A Short History of Agricultural Seed

Seeds are the foundation of agriculture. As John Navazio describes in this excerpt from his new book, The Organic Seed Grower: A Farmer’s Guide to Vegetable Seed Production, America was once home to hundreds of small-scale agricultural seed producers, each of which developed seeds adapted to grow best in the surrounding region.

Today, following the trend of most businesses, just a few large companies provide seed for farmers everywhere. With the advent and rapid spread of transgenic seeds, and companies like Monsanto actually owning patents to the organisms they sell, we’ve come a long way since the first human saved the first spelt seed back in the Fertile Crescent!

The following is an excerpt from The Organic Seed Grower by John Navazio. It has been adapted for the web.

---

A Short History of Agricultural Seed

Seed is the vital link to our agricultural past. All of the changes that have occurred in the domestication of our crops are a reflection of the ingenuity and perseverance of our agricultural ancestors. This is even more wondrous when we realize that all of the plants we rely on for our very existence are derived from wild plants that were not usually succulent; in fact, they were often bitter or sour, far beyond what our modern palates would tolerate.

The modern crops that grace our tables daily are all derived from a much larger number of plants that were found to be edible and were used extensively by our hunter-gatherer forebears. While natural selection had already shaped these wild plants, the selection pressure of the people who first grew them under cultivation further changed them to better suit their needs.

Certainly these early farmer-breeders were interested in plants that were easier to harvest, were more productive, stored better, had better texture or flavor, and had larger fruit, seed, shoots, buds, or leaves, depending on which part of the plant they harvested as food. But natural selection was still the dominant selective agent.

These early crops were grown in very rustic agricultural conditions with few or no inputs. The environmental challenges of drought, predation, low-nutrient stress, and excessive heat or cold were ever-present and played a central role in the evolution of our crop plants for thousands of years in the development of agriculture.

Through many generations of cultivation, crops changed based on both the selection pressure of the environment and the selection of humans to meet their cropping methods, culinary needs, and cultural preferences. While some of the early crop domesticates flourished under agriculture, other potential crops were abandoned.

The most promising crop plants spread across the countryside via trade and human migration. This dissemination placed these budding crops into many diverse environments under the stewardship of people of different cultures, who often had quite different goals in their selection criteria.

What is amazing to ethnobotanists (or anyone who studies the spread of cultivated plants around the globe) is just how genetically diverse, elastic, and adaptive all of the widely cultivated crop species became in a relatively short period of time.

The variation that unfolds as diverse challenges of natural and human selection are applied seems to yield an unlimited array of genetic possibilities. Certainly the evidence presented by the fantastic spectrum of shapes, colors, flavors, and sizes, as well as the range of climatic adaptation of our crops when compared with their wild ancestors, is proof positive of this.

Over thousands of years of practice, agriculture became increasingly sophisticated. The cultural methods used by many agricultural societies moved from hand tools to implements drawn by animals; out of necessity a number of farming communities devised sophisticated irrigation systems; many learned the value of nutrient cycling; and all improved the genetics of the crops they used.

Most agricultural societies developed deep traditions and ritualistic methods of gathering seed that were carefully handed down from one generation to the next. In many cases there was an emphasis on how to select for important, desirable traits from the correct number of plants without too much emphasis on any particular type of plant.

But despite the increased sophistication in agricultural production and accumulated wisdom in maintaining and improving seedstocks, the forces of natural selection remained the dominant factor in shaping the crops that they grew right up until the industrialization of agriculture in the 20th century.

The best farmers knew this instinctively and worked in concert with natural selection. If the crops they relied on weren’t suited to the local environment and growing conditions, then the farmers would have to abandon them for something else that might work.

Seed as Trade

Trade in seed has been a key component in the spread of crops since very early in the domestication process. Seed of a promising crop has probably been a large enticement in many bartering situations. The commercial sale of seed, however, didn’t become commonplace in North America and Europe until the second half of the 19th century, and the seed trade of that era consisted almost entirely of small packets of vegetable, flower, or herb seed that served as starter packets for future seed-saving activity.

The growing and saving of farm and garden seed was as much a part of any agricultural pursuit as was working the soil and planting in the spring. With the advent of commercial seed companies, farmers and gardeners bought seed of specialty and hard-to-find items. Sometimes they purchased seed of a particular species that was difficult to produce in their climate. And sometimes people purchased seed packets to try something new, exciting, and full of promise.

