Plant a Seed and Watch it Grow with Frank Morton, Oregon plant breeder
Frank Morton selects seeds for his company, Wild Garden Seed, based in Philomath, Oregon. Photo by Karen Morton
PLANT A SEED, WATCH IT GROW
With Frank Morton
By Kathleen Bauer
For Spring 2008
In early December 2007, the Marys River overran its banks and flooded the fields of Gathering Together Farm, where Frank Morton grows his seed crop. But as he walked through the areas where his plants had been under two or three feet of water, he saw it as an opportunity to discover which of his lettuce and chard varieties best tolerate flooded conditions.
Plus, he said, “If it goes under water for a month, all the grass and cover crop drown. When the water recedes, the lettuce jumps up and starts to grow, weed free!”
This self-described “obsessive-compulsive seed-head” and plant breeder started thinking about propagating his own seeds when he noticed a single red oakleaf lettuce among thousands of green oakleaf “Salad Bowl” lettuces in his field. He realized that a green lettuce and a red romaine heirloom had crossed to make an individual red “Salad Bowl” lettuce.
Frank kept the seed, and from that single lettuce cross came a range of biodiversity: red oakleaf, green “oakleaf romaine,” and everything in between. This led to both the realization that over time, farmers have become fully separated from their seed sources, and the epiphany that farmers could reverse that trend.
“It was like, ‘Wow, if I keep doing this, in 20 years I could have a seed company selling seed that had been developed on my own farm,’” he recalled.
Things progressed to the next level when John Navazio, a nationally known plant breeder and friend, said, “Frank, those seeds you have are going to be really valuable in about ten years.” Morton laughed, and Navazio said, “No, I’m serious.” Navazio then demonstrated how to do scientific field trials to find the plants with the best genetics. What followed was a three-year trial to determine which of 40 varieties of heirloom lettuce had the most resistance to sclerotinia and downy mildew, common diseases that can ruin as much as 50 percent of a farmer’s crop.
As a young boy, Morton was fascinated by the chemistry of toxins, though it wasn’t until college that he connected this early passion to farming. In 1977 as part of an environmental study group from Lewis & Clark College, he visited a farm in Oregon’s Coast Range. “This farmer and some of his friends were the ones who had brought suit against the Forest Service over spraying dioxin-tainted 2,4,5-T as part of forest practices,” he said. “They had taken the Forest Service to court and shut down the spraying in the Pacific Northwest.”
He was so impressed with “the farmers’ knowledge, independence, courage, innovation, and grasp of things that the population at large did not know,” that he decided to become a farmer.
He heard about gardening innovator John Jeavons, who had written a how-to book for home gardeners that promoted small-scale bio-intensive methods. The book became Morton’s bible, and he rented an isolated farm in Coos County to apply Jeavons’ methods, learning to make his own high-test compost and selling vegetables to local stores.
From there he joined Entheos Mountain Agriculture in Washington, which was converting a 40-acre clear-cut on the side of a mountain into a working farm. There he met his future wife, Karen, who was developing orchards for the community. Karen was a devotee of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution, the polar opposite of Jeavons’ intensive, controlled methods.
Photo by Karen Morton
The two left Entheos after several years and bought property in Philomath. They started Wild Garden Seed with a merging of the two philosophies. In 1994, Frank and Karen printed a catalog as a way to get their seeds to market, and made it a policy never to allow seed companies to buy exclusive rights to sell their seeds. In this way they’ve been able to add hundreds of their own varieties to the larger market, including some of the most whimsically named, like “Hyper Red Rumple Waved” kale and “Flashy Trout Back” romaine.
A typical description from their catalog exemplifies Morton’s lyrical and improvisational side. This is the description of “Olga,” a new romaine he introduced in 2006: “She’s a big, blonde-green beauty with broadly rumpled leaves holding a big blanched heart. Kind of soft for a romaine; a little butter in her background, I’d bet.” Morton described “Anuenue,” a new head lettuce, as, “a sweet green header from Hawaii, of all places. Can you hear the winds sing ‘ah-new-ee-new-ee’ as a rainbow arches over your paradise?”
