Stop obsessing over heirloom seeds and let plants change
I want to talk about the problematic concept of heirloom seeds. Now, this will probably will cause some trouble, as criticizing heirlooms is like picking a fight with everyone’s favorite granny. Or – given that heirlooms are often seen as the only alternative to a seed industry dominated by patents and global profiteering – this could come across as kicking David in the balls as he stands before Goliath. But in our current times of climate chaos, seed and food systems need to be able to change and adapt. As a farmer who cares about sustainable agriculture, I know that growing food is getting more difficult and it is high time to embrace dynamic and regional seed diversity.
Humans have been saving seeds since the dawn of agriculture. For the most part, people and seeds have long been in a dialogue of ever-changing genetics, environmental conditions, cuisines, cultures and curiosity. Seeds have changed us, and we have changed them, sometimes without even trying.
But this is not how we talk about heirlooms, loosely defined as openpollinated varieties that will reliably breed “true to type” – that is, producing plants identical to their parents – and predate the second world war. When most people talk about heirlooms, often with glassy-eyed nostalgia, the stories are almost always historical. When seed catalogs arrive in the fall and winter, we flick through the glossy pages of varieties, reading their biographies. Heirloom descriptions generally read like this:
this variety can be traced back to sometime in the 1800s or early 1900s to some white dude or his wife who “discovered” or bred or selected it, and it’s been passed down the generations and looks like this.
The question “What was that seed before this somewhat arbitrary point in time?” goes largely unasked, feeding the erasure of Indigenous, enslaved and peasant contributions to agrobiodiversity. And this “beginning” becomes the last page of the seed’s story, which is repeated as well-meaning seed savers strive to preserve the seed so it grows like it’s almost always been grown. Heirloom seeds get frozen in narrative time.
Seed stories rarely embrace what could be. Strict adherence to varietal purity stifles another query: “What could this seed be in the future?” The naming and describing of an heirloom variety reinforces the notion that the seed is a static thing. The appearance of named varieties (and therefore most heirlooms) coincided with the formation of the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA) in 1883, which established business alliances with the seed industry (which was previously government-sponsored). By 1924, the ASTA had persuaded the federal government to stop its free seed distribution program. This commodification and privatization of the seed industry has cemented expectations of varietal uniformity. Most people don’t question why they want all of their favorite tomatoes to look exactly like their 100-year-old ancestor.
In this light, the seed’s story is a cage.
If we focus too narrowly on preserving seeds for this trait or that, we can’t see the possibilities that turn up when we let go of the idea of purity and adopt a more open approach to genetics. The genetic cage gets smaller and smaller each year as the plants become more inbred. Most plants aren’t too happy having “babies” with their close cousins, which is referred to as “inbreeding depression”. The opposite is also true; mixing varieties or genetics can produce an effect, heterosis, in which those plant children are more vigorous and healthy.
Author and educator Martín Prechtel describes an ancient practice of reintroducing wild genetics into stable corn populations on a 12-year cycle to reinvigorate the crop. This practice has been recorded in corn-growing communities across the Americas and is often integrated in culture and ceremony. I have heard Appalachian oldtimers describe a similar intent undergirding the tradition of scooping a handful of bean seeds from a neighbor and dumping them in the seed stock of another neighbor. This practice ensured the genetic diversification of community seeds.
Prechtel critiques conventional notions of purity, stating: “To keep seeds alive, clear, strong and open-pollinated, purity as the idea of a single pure race must be understood as the ironic insistence of imperial minds” (he suggests that insistence could be boiled down to white people’s agricultural tears and “composted into something useful”).
My journey from variety preservationist to heirloom mixologist has been quite rapid. I initially wanted varieties that could grow well in the mountains of western North Carolina, where I live. I started growing lots of different varieties, searching for those that were already happy growing in lowinput, south-eastern conditions. Saving seeds from those varieties begins the process of regional adaptation, where subtle genetic changes over multiple generations can lead to a variety specifically suited to a place. Unfortunately, the climate crisis has created erratic weather patterns, and slow adaptation isn’t enough. We need seeds that are highly adaptive and resilient, which led me to seek even more diversity. This includes working with crops that are new to our region like taro and cassava, as well as exploring varieties of traditional southern crops like okra and collards. But more and more, I’m embracing intra-variety diversity.
In 2020, I grew 21 heirloom collard varieties from longtime backyard seed savers. There was a lot of diversity between and within varieties: shades of yellow-green through dark greenglazed; purple, pink and white veins; and collards that formed loose heads almost like a cabbage. That winter, we had a few weeks in the 70s and then it plummeted to 8F overnight. That’s a pretty brutal temperature swing for most plants. I expected a field full of collard mush, but while plenty of plants did die, there were survivors – extremely healthy collard plants that acted like the arctic plunge was no big deal. I made an instant decision to let all the surviving plants interbreed to create an extremely diverse population of winter survivors.
This became the first “ultracross” population, which I continue to grow and save for extreme climate tolerance each year. Every single plant is a distinct individual with paths diverging and beautiful. It’s an absolute joy to walk my fields with an open mind and see which plants speak to me and seduce me, and from which I ultimately save seeds. These “ultracross” populations are highly dynamic and adaptive, giving hope for climate-resilient regional food systems.
Growing heirlooms compared with growing these diverse seed mixes is like the difference between reading a history book (where everything has already happened) and reading a sci-fi novel (where anything can happen). Or, to follow the analogy to a niche subgenre, in an episode of The Seed Growers Podcast, the Indigenous seed keeper Rowen White described growing these kinds of diverse populations as “choose your own adventure” books. This is not a new concept. In fact, it’s much closer to how seeds were (and in some places still are) traditionally kept, back before the commodification of varieties, when seeds had no names.
There is a clear fork in the road here, where one path is to steward seeds in a way that keeps them static, and the other that embraces and even encourages ongoing change. When I’ve spoken about mixing up varieties, I have come up against almost visceral reactions from folks who are appalled at the idea, who think that something will be irreversibly lost. But it’s human nature to remember the past and strive for the future, to want our children to be better than us. The same should be true of seeds.
This is not an attack on seed preservation, which certainly has its complexities. This is not an attack on reconnecting with and stewarding ancestral or culturally significant seeds, which is deeply important work. I understand the strong call of seeds and their stories. There is a 10,000-plus-year history of deep seed-people relationships that have largely been broken in the last few hundred years of industrialization and the last few decades of corporate genetic modification.
But I think heirlooms may be a siren song, a misguided proxy for what we really crave and need. We don’t need “seed savers”. We need seed sci-fi writers, so to speak, who can radically reimagine what seeds can be. And we need diverse genetics so those seeds can be filled with poetry and color. We need to dance with these seeds over a lifetime, remembering that as much as we want to bury them in the past, they are alive and animate today.
The naming and describing of an heirloom variety reinforces the notion that the seed is a static thing