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Garden Advice

What’s In a Seed: Open-Pollinated vs. Hybrid vs. GM

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If you’ve found your way to the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange blog, you probably have at least the basic knowledge that not all seeds or seed companies are the same. However, if you’re new to gardening, you may not understand what makes seeds different. In this post, we’ll discuss open-pollinated, hybrid, and genetically modified seeds. We’ll also touch on heirlooms seeds and what makes them special. 

Open-Pollinated

Open-pollinated refers to how the seeds are bred. In an open-pollinated system, plants are pollinated by other plants of the same variety, creating seed that will produce “true to type” or display the same characteristics each season. 

This type of seed makes up most of the seeds we carry at Southern Exposure. Many of the open-pollinated varieties we carry are also heirlooms, but we’ll get into that later.

Open pollination is the oldest method of plant breeding and is generally done by isolating a crop. Typically, a crop is isolated from other varieties by distance. However, they can also be isolated in greenhouses or by time or technical methods.

At Southern Exposure, we believe everyone has the right to save seed and grow food. Open-pollinated varieties allow gardeners and farmers to save seeds from their own crops. This helps adapt varieties to their local growing conditions and encourages food sovereignty.

When you save seed from only the best 50% of the plants, you can improve the variety over time. Learn more about what seed growers look for when choosing plants in our post, Selecting Plant Characteristics.

Hybrid

Hybrid also refers to a type of breeding. Two open-pollinated varieties are grown side by side. Using hand pollination, corn detasseling, or another technical method, growers ensure that every seed has received pollen from one breed (the father) and is grown on a distinctly different breed (the mother).

The seed from that breeding process is what’s known as an F1 hybrid. If F1 hybrids are grown and bred with each other, the resulting seed is known as an F2 hybrid. 

F1 hybrids often display what’s known as hybrid vigor. This means they may display better vigor, disease resistance, earliness, or other characteristics than their open-pollinated parents. Unfortunately, while the F1 generation is typically very uniform, the F2 generation often displays wide variation in traits. 

This wide variation in the F2 generation is the biggest drawback with hybrids. It means that seed saved from hybrids isn’t reliable, forcing growers to purchase from seed companies each year.

As I mentioned in my previous post, 8 Steps to Saving Corn Seed, we carry a few hybrid sweet corns. Hybrids can be helpful for market growers and farmers because of their uniform harvest time. That said, 98% of the seed we carry is open-pollinated (and hybrids are clearly marked) because we believe being able to produce your own seed is essential.

GM

GM stands for genetic modification. It’s the process of creating seeds by taking a gene, through laboratory means, from one species and implanting it into another species where it would have never naturally occurred. 

At Southern Exposure, we have many concerns about these types of seeds. GM seeds cannot be saved year to year, meaning that gardeners and farmers must rely on the big companies that produce them and have the financial ability to purchase new seeds each year. 

These huge companies produce just a few varieties which are now grown all over the United States. The switch to just these few varieties has significantly decreased seed biodiversity. This loss in biodiversity has negatively impacted our food system and could have unknown ramifications in the future. As we lose biodiversity, we may be losing genetics resistant to certain diseases or that could handle the effects of climate change better. It’s also a loss of culture.

“The number one threat to seed biodiversity: corporate takeover of commercial seeds by major chemical/biotechnology companies.” – The Center for Food Safety

GM seeds also come with other drawbacks. Many GM varieties are specifically designed to be grown in combination with chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. These chemicals negatively impact farmers’ health and force them to rely on these companies even more. They also harm water quality, wildlife, and soil health.

Many studies have also shown that these crops are detrimental to our health. The chemical herbicides and pesticides don’t just wash off; they make it into consumers’ systems. These crops also tend to have lower nutritional values than those open-pollinated varieties grown in gardens and on small farms.

In 2011, Southern Exposure joined nine other members of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and over 80 total plaintiffs in taking a stand for the protection of organic seed. Plaintiffs include agricultural organizations, seed companies and farmers. Read more about this landmark lawsuit here.

So What’s an Heirloom?

There’s no official definition of an heirloom. Heirlooms are just open-pollinated varieties that have been saved for generations. At Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, we consider those open-pollinated varieties bred before 1940 to be heirlooms. 

We love heirlooms for many reasons. First is their incredible flavor. Farmers and gardeners saved heirlooms year after year primarily because they tasted good. Sure, there were other considerations such as size, storage ability, and earliness, but generally, vegetables that didn’t taste great weren’t saved.

Many modern varieties and hybrids, on the other hand, also have to meet other standards. They must be uniform, ship, and store well, and be easy to grow. This is a great thing for large growers, but as anyone whose eaten a supermarket tomato will tell you, it’s not always great for their flavor.

Heirlooms are also important parts of our culture and heritage, help diversify our diets, can be adapted to our local growing conditions, and much more. Read more about why we love heirlooms here.

What Should You Do?

So, now you understand the importance of open-pollinated and heirloom seeds. You can support and join the movement of growers, foodies, and activists working to protect these varieties.

This year, if you’re growing a garden, we encourage you to choose open-pollinated varieties and try saving seed. We created a list of 22 reasons you should save seed in 2022!

Then you can share seed with others. Go to seed swaps or share some of your favorite open-pollinated varieties with neighbors and friends. You could even try to sell some seed and earn a little extra cash from your garden.

Lastly, even if you don’t have the space for a large garden, you can support those who do. Visit your local farmers market and ask if anyone has any heirlooms for you to try or encourage your local community garden to grow and save seed from open-pollinated varieties. 

Garden Advice

Why Open Pollination

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This post is based on a short speech that Sapphyre Miria of Commonwealth Seeds and I gave at the Charlottesville Gaia Gathering in May of last year.

Cowpeas (a.k.a. southern peas or field peas) dry on a string in a home pantry, at a scale appropriate to home seed-saving or food preservation.

Preserving seed for the next season has been a fundamental rule of survival throughout human history. And yet in our time, dependence on commodified seed is a huge insecurity to our local food systems. Almost all seed prior to the 1930’s was organic, regionally adapted and open-pollinated (non-hybrid). American seed companies first arose in the latter half of the 19th century, but in 1940, most farmers and gardeners still knew how to save seeds of most or all of the vegetables, herbs, flowers, and other plants that they grew.  When they traded and shared these seeds with their neighbors, they passed the knowledge along, too.

A variety stewarded in this way has a genetic makeup suited to the local traditions and the local growing conditions. This adaptation of seed stocks allowed for a diverse, secure food supply in each region.

This began to change with the advent of hybrid corn varieties in the 1930’s. With outcrossing crops like corn, onions, and broccoli, hybrid vigor is a significant factor, and that’s why we carry two hybrid sweet corns, a hybrid broccoli, and a hybrid onion, in addition to about 800 open-pollinated varieties.  However, around 1940, farmers started trading in their ability to save next season’s seed, adapted to their growing conditions, for seeds purchased from a seed company and promises of better yields. In the years since, using hybrids (which don’t come true to type if you plant seed you’ve saved) has become standard practice even for plant types that don’t benefit from hybrid vigor — and most don’t.

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, farmers