Sowing Change

Jason Mark, editor of Earth Island Journal and a founding member of an urban cooperative farm, is a columnist for Change.org.

As a farmer, winter is one of my favorite times of year. Things move slower, and on our four-acre urban farm in San Francisco there’s not much more to do than prune the fruit trees and keep next spring’s garlic and strawberries free of weeds. After summer’s hustle and bustle, a slack pace is a welcomed relief.

But the main reason I love winter is because it’s the season of seed catalogues, that time when farmers and gardeners get to hatch their plans for the coming year. A few weeks ago, for example, I went to the farm with big plans to prune our block of Jonagold apples. Then a rainstorm rolled in, and I quickly retreated to our damp tool shed, where I spent the afternoon sitting on a bucket pouring over the seed catalogues as it poured outside the door. It’s lovely, I thought, how summer gets plotted in the cold, how spring gets figured out in the depth of winter.

If you’re a backyard gardener and you’ve never spent time with a seed catalogue, let me tell you: You’re missing out, because the seed company’s annual offerings are nothing short of horticulture porn. The glossy, dew-of-the-morning pictures of prize-winning peppers, tomatoes, and lettuces are mouth-watering. Every vegetable has a sexy sheen, every fruit looks Edenic. The images make a farmer or gardener hunger for growing something so ideal — it is a kind of lust.

For the last three years, our farm has mostly relied on a family-owned seed company in Maine called Johnny’s Selected Seeds, which specializes in heirloom varieties and organic-certified seeds. Another favorite is High Mowing Seeds, another independent company in New England. We once bought from Seeds of Change, until we learned that it is owned by the M&M/Mars Corporation, a fact that seems out of sync with our commitment to sustainable food systems.

This year, we have a new favorite: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. A family-owned company located in Bakersville, Missouri, Baker Creek stands out with its unbelievable selection. Founder Jere Gettle — who started the company 12 years ago, when he was just 17-years-old — has traveled the world collecting seeds, and his beautifully produced catalogue (which looks more like a coffee table book) boasts some 1,400 different varieties, including an oval, orange cucumber from Cambodia (“Hmong Red”), a beet (“Crapaudine”) that has been cultivated for more than 1,000 years, and a scallop-type summer squash (“Patisson Strie Melange”) that looks like it landed from outer space.

But most of all I like Baker Creek because of its politics.

Jere and his wife, Emilee, are unabashed in their opposition to Corporate America, especially the power of seed companies like Monsanto. At the beginning of the 2010 cataglogue, Jere comes across as a model of Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer:

Let’s rock the food supply in 2010! Let’s put the home gardener and local farmer back in control of our food supply, our lives and our freedom. It is time for gardeners to learn to save seed again: yes, save seed! Let’s put the biotech and chemical corporations back on the shelf, letting them know we don’t need their toxins, patents, lobbyists and lawyers.

Jere keeps the polemic going throughout the catalogue. Scattered among the vegetable photographs and varietal descriptions are epigrams from a range of thinkers. In the lettuce section, Ralph Waldo Emerson muses: “What is a weed?  A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Among the leeks, Thomas Jefferson says: “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden.” There’s a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and one from Ronald Reagan: “The nine scariest words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

This last one is my favorite — if only because it proves that Jere Gettle and I don’t agree on everything. The Gettles probably fit author Rod Dreher’s definition of  "Crunchy Cons,” conservatives who are just as countercultural as any progressive because they feel alienated by consumer society. Jere and Emilee were both home-schooled. They are, I have been told, observant Seventh Day Adventists; Jere signs off the catalogue’s opening letter with a hearty, “God Bless.” I think it’s fair to assume that many of the Gettles’ Ozark neighbors wouldn’t feel especially comfortable with the queer-friendly scene at our San Francisco garden.

Yet when the Gettles decided to open up their first retail location outside of Missouri, they chose an old bank building in Petaluma, CA, because after looking at their sales figures they discovered that many of their customers are in the Golden State. What this says to me is that despite some real cultural differences, the similarities between the Gettles and me are much more powerful. We both believe that organic food production is wiser than industrial food production; we both see community relationships as an antidote to commodification; we both value what Jere calls “the love [of] the slow life.” And we are both fervently against war and the notion of U.S. imperialism. Probably the most insistent theme throughout the Baker Creek catalogue is the idea that agrarian values — the values of Jefferson’s ideal yeomanry — are the opposite of our nation’s obsessive militarism. On the winter squash pages Jere quotes Menno Simmons, the founder of the Mennonite Church, who says: “The regenerated do not go to war, nor engage in strife. They are children of peace who have beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning forks, and know no war.” The self-sufficient farmer-gardener, he is saying, has no need of navies.

Today I’m going to place much of the farm’s seed order with Baker Creek. I’m hoping that by practicing the ancient act of growing our own food we can come together around a shared table of common values.