For millennia farmers have saved and developed their own seed and maintained local sovereignty in doing so. There is significant food security inherent to this practice. Should the World’s food supply be reduced genetically to only genes that are patented—which a farmer cannot save, develop to fit their farming system and re plant, the World’s food supply becomes dependent on only these patented genes and those who own them.
As vast majorities of the world’s basic food crops become based on genetically engineered codes, so does the ability of the farmer to grow, save and develop their own seeds diminish. This is not only because they can’t replant and acclimate such seed to their farm but also because the seed they do develop stands to be contaminated with genetic code that Nature would never create on her own. As farmers stop growing and developing their own seed, the diversity of the gene pool providing us food also diminishes.
The natural world and the Earth herself operates as an inter-connected, self-contained whole. The sun rises, the sun sets, seasons progress, ocean tides rise and fall, weather patterns move across the face of the planet pushed and pulled by gradients of high and low pressure. Nature is holistic and endowed with ancient rhythm. There’s a wisdom to this—call it what we will—that presents biological systems that are inherently evolved, efficient, and sustaining beyond compare. It does not take much observation to see that Nature succeeds from, and in fact is truly efficient based on, highly evolved diversity—not the other way around.
Our ability, and opportunity, to work with the inherent wisdom of the Natural World is a treasure available to humanity but it has been recently neglected.
—Jim Fullmer, Biodynamic farmer and Demeter director