Certified organic certified seed

SANET post
Mary-Howell
September 25, 2001

A few thoughts on seed - organic and otherwise -

- You folks are absolutely right - the potential capacity to produce large quantities of organic seed within the organic community exists and would grow if there is a good market. This is something that we as a community should be putting signficant and cooperative effort into.

However, the infrastructure and commitment to produce sufficient quanities of certified organic seed is simply not there yet.

- There are possibly a million or more acres of certified organic land that will be planted to grains over the next 12 months in North America alone. Winter small grains are going in now, and corn, soybeans, and other grains will go in in the spring. There is simply not seed supply now to provide certified organic seed for all those acres in 2002, and much of what supply is available is highly regionalized. Do we decertify all crops grown from non-organic seed where a farmer lives in the wrong place to get organic seed economically, or lives where there is heavy competition for what little organic seed is available? What about vegetable growers? For many of them, organic seed of the varieties they have a market for simply doesn't exist. If you're trying to get into organic processing vegetables as we are, usually the processor tells you what variety to grow and provides the seed - what if that variety that the processor wants is not available organic? Its often hard enough to get the required varieties untreated.

- An organic market vegetable grower spoke to me at last Saturday's farmers market about seed - she had purchased organic seed from a small cottage-industry organic seed operation this year and she complained about the seed envelopes full of trash, poor quality seed and off-types. Although she is strongly committed to the organic philosophy and lifestyle, she said she would much rather buy seed from a bigger company to get consistent high quality and a larger selection of varieties.

** As with grain, 'organic' should NEVER be an excuse for poor or mediocre quality!

- Bin-run grain out of the field or out of your bin is not the same thing as high quality seed. Unless the organic community develops the regional capacity to clean, condition, store and test seed as seed needs to be handled (which can be different from how grain is handled), many of us will be using inferior quality seed.

Seed fields should be stringently rogued for off-types, weak plants and virus infected plants to make sure there is no unwanted mixing or segregation. Once the seed is harvested, there is usually no easy (visual) way to tell if it is disease-infected or weak. Machinery that harvests the seed must be clean of previous crops, especially if they are of the same species, and must be set to harvest gently so there is minimal damage during harvest. For fleshy fruits and vegetables, the separation of viable seed from fruit is messy and space/labor consuming for a relatively low yield of seed.

There are laws governing the labeling and selling seed, if it is sold commercially . A germinaton test is necessary to determine how thick you will need to plant to get a good stand, and germ tests should be done by an independent lab even if a farmer is selling seed casually so the buyer knows what they are getting. Most states have State Seed Testing Labs that will perform germ tests for a nominal fee ($15 in NY). No one should be selling organic seed that tests below 80-85% germination, certainly not without letting the buyer know before purchase what they are getting! If you label your seed lot with one germ% and the state tests it and finds a signficantly lower %, you can be fined and be prohibited from selling seed. As a farmer moves from casual on-farm seed sales to something more commercial, it is important to know what the law requires.

However, standard germ tests do not fully assess seed vigor - seed vigor is a characteristic that is not as easily measured. Vigor is quickly lost if seed is poorly handled, improperly stored, exposed to moisture, or if the parent plant was weak. Smaller and lighter weight grain and beans are often lower in vigor - if you size a seedlot of snap beans, the smaller beans will grow into significantly lower yielding, weaker and more disease susceptible plants than the larger beans. Both the tip kernels and the butt kernels on a cob of corn will often have lower vigor than the 'flats' in the middle of the cob. Beans and grain banged up during harvest may look fine on the outside, but have hairline interior cracks that will result in lower vigor. Grain that has started to sprout before harvest may have much reduced germination and vigor when planted.

There needs to be a way to separate low vigor seed out of a seed lot and DISCARD them. Seed with low vigor will produce low vigor plants which are slower to germinate, slower to grow, much more susceptible to insect and disease attack (especially seedling rots and seed/seedling insects), are harder to control weeds in, are less resistant to other environmental stresses like drought, and usually yield significantly lower. We organic farmers, who can't rescue disasters with seed treatments and pesticide/herbicide sprays, simply can not afford to use low vigor, inferior quality seed!

- Most people know that if they save seed from a hybrid, like corn, it will segregate the following year and the seedlings will not necessarily resemble the parent. OP corn can be a good option, and is worth putting time into developing regional landraces that yield and stand as well as commercial hybrids, but that takes time - perhaps years of generations to get something stable and widely adapted. And there is no guarantee that your own homegrown OP corn is non-GMO - not if your neighbor plants Bt corn. On average, using traditional plant breeding techniques, plant breeders figure it takes about 10 years from the time of making a cross to a released variety in seed propagated crops, and about 25 years in woody perennials. And that assumes that 95-99% of the progeny from each cross are discarded as worthless.

- For many organic farmers, and certifiers, transitional land is a problem. What to do with the crops grown on transitional land, how to prove that there is no co-mingling. But - what better use of transitional land is there than to grow next year's seed on? The plants will be under organic management, and it will allow a farmer to be more self sufficient while maintaining adequate income on their organic acres. And if the seed is harvested, cleaned and stored separately for seed, the disposition of the transitional crop will be easily documented. However, it looks like the NOP and OCIA will be requiring 'certified organic' seed, possibly eliminating or at least restricting the use of transitionally raised seed.

- Plant varieties that are patented may only be propagated by companies licensed to produce seed of that variety. Therefore if you save seed from your Vinton 81 soybeans and plant it next year and call it Vinton 81, you are breaking the law. You will be able to call them 'food grade clear hilum soybeans' but not Vinton. To be sure, you can find clear hilum food grade soybean varieties that yield better and have better agronomic characteristics than Vinton, Klaas and I developed one such soybean variety 15 years ago and are still growing it, but it has a slightly different protein composition and isn't a Vinton, so most buyers don't want it.

- And cost! It costs $19.22 for standard ground UPS postage alone to ship a bushel of soybeans (60 lb) from New York to Lincoln, NE. That has been tacked onto the cost of the seed once we try to start supplying or sourcing outside our own geographic area.

- There is a significant opportunity for professional plant breeders to develop varieties well suited to organic production - larger more spreading plants to shade the ground, plants that grow well without high bursts of nitrogen, insect and disease resistant plants, non-hybrid varieties etc. Plant breeding facilities select their new varieties under conventional chemical farming conditions - so it is no surprise that most won't be well suited to organic conditions!

However, some university plant breeding departments are seeing this organic niche and are starting to work toward it. We have recently talked to several Cornell plant breeders about this opportunity and they are quite interested. As a group, we need to work with our university plant breeders to let them know what we organic farmers need, to participate in field trials on our farms, to encourage them and provide useful feedback. With the increasing privitization of the seed industry, many univeristy plant breeders are looking for a reason to be - we can provide this.

But plant breeding is a slow, laborious, space consuming and expensive process, especially without the option of genetic engineering to facilitate and accelerate selection . Not many scientific articles so essential to university tenure come out of this kind of work, nor is it considered glamorous in today's molecular environment. And - the bottom line, there isn't much private grant or government money available for such work, someone will have to fund it!! We would hope that no one will be getting patents on the varieties once they are developed, so where would the income/incentive come from?

There is no doubt that we need to work toward the goal of developing the capacity for producing organic seed for the organic community. But this needs incentive and commitment - and money, with an appropriate phase in period that may need to be regionally flexible and understanding of the all the different realities of 'commercial availability'. Time to stop talking and get back to work!

Mary-Howell

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