Seed Money, Part II
Employing an ancient human technology to reinvigorate agricultural biodiversity
The Seed Temple
Read Seed Money part I here.
My great great grandchildren / ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
- Drew Dellinger, Hieroglyphic Stairway
Agricultural biodiversity has shrunk an alarming degree over the last century, and what’s lost goes well beyond epicurean variety. What’s lost are microclimatically adapted varieties and, therefore, what’s lost is agricultural resilience, something we could use now more than ever as temperatures rise along with incidents of flood, drought, crop disease and pests.
In the middle of the last century, university-based plant breeders like Colorado State University’s Dr. Donald Denna kept extensive collections of regionally adapted seed and worked them into the public domain, but it’s a fading art.
Denna’s own teacher, Dr. Henry Munger at Cornell University, was a preeminent plant breeder credited with over 50 cucumber varieties. It’s estimated that more than half of the carrots grown in the U.S. and Europe today can be traced back to Munger’s breeding in the mid-1950s. A 1995 seedsave.org biography says Munger “lamented the toll that agricultural biotechnology was having on traditional plant breeding by diverting funding and students away from conventional plant breeding. He is proof that traditional plant breeding methods work, are productive, and yield economically viable plant varieties.”
One of Denna’s students, Dr. Brent Loy, 75 years old and approaching his 50th year at the University of New Hampshire when I interviewed him in 2015, has released over 60 varieties into the market. But these men — even Denna back in the 1970s — are holdouts to an older way of breeding.
Indeed, says Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance’s Bill McDorman, bio-tech research dollars outpace public monies 70-to-one, putting an end to public breeding programs and contributing to what he identifies as “extreme monocropping.” “We had probably 2,000 varieties of corn growing in the United States in 1900 and today we’ve got one company that owns genetics on probably 90 percent of the corn planted,” he says. With climate change and political storms, we’re realizing that bio-regionalized grain and vegetable varieties are increasingly important in reducing inputs and shortening supply chains. “Now we wake up and go ‘Oh wow, all that diversity would’ve been really good, and most of it’s gone.’”
“Now we wake up and go ‘Oh wow, all that diversity would’ve been really good, and most of it’s gone.’” — Bill McDorman, Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance
Bioregionalization of agricultural varieties was a diminishing art form even in the second half of the 20th century. To call it an extinction — perhaps a controlled extinction — would not be exaggeration. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that diversity of traditional agricultural varieties has been reduced by over 90 percent in the last century with uniform varieties now being grown across the globe irrespective of microclimatic differences.
Even back in the 1970s, as genetics became a keener part of plant breeding research, Denna’s practical breeding was on the minority end of the spectrum, giving way to more theoretical approaches that prove a concept and then hand off the development of crop-ready seed to private industry. Today’s seed companies are decreasingly dependent on any university-level research.
Denna’s plant breeding and seed collecting came to a sudden close with his unexpected death in 1975 (see Seed Money, Part I). The bigger surprise is how CSU’s breeding program sunsetted along with Denna’s demise. “It’s so emblematic of what we’ve done as a species in the last two generations,” says McDorman. “We’ve had all these treasures that it took 10,000 years to create and in two generations 96 percent of them are gone! And they ended up in garages and cabinets like the Denna collection.”
McDorman doesn’t know if the Denna seeds have value, but this forgotten chest represents much of what agriculture has forgotten over the last few decades. “Every single variety in that collection may be priceless … great varieties from when humanity was still paying attention to things that worked in each region.”
By mid-2015, McDorman, with his newly founded Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, was ready to dedicate resources to assisting Penn Parmenter, the unwitting custodian of the collection, in curating the Denna seeds. The seeds were moved to Sawtooth Botanical Garden in Ketchum, Idaho where samples underwent germination testing and preliminary cataloguing. Now they must be trialed to see what grows and what genetic or commercial value it has.
Of the tens of thousands of packets, some are originals, brought in from plant introduction stations. The vast majority are crosses: often dozens of micro-variations of the same original. A meticulous scientist, all were saved, not just the effective ones. In fact, there’s no evidence any of the crosses were effective.
Furthermore, Penn Parmenter acknowledges, “when the seed is just sitting there, it’s not improving, it’s not changing with the climate, and when it comes out it has to catch up.”