Starting in the 1880s and continuing into the 1920s there was a steady increase in the number of start-up seed companies in North America. In addition to many new companies entering the vegetable and flower seed market, there were also companies specializing in seed corn and other agronomic staples on a scale that hadn’t been seen before.

It is impossible to get a comprehensive list or an accurate count of all of these companies—some were quite small, and some only lasted a few years—but by the 1920s literally hundreds of them had sprung up in every agricultural region of North America.

These companies were all regionally based, and they concentrated on supplying seed of crop varieties that were regional standards as well as finding unusual or unique varieties that would give their customers something new or exotic to grow.

Most of the seed was grown within the company’s geographic region (a small amount was imported from Europe and elsewhere), and a company would rise and fall on the quality of its seed. Quality had two components:

1. The seed had to be relatively clean, free of debris, and undamaged, as well as offer a decent germination rate.
2. The seed had to have reasonably good varietal integrity, being true to type, largely uniform, and able to perform in the field with some semblance of what the catalog claimed.

Standards for seed quality and varietal integrity were not nearly what they are today, and standards for uniformity were much more forgiving, but farmers did notice differences and knew good seed from bad.

Concurrent with this growth in commercial seed was a series of innovations in cultural practices, science, and engineering. These set the stage for a revolution in agriculture that would change the fundamental landscape of farming in the 20th century. Toward the end of the 19th century the first commercial pesticides became available, with Bordeaux mixture being used for fungal diseases of fruit, and various forms of arsenic and pyrethrum used to control insects in a number of high-value crops.

At the beginning of the 20th century came the rediscovery of Mendel’s principles of heredity, which laid the foundation for genetics and modern plant breeding. By the 1910s several American manufacturers were making gasoline-powered tractors; the first synthetic nitrogen fertilizer was being produced in Germany by harnessing atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia using the Haber-Bosch process.

Throughout this entire period hundreds of smaller hydroelectric dams were being built across North America, laying the groundwork for the large irrigation projects yet to come.

These changes didn’t “take” with farmers overnight. First of all, many of these inputs were expensive, and most farmers were not operating on a cash-intensive system—they produced all or most of their own fertility, feed, and seed for their farms. Pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, and even tractors wouldn’t become commonplace on North American or European farms until after World War II, and even later in other parts of the world.

The main source of fuel on the farm was the grain and hay produced on-farm for horses. It’s hard to believe now that only 100 years ago, even in countries that were rapidly industrializing, most of the population lived on farms that were largely self-sufficient, breeding their own animals and growing their crops from seed they had grown.

The Change

Many social, cultural, and political events occurred between the 1920s and the end of World War II that had a profound effect on agricultural practices in many industrial societies. Modern plant breeding came of age during the 1920s, and the development of hybrid corn received most of the attention.

Much of the early breeding work in corn concentrated on improving its stalk strength and ability to produce under challenging conditions. This proved invaluable in many areas of the Corn Belt when several cycles of drought, extreme heat, and high winds conspired with poor farming practices to create the Dust Bowl crisis in the American Great Plains during the 1930s.

The Dust Bowl, coupled with a worldwide economic depression and a near collapse in world markets for wheat, corn, and cotton, shrank many farmers’ profit margins and forced many people off the land.

Further displacement of people from farms occurred throughout many industrialized societies with the onset of World War II as young men left to fight, people moved to cities to work in factories for the war effort, and whole nation-states were occupied by invading forces.

This set the stage for increased agricultural mechanization when wartime demand for agricultural production became crucial to the Allies as the conflict in Europe became a world war.

The war pushed industrial and scientific development to the hilt in dozens of areas. Many American factories were built solely to produce enough ammonia for gunpowder and bombs used by Allied forces worldwide.

US agricultural production played a pivotal role supplying troops and allies with staple foods. Production was bolstered through federal programs such as the Lend-Lease Act, which promoted a more industrial farming model geared toward maximizing yields and raising quality standards of important agricultural commodities.

American farmers increased production as much as possible with limited resources throughout the war. Seed production for a number of crops boomed on this side of the Atlantic, with vegetable seed for war-torn Europe in high demand.

Some cabbage seed growers in the Puget Sound region of Washington State were said to have paid off their mortgages with three good crop years during the war. By the end of the war tractors outnumbered horses on American farms for the first time. Agriculture in industrial societies was changing.

---

Recommended Reads

Choosing the Right Seed Crop: The Seed Series

8 Seed Saving Myths