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Seeds are an integral underpinning of our food system. Over the past decades we have seen a hyper consolidation of seed systems that has led to a dominant culture of seed commodification. Over time, the consolidation and commodification of seeds has eroded the resilience of our food systems, diminishing the agrobiodiversity of crops cultivated in the US at an alarming rate. Support for resilient and diversified seed systems is critical in the upcoming Farm Bill and can also be a direct pathway to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities and climate change strategies.

The History of US Seed Breeding

For most of the history of domesticated crops, those who grew crops saved seeds from one growing season to the next. They were able to identify the best of what they had grown in one season and set aside enough seeds to plant the following season. That meant farmers could maintain and improve the traits that mattered most to them and that best fit local growing conditions. Seed saving was also an important element of maintaining food traditions. From the high value placed on the flavor and texture of Carolina Gold rice by generations in the South to growing the right tepary beans for a favorite Southwestern dish, the particularities of foods matter for more than just their appropriateness for a climate or soil. They underpin what it is to feel at home; what it means to sense one’s lineage through food in a single place or across oceans.

In short, being able to save seed in prior centuries was central to adapting to an environment and to carrying on the most-valued rhythms of one’s ancestors by preserving culturally appropriate foods.

However, during the nineteenth century, these patterns of seed growing and saving began to change.

Before 1862, the US Patent Office was mailing millions of free seed packages to farmers across the country. One of the core functions of the USDA, upon its foundation in 1862, was the collection and public distribution of germplasm, or seeds. By the end of the 19th century, a third of USDA’s budget was devoted to germplasm collection and distribution. USDA distributed seeds to farmers for free, encouraging growers to save and share seed and to experiment with any crop that could become economically important to US agriculture. With the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, land grant universities began to establish regional seed breeding programs. While these breeding programs furthered the base of scientific knowledge around plant breeding and led to significant increases in yields, farmers were slowly pushed out of their historical role as the primary stakeholders in seed saving and development.

Although free seed distribution programs were immensely popular among farmers, emerging private seed breeders and horticulturalists lobbied the federal government to end the program in 1924. The shift toward commercialization of seed began in earnest.

Among the most pivotal changes to growing crops was the development of corn hybrids in the first decades of the 20th century and the subsequent commercialization of hybrid corn in the 1930s. For the first time, seed-saving for a staple crop began to be infeasible, and private breeding became paramount. This marked another distinct point of transition to the professionalization of seed breeding. The resulting 20th century trend was toward decreasing control of seedstock by growers and more and more breeding by land-grant university researchers and–especially toward the end of the 20th century–by large transnational corporations. Such changes reduced the overall resilience of the agroecological system.

Seed Breeding Commercialization and Food System Resilience

As corporations increasingly became the main seed breeders and therefore the arbiters of available seed, the diversity of seed options steadily declined, with substantial impacts on overall crop diversity.

Robust, diverse food systems rely on varied seed to respond to challenges like pests and disease, but also to respond to the increasingly challenging conditions created by climate change. The responses to challenges of climate change, including pests and disease, will be most effective if they include perennial crops. Perennial crops, many of which have deeper roots, offer resilience to drought, flood, and disease more so than annual crops. Moreover, they have more potential to contribute to greenhouse gas mitigation via carbon sequestration. By expanding the diversity of our seed system, seed and planting stock for perennial systems will also be an important element of building resilience.

However, given the substantial shift away from public seed research and toward a corporate-driven research agenda, along with the consequently common focus on production of genetically modified organisms, the approach to climate mitigation and adaptation in seed breeding has been narrowly focused. For example, identifying drought tolerance characteristics offers some opportunity to decrease the stress on certain crops. However, given the wide range of new stressors on crops, from shifting pest pressures, smoke stress, and increasingly high temperatures, to more stochastic spring and fall freeze events, a much more holistic and comprehensive approach to seed breeding is needed.

A better system would allow farmers to diversify the range of species they produce. This would further enable farmers to drastically cut pesticide use and increase habitat availability for a wide range of species. This diversity helps build more resilient farms as compared to farms where only a single trait of a single species is altered.

In other words, effectively responding to present and future climate challenges means thinking ahead about the seeds we will use in a much broader light than is possible under the dominance of corporate breeders. Identifying the traits that work with weather impacts like heat, drought, floods, and smoke is important. But part of that adaptability comes from having multiple different species of both plants and animals in the same space. For example, farmers in highly variable climates like Niger succeed best by having a range of species and varieties mixed across the landscape so that every year something will thrive. Moreover, the needed shift away from industrial farming means identifying effective mixes of crops that produce nutrients in place. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions means moving away from the use of high-energy and polluting nitrogenous fertilizers. Diverse plants and manure must take their place. We can look to the many species that represented the exclusive sources of nitrogen and other nutrients for farming in use before 1950 and especially in prior centuries.

However, the move away from a focus on corporate breeding, to one that incorporates more climate-adaptive and culturally relevant crops, requires understanding the system that brought us to this point.

The Corporate Consolidation of Seed Breeding

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Over the past decades, we have seen a hyper consolidation of the seed market with over 50% of seed sales coming from companies that are owned by four large biotechnology corporations. Source: Philip H. Howard

Above, we discussed the transitions in seed breeding that occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the shift from farmer-led seed saving to private breeding companies. Yet, the early private seed industry bears little resemblance to the commodified industry we see dominating farming today. Small and regionally-based private seed companies acted mainly as breeders of regional seed and distributors of publicly developed seed varieties. In contrast, today’s dominant players genetically engineer and mass produce seed alongside complementary inputs including fertilizers and pesticides. This is seen repeatedly with major field crop seed corporations selling corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, and alfalfa.

In the 1930’s, as the market shifted toward hybrid varieties with desirable traits, companies developed exclusive cultivars. The increased demand for agricultural exports generated by World War II, and with continued research breakthroughs, led to the mass acceptance of hybridized seed. Moreover, in the wake of the war, the Marshall Plan converted bomb factories to fertilizer factories, rapidly creating an entire system of hybrid seeds and manufactured inputs upon which farmers rapidly became reliant.

Though plants and seed were historically interpreted to be products of nature and thus, not patentable per existing patent law, the American Association of Nurserymen successfully lobbied the federal government to pass the Plant Patent Act of 1930. This became the first statute allowing biological materials to be patented, though this applied only to unique asexually reproducing plants. You can see the difference between the two patent types in their definitions:

Utility Patent: The right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing the invention. May be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.

Plant Patent: May be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

For decades, USDA and Congress remained hesitant to extend patents to sexually reproducing plants, fearing that patents on seeds would lead to market concentration and less innovation. However in 1970, in the face of mounting pressure from burgeoning seed companies, Congress passed the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA). Under the PVPA, breeders could obtain a Plant Variety Protection Certificate (PVPC) for new varieties. Farmers, land grant universities, and other seed companies were still allowed to save seed protected with PVPCs, but they could no longer sell the seed to other farmers except under license from the PVPC owner. Seed companies and breeders could still freely use protected varieties as parent material in their own breeding programs. Evidence suggests that in its first decade, the PVPA actually increased the number of distinct plant varieties available to farmers, but this arrangement did not last.