws the reader in and helps communicate the true importance of a topic.
And seeds are a topic of great significance for Jewell — and, she hopes to convince us — for everyone. The book intersperses notes from her journal that she kept throughout a full year — October 2020 through October 2021 — with discourses on a number of seed-related topics: how certified-organic seed is sourced; seed patents and the businesses that create and sell seed; seed scarcity during COVID-19; efforts to preserve heirloom seed, etc. Jewell is an avid gardener in California and is the host of the NPR show Cultivating Place, and while a good portion of the book is devoted to flowers and wild species, a significant portion of the book does focus on agricultural seed.
For example, Jewell highlights the work of the Open Source Seed Initiative, an organization that is dedicated to ensuring as much seed as possible continues to be held in the public domain. While she acknowledges that many people she admires and trusts argue for the ability of seed companies to patent their work in order to provide incentive to researchers to improve the existing stock of seeds, she remains skeptical.
This is definitely a tricky subject. Without copyright and patent protection, many of the quality-of-life improvements we’ve benefited from in the past centuries, from life-saving drugs to improvements in transportation and information, would doubtless not have come to pass. But everything has a downside, and the opposite side of the coin regarding seed patents is that they have allowed large seed companies to have a stranglehold on what goes into the ground in most largescale agricultural operations. Cronyistic governmental policy is a large part of this as well, but seed centralization is a component of that.
One counterargument to this is exactly what Rick Clark discusses in this issue of Acres U.S.A. — he obtained either off-patent or open-pollinated seed and began breeding his own landrace. Theoretically, any farmer could do this and opt out of the system. The problem is that what Rick Clark and other ecologically conscious farmers are doing is not common, nor is it easy. This isn’t to look down on most farmers, but … most farmers don’t have the knowledge or (arguably) the resources to go to the effort Clark does to farm in tune with nature. But this means that those farmers are in thrall to the large seed companies.
Jewell’s take on this issue is not exactly that there isn’t any hope, but she isn’t optimistic that everyone is going to farm like Rick Clark. Most farmers, to her, are victims of a system they can’t control. Some readers will agree with this, but others are more ready to emphasize, like Clark, that one doesn’t have to participate in the system.
Jewell accomplishes her goal in providing an overview of where our seed comes from, how it’s handled by corporations and government, and, above all, why seed matters. While she perhaps overstates how much of a true crisis we’re in regarding seed, the book is a notable examination of the complexity of the system we live in.
