A new gig: Fruition Seeds

image7I have this new gig, working with a farm.

It’s a seed farm – a farm that grows crop for seed – just over the ridge from where I live.

Fruition Seeds. Co-owned and co-farmed by Matthew and Petra.

They have this crazy idea that they can change the world through growing and giving people access to the highest quality seed possible.

I like it.

All of Fruition’s seed is organically grown. None of the heavy chemical and mechanical inputs used by industrial agriculture. Only seed that can inherently out-compete weeds, take up nutrients from the soil more efficiently, and be resilient to changes in the environment ultimately survives and is harvested for future use.

All of Fruition’s seed is regionally adapted. This is Biology 101: the organisms that will thrive in a given environment are those that have been bred in and adapted to similar conditions. Fruition sources all of it’s seed from the Northeast; the seed is either grown right on the farm in the Finger Lakes or comes from a collaborative network of farms in New York, Vermont and Quebec.

All of Fruition’s seed is open pollinated. No hybrids or GMO here. Specific characteristics of taste, color, pest and pathogen resistance are achieved through the natural process of selecting the most desirable crops and replanting their seeds in following years. The result is stable genetics for anyone who wants to save their own seeds.

And having people save their own seed is at the heart of how Matthew and Petra want to change the world.

Seed saving is an activity as old as human civilization but practiced by almost no one these days. Even the most dedicated growers tend to buy their seed every year.

And what this does is abdicate control over our food to someone else.

Someone else decides what seeds are available. Someone else decides the traits of those seeds. Someone else makes decisions about our food based on their values, not our own.

Someone else can patent the seeds they sell and legally prevent us from having any real control over them.

How do you patent something that comes from Nature? Maybe the answer is: if you can patent it, it’s not natural.

Matthew and Petra want to change that. They want growers and eaters to have control over their seed, to have control over their food.

Real food security at the most basic level. I like it.

So what am I doing for Fruition Seeds?

Harvesting crops, squishing tomatoes, splitting zucchini, scraping seeds, cleaning seed, filling packets, selling packets, picking things up, putting things down and getting generally dirty.

Not a bad gig.

Additional Info:
Fruition Seeds, http://www.fruitionseeds.com/

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