THE FARMER COOPERATIVE GENOME PROJECT Agnet Oct 3, Oct. 1 /98 Organic

Farming News

The Farmer Cooperative genome Project (FCGP) is a collaborative effort to return farmers and gardeners to the practice of characterizing and saving seed. With support from the Fund for Rural America, and administered by Oregon Tilth, the FCGP explores the feasibility of a cooperative marketing structure that rewards producers for maintaining our nation’s most vital resource base - the seed.

Consolidation of the seed industry, the rush to patent varieties, and recent technological developments all result in a narrowing of the genetic base on which agriculture stands. The Farmer Cooperative Genome Project is a three year plan to assemble a farmer-owned seed cooperative. Participants in the effort will learn how to work with the United States’ repository of SEEDS (the National Plant Germplasm System) and other seed resources, learn how to characterize or describe varieties, learn how to grow true seeds, and develop plant varieties for preservation and sale.

Traditional garden varieties of seed are in decline. Over two-thirds of the nearly 5,000 non-hybrid vegetable varieties offered in 1984 seed catalogs were dropped by 1994. Less than 10% of the seed companies in the world are responsible for over 63% of the varieties offered in 1997. As seed companies are lost, traditional and heirloom varieties of crops are lost. Compile the loss of known traditional varieties with the lack of preservation efforts for native varieties, and the threat to our common genetic heritage is staggering.

The PATENTING OF PLANTS threatens our continued access to agricultural resources. Patenting obliges farmers to pay royalties on every generation of seed, breeders no longer have free access to genetic resources to develop new varieties, and consumers end up paying higher prices for food and medicine.

To "publish" a variety bars the patenting of that plant. Describing or characterizing a variety and publishing that description in a catalog, or on the internet, goes a long way toward locking that variety into the public domain, and protecting our common heritage. Growers, both professional farmers and homegardeners that have the capacity to reproduce seeds will be encouraged not only to characterize those varieties, but also make them available for sale in a cooperative marketing effort.