Westcliffe, Colorado, April 2016
I drive up the grade, a steep dirt and mud road leading out of Colorado’s Cañon City, gaining 3,000 feet in elevation in a single mile-and-a-half stretch. I’m alone, engulfed in a darkening, snow-filled canyon. The blue-white dusk is interrupted occasionally by red-brown stone walls around me. Endless waves of coniferous trees droop with dollops and folds of snow, armloads of thick, white woolen blankets.
The slick brown road turns to a firm crunch, frozen ridges of chocolatey slush scratching the belly of my car. Low clouds hug the hilltops above. Steep canyon walls give way to widening valleys. A languid creek zig-zags across the valley floor and two or three dozen deer in snow-covered grey-brown, watch me pass.
I get to the Parmenter’s as Penn assembles pizzas in a kitchen that has been halfway resuscitated since last year: new stove and new refrigerator in opposite corners, old sink and old shelving inhabiting the others. I walk with Penn’s husband Cord through the gardens — a distance equivalent to two or three city blocks — to the larger of their two greenhouses and fill a bag with salad greens.
After dinner, 13-year-old Wulfgar heads a hundred feet up the hill to his 100-square-foot cabin: a detached bedroom that has served each of the three Parmenter boys successively. A mini-binge of Modern Family episodes follows for the adults and then I stretch out on the twin guest bed in the living room while Penn sits a few feet away organizing Seed Savers Exchange seeds — several envelopes to be mailed to other savers, traders and growers around the country.
In the morning, after leaving Wulfgar clear instructions for his three days alone on the mountain (including feeding the cats, horses and himself, and getting on the school bus by 7:15 on Monday), we pack the Parmenter’s 4runner for a drive six hours further south to the small town of Estancia, New Mexico to visit a seed temple, its visionary and caretaker, Grandmother Flordemayo, and seed keeper Greg Schoen.
While a child in central America, Flordemayo was identified within her Mayan community as a curandera espiritu, or divine healer. She is a founding member of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. In 2012, a series of visions guided her to build a seed vault and temple near her home, a library of agricultural biodiversity for future generations. The project took nine months to complete, she says. “The period of time of one human gestation.”
Today the temple holds a growing seed collection to be stored, grown out, shared and replenished in perpetuity, for future generations to find the regional biodiversity nearly lost by recent generations. Flordemayo, the primary caretaker, prays over the seeds. Three seed keepers curate and maintain the collection.
Don Denna is leading us here, posthumously and inadvertently. Last year, after testing and cataloguing in Idaho, the Sawtooth Botanical Gardens’ seed vault cooling system failed and the Denna seeds found temporary safe keeping in this vault 900 miles south.
As Cord drives, Penn and I catch up on some facts. She tells me about the seeds’ uncautious journey north to Idaho and her feelings of fear and loss as soon as they’d left her care. I catch her up on the history I’ve collected since we last talked. I tell her about Dr. Loy at UNH, I tell her about Dr. Fenny Dane, a PhD candidate under Denna at the time of his death, and I tell her that every expert I’ve spoken with assumes seed this old will no longer be germinable. Further, I tell her, Dr. Loy predicts the collection — even if viable — would have no particular value today. What Denna was aiming for in the early 1970s may no longer be relevant.
Penn takes in the new information with characteristic humility and excitement, editorializing along the way (“She was totally in love with him!” she says about Fenny Dane, “how couldn’t she be? She was his student, he was brilliant and handsome!”). And she accepts disappointing plot twists when I tell her that Dane has no recollection of a chest of that magnitude anywhere in the horticultural department — and certainly not in Denna’s office. Maybe these aren’t even Denna’s seeds.
She’s unconcerned about the ‘dead seeds.’ She grew a few herself, and Sawtooth performed Tetrazolium Chloride testing on many revealing 60–80 percent viability. As for them being useless? Yup, she says, “even at the botanical gardens up in Ketchum, everyone was like, ‘Penn don’t get your hopes up, you’re probably not going to find something rare.’” Even as she’s emotionally invested, she maintains an ability to remain unattached, embodying a responsibility to the seeds rather than an expectation of them. “I’m like, ‘y’know what? Just to wake some of this seed up and grow it out is a cool thing,” she says.
“I can feel them,” she continues. “There’s this other level of understanding about seed that a university professor may not be tapped into, and that is the magic, the secret, the spirituality, the tapping into the earth and the cycles and things we cannot slap science on. That’s what’s going on with this collection. There’s all kinds of life in there that’s talking to me and I took it very seriously to be the steward of this seed.”
“There’s this other level of understanding about seed that a university professor may not be tapped into, and that is the magic, the secret, the spirituality, the tapping into the earth and the cycles and things we cannot slap science on. That’s what’s going on with this collection.”
She conveys one of Bill McDorman’s stories: “He shows us these Hopis that have been growing this corn with no water and no fertilizer in the same place for a thousand years, and he showed us pictures of 10-foot tall corn growing out of pure sand — not even salt bush growing. And he goes, ‘What do you fertilize with?’ ‘We don’t fertilize.’ ‘What do you water with?’ ‘We don’t water.’ ‘What do you do?’ ‘We sing to the seed.’
“They plant it 10-inches deep,” she continues, repeating for emphasis: “10-inches deep in the sand with no water, and it grows 10-feet tall. And they sing. Bill asks, ‘How do you select?’ as he holds the cob in his hand, ‘look this cob isn’t perfect, there are imperfect kernels on here, how do you select?’ and he goes, ‘Select? They are all my children. I don’t understand…’”
She gives an astonished laugh. “There’re things we just don’t get to understand that they understand. They have a different relationship with seed.”
Parmenter is unboastful as she acknowledges she has some of that relationship, too. “Obviously I have a connection with the seed or I couldn’t wake up a 60-year-old seed. I don’t mean I have magical powers; I mean I’m paying attention and I’m listening and I feel in an intuitive way. Those things are living, breathing embryos. They’re created to live and breathe in that perfect shell.
“Don’t tell me you can’t wake up a seed. Give it to me, I’ll wake its ass up! I have done it. I can will them to come.” She recalls planting some of Denna’s tomatoes. “The whole flat was up but there’s a bare spot: keep watering it, keep talking to it and five weeks later, there it was!”
“Did you sing to it?” I ask.
“No singing,” she says, “because I didn’t know about the singing yet. But when I had glass gem corn and I couldn’t get it to fruition I danced naked because that’s the only thing I could think to do that would be ceremonial.”
“Did it work?”
She laughs. “Nope.”
Estancia, New Mexico, April 2016
Cord Parmenter pulls the 4runner on to a dirt road in windy, flat open land. Fences cut the land into individual properties, but it’s not evident if or how the land is being used by the property owners.
Two more turns and we enter the circular drive of the seed temple property. As we step out of the car, the desolate howl of wind greets us and unique characteristics of this property present themselves. First, a giant amorphous rock-turned-fountain forms a centerpiece. This, we will learn, is the grandmother rock forming a water temple. Five six-foot-tall upright “grandfather rocks” form a circle around it. On one side of the circle is a sunken fire temple and on the other is the seed temple — itself an unassuming single-room box home in characteristic New Mexican orange clay exterior beneath a blue corrugated roof.
The central architectural feature is an octagonal hogan — a Navajo-inspired dwelling, this one built of strawbale. The hogan is the only structure that predates Grandmother Flordemayo’s ownership of the land, though it was uninhabitable when she acquired it. It now houses a kitchen, bathroom (a single bathroom with a commercially manufactured “women” sign on it), an altar and Flordemayo’s office.
After we unpack some of our belongings into the hogan and the airstream camper in which I’ll sleep, Flordemayo, dressed in white linen, dons a red wool felt jacket and shows us the seed vault: a cool cinderblock-framed basement beneath the seed temple. Chrome shelving lines the walls and a central aisle. The shelves, only about one-third full at this point, house mason jars full of colorful seeds in vibrant contrast to the dull grey of the concrete walls. Near the vault’s entrance are the Rubbermaid bins full of the seeds that brought us here: what might be the lifelong breeding collection of Donald W. Denna.
Penn Parmenter approaches the stack, lays her arms across them and begins to cry. “They’re here. They’re ok,” she says. “I can feel it.”
“They are nine feet deep in the belly of the mother,” Grandmother Flordemayo says reassuringly. “What could be better?”
Seed Money in its entirety was a nonfiction finalist in the 2017 Iowa Review Awards.