Whimsical at times, Morton is dead serious when it comes to the key role that plant breeders and farmers play in growing our food.
He sums up the development of agriculture in four seemingly simple steps. Step one: Save seeds from your favorite plants. Step two: Re-sow those seeds in a seed bed. Step three: Keep the seeds from your most productive plants. Step four: Resow those seeds in a seed bed. Keep selecting for every change that increases yield and usability.
“If you repeat that process 400 times you can go from a big bushy grass to a primitive corn,” he explained. “You do it 400 more times, that primitive corn can be adapted from Chile to Minnesota, from sea level to 10,000 feet elevation.”
Historically, seeds traveled by passing through farmers’ hands wherever they went. Farmers helped adapt seeds to their new environments in order to increase yield. Eventually local seed companies were founded that pre-selected seeds adapted to their locations. Then those local companies were bought by larger seed companies that adapted the seed for regional and then national distribution.
Today the breeding for carrots is done in Yuma, Arizona, and the seeds for broccoli come from the fog belt along California’s coast. The large seed companies also started developing inbred lines from what had previously been open-pollinated (OP) varieties, or varieties pollinated between plants by wind or insects without human intervention. These inbred lines became the parents of modern high-yielding hybrids. (A hybrid is an offspring of parents from different species. Two organisms are crossed with different desirable characteristics with the premise that the offspring will possess more of the desirable characteristics.)
“This concept that hybrids would always give you higher yields began to be firmly ingrained into the farmer’s mindset,” Morton said. The drive to use hybrids was exacerbated by the virtual abandonment of OP-varietal maintenance. Without ongoing selection, the OP-varieties in the seed market became inferior remnants of their former incarnations. So, comparative trials usually favored the hybrid version.
This was followed by the Plant Variety Protection Act, enacted in 1970 and recently updated, which makes it illegal for farmers to save and replant “protected” seeds. Instead, they have to buy new seeds or pay a license fee to replant them. (The Plant Variety Protection Act as defined on Wikipedia.)
Now most of the big seed companies have been bought by global conglomerates like Bayer, Syngenta, Dow and Monsanto, which, according to Morton, are developing seeds not just to feed people but to deliver products in the form of genes from non-plant sources that have been inserted into the genome of a crop plant, making them patentable.
He charges that the rise of large conglomerates has caused “the erosion of genetic diversity, as small regions drop whatever genetics they may have developed themselves.” And, he added, “A hundred generations after somebody thought of the concept of hybrid corn, we have genetically modified organisms (GMOs). That is, corn that is not even all corn.”
When genetic diversity is lost and OP-varieties are replaced by fewer and fewer varieties of biologically engineered plants that have a narrower spectrum of genes, a country’s crop could be wiped out by a single disease. That is why small seed companies, seed banks, and home gardeners working with heirloom varieties are so important. They maintain the genetic diversity that might provide the genetics for resistance to such a devastating disease.
And in the meantime, we have Frank Morton, who will continue to plant a seed and watch it grow.
Kathleen Bauer is a writer and blogger at goodstuffnw.blogspot.com. She lives in Portland with her husband, son, two Corgis and a big red cat.
Read this Portland Tribune (2/12/08) article that features Frank Morton: Modified sweet beet seeds leave many sour: Groups sue USDA over environmental impact of variety that is resistant to herbicide
HOW TO SAVE YOUR OWN SEEDS
To save your own vegetable seeds, start with the easiest ones first, like beans, lettuce, peas, and peppers. There are lots of resources available online when you’re ready to move up to tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, melons, spinach, squash, and beyond!
Beans and peas: Allow developed pods to dry until brown in a cool, dry location. Split and remove by hand.
Lettuce: Allow plant to flower and go to seed. Cut top of plant and hang upside down in paper bag. Shake heads or rub between your hands to remove seeds that don’t fall off by themselves.
Peppers: Cut the bottom off the pepper. Strip out seeds in center. Allow to dry in cool, dry location.
Store your harvested seeds in individual envelopes in a cool, dry place.
