Growing Your Own Seeds: New Free Training - Training to Learn to Survive

Image credit: Myleine Guiard Schmid

These films were produced by Longo Maï and the European Civic Forum represented by the website https://www.diyseeds.orgtwo associations that have long been concerned with the future of seeds.

These films and tutorials are published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
The pretasurvivre.com platform and the organisation represented by www.diyseeds.org are in no way connected.

Exceptional and free training here https://pretasurvivre.com/product/production-semences-potageres/

Vegetable seed production

You want to learn how to become a professional seed producer for your own use or to develop your post-covid business.

Here are video tutorials supplemented by 8 theoretical or practical ABCs that explain the general basics of seed production.

Why produce your own seeds?
text by Jacques Berguerand, Longo maï

We produce our seeds so that each seed participates in the continuity of life on earth and in the dynamics of biodiversity, of which humans are a part.

Because we live in a time of conflict, and every war, every economic crisis sends individuals, civil societies, back to their most basic needs: housing, clothing, food.

And it is a bitter fact: a city dweller no longer knows how to grow a plant, a farmer depends almost exclusively on a few large multinationals for his seed supply.

In Greece, Syria and elsewhere, populations destabilised by crisis and war are looking for seeds.

In Syria and Iraq, the cradle of cereals, ancestral seed banks have been systematically destroyed by Westerners: they represented an invaluable heritage of ancient seeds domesticated by generations of farmers.

And it is too dangerous to entrust this heritage to a few 'gene banks' that are difficult for the farmer to access.

We should also not forget the bloody "food riots" of the past decade (early 21st century), mostly urban, in a context of grain speculation and climate disruption.

Industrial agriculture is robbing us of our knowledge

Today, genetically manipulated plants cover an area of agricultural land worldwide equivalent to that of Western Europe.

Since 2001, it has been known that collections of old maize in Mexico, the cradle of this crop, are contaminated by GM maize imported from the United States.

These GMOs that are being imposed on us will not solve famine and malnutrition, or plant and human diseases.

On the contrary, they are a danger to the environment and to health.

It is also known, at the agronomic level, that most plant diseases are created today by industrial agriculture.

The monocultures currently practised by extremely simplified agrarian systems are causing irreversible genetic erosion, which will lead to future famines.

They are an insult to the boundless ingenuity of generations of farmers who have been able to survive thanks to them.

The monopoly of agribusiness on a standardised and globalised market has led to the destruction of these millennia-old agrarian systems that have provided food for generations.

We want to increase the diversity of cultivated plant species

While there used to be thousands of food species on the planet, they are now rapidly disappearing and the world's food supply is based on a very limited number of plant species.

For example, in France, 700 varieties of oats kept in INRA freezers have been burnt, a genetic heritage that is going up in smoke, because it is expensive to preserve, and the draught horses have disappeared, for which oats were the main fuel.

But who knows, one day we may have to go back to animal traction?

In livestock farming, the disaster is just as serious.

The consequence is that fragility, disease and epidemics develop without restraint, exacerbated by inbreeding.

In the past, each country, each valley had its own variety adapted to the soil.

There were many exchanges between farmers.

The varieties travelled.

In the 1950s, 10,000 varieties of rice were used in China, each with its own qualities.

But industrial agriculture requires homogeneous and stable varieties, the opposite of the selection criteria of farmers who work on 'populations', and who practice 'massal' selection.

Populations where there is a great deal of diversity, adaptability, evolution and resistance to changing environmental conditions.

This is the opposite of the industrial "varieties".

It is essential to understand these data because they are mortgaging the agricultural future of the planet, while at the same time making us believe that they are the only possible way to ensure the feeding of a growing population.

Reclaiming a common heritage

The equation is simple: the disappearance of farmers means the disappearance of the varieties and know-how that are attached to them.

This is why it is said that farmers and gardeners are the guardians of seeds, and that their installation must be multiplied.

For all these reasons, we need to preserve all the possible diversity of old varieties, and their free access, because they are the seeds of the future.

The only guarantee of their survival is to be grown in our gardens, not to be kept in refrigerators or gene banks.

Fortunately, the richness and diversity of different food traditions still resist the standardisation of tastes and production, even if the situation is very different from one continent to another.

This film is a tool to learn how to make your own seeds, which is not very difficult, costs nothing, and is even a real pleasure.

This knowledge must not remain in the hands of specialists who privatise access to seeds through patenting and the creation of sterile hybrid varieties, all of which are protected by increasingly restrictive legislation at the behest of the multinationals.

Doing your own seeds is a free act, which allows you to demystify this knowledge and to be autonomous.

On the contrary, it is a common heritage to be reappropriated, protected and developed.

Image credit: Myleine Guiard Schmid

Plant breeding in the industrial age

Text by Jean-Pierre Berlan, former research director at INRA

Living things reproduce and multiply freely.

The law of Life is opposed to the law of Profit.

Life exists through the uniqueness of each organism, industry imposes itself through the uniformity of goods.

For industrial capitalism, Life is doubly sacrilegious.

For two centuries, putting an end to this double sacrilege has been the historical task that industrial capitalism has assigned to breeders and agricultural sciences.

It is now almost complete.

The patenting of life forms is the culmination of two centuries of efforts to do away with the founding practice of agriculture, sowing the harvested grain.

It is about separating production from reproduction, making reproduction a privilege of the 'life sciences' cartel - the manufacturers of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, larvicides, ovocides, gametocides, bactericides, fungicides, mollusquicides, rodenticides, acaricides, nematicides!

As for uniformity, these industrial fields, too large, too green, streaked with the scars of tractor wheels, where the plants "make the table" - not one of them outranks its neighbours - show that the goal has been achieved.

The history of industrial breeding is simple if you disperse the genetic smokescreen.

It is the replacement of a variety - the character of being varied, the opposite of uniformity - by copies of a plant selected within the variety - a clone.

When plants retain their individual traits (such as "self-pollinated" wheat, barley, soybeans etc.), the breeder only ends the sacrilege of diversity. When they do not retain them, he ends both simultaneously.

This is the miracle accomplished by 'hybrid' maize, the sacred cow of 20th century agronomy.

In 1836, John Le Couteur, an English gentleman farmer - a capitalist who invested his capital in agricultural production - codified the technique of "isolation" which had been practised empirically since the beginning of the century.

Since we are growing, he reasons, varieties (the character of what is varied, diversity) of plants, since each plant retains its individual characters, I will "isolate" in my fields "the most promising plants to grow individually[1] and thus reproduce and multiply them - to make copies, clones - to finally select the best clone and replace the variety.

The isolation technique is based on an unstoppable logical principle.

There is always a gain in replacing a variety of 'anything' with copies of a better 'anything' isolated within the variety.

The sacrilege of free access must be ended.

A self-pollinating clone reproduces identically.

The harvested grain is also the seed for the following year.

It was not until the 1920s that this problem found the beginnings of an administrative/legal solution in France and the 21st century that the patent put an end to the scandal of free reproduction.

Since the late 1920s, marketed varieties have had to be 'uniform' and 'stable'.

Homogeneous: plants should be phenotypically (visually) identical.

Stable: the same plant should be offered for sale year after year.

This double requirement implies that the plants must be genetically identical or nearly so.

This uniformity and stability is examined by an official service. If a new variety meets these criteria, it is entered in a Catalogue and the breeder receives a Breeders' Certificate which gives him the right to market it.

In 1960, this system was taken over by the Treaty of the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants.

The selection-cloning of Le Couteur and La Gasca now has a sort of international legal standing in more than 60 countries.

The breeder's certificate protects the breeder from "piracy" of his clones by competitors.

It leaves the farmer free to sow the grain he harvests. It met the needs of traditional breeding houses run by agronomists who were passionate about breeding work.

But over the past 30 years, the Cide Cartel has taken control of the world's seeds.

For the Cartel, the farmer who sows the grain he harvests is now a "pirate" who commits a sacrilege against Property.

The patent of life is putting an end to this sacrilege.

In 1900, the rediscovery of Mendel's laws made it possible to extend the isolation method to maize.

But in practice, it proves so difficult, so implausible, that it was necessary to invent a biological phenomenon, still "unexplained and inexplicable [2]" - heterosis - to justify its implementation - whereas, as we have seen, no justification is necessary! - heterosis - to justify its implementation - whereas, as we have seen, no justification is necessary!

But 'hybrid' maize puts an end to the double sacrilege, and geneticists and breeders have been able to accredit and perpetuate the existence and their futile hunt for this genetic yeti.

In short, the history of industrial breeding is the history of mining through selection-cloning that destroys the diversity created by the friendly cooperation between farmers and nature since the beginning of plant and animal domestication.

Farmers did not wait for genetics to 'improve' plants. The abundance of cultivated varieties (and animal breeds) bears witness to this.

Genetics and breeding are separate activities.

In the 1980s, I was lucky enough to see a very great wheat breeder, Claude Benoît, at work in a disjunct wheat field.

At first, for me, the plants were all the same.

At the end of the day, I began to distinguish them roughly and to understand Claude Benoît's selection criteria. I said "started" because Claude Benoît himself could not explain what made him choose this one rather than that one among plants that seemed strictly similar to me.

This is because selecting is based on 'uncodified' knowledge that cannot be explained or is explained with difficulty.

The meticulous work of the breeder, guided by experience, by a long familiarity with the plant, by empathy, not to say love, for it [3], by a keen sense of observation, by his agronomic knowledge, does not need the geneticist

[4] The esotericism of genetics serves rather to intimidate those who would like to carry out selection, to discourage them, to make them give up.

As we have seen, the Geneticist, like all scientists, can err by deceiving us, provided that he is not mistaken about the interests he must serve.

There is no point in shedding crocodile tears about the collapse of cultivated biodiversity when the whole dynamic of industrial capitalism is tending towards it and when the regulatory and legislative system and repression governing the production and sale of seeds imposes a single two-century-old selection method.

While waiting for the struggles against the infamy of patenting life to succeed, while waiting for the legal framework imposing a selection method that destroys diversity, enacted to industrialise agriculture and eliminate farmers, while waiting to expel the Cartel of the Cides of Life, organising collectively to cultivate diversity, share seeds, and disseminate the corresponding know-how, as generations of farmers have done before us, are acts of survival as much as of resistance and freedom throughout the world. Kokopelli has shown the way.

Longo Maï describes, step by step, how to reclaim our seeds and our future.

Jean-Pierre Berlanformer research director at INRA

[1] This individualisation of the plant accompanied the rise of bourgeois individualism.

[2]Terms used repeatedly at the World Symposium (400 researchers!) on "Heterosis in Crops" organised by the International Maize and Wheat Centre in Mexico City.

[3] An old breeder at INRA said this wonderful thing to me, a little embarrassed: "You know, when I am alone with my plants, I talk to them".

[4](8.) For this reason, the Cides cartel has bought up the seed companies. Their gene-manipulating molecular biologists are incapable of doing any breeding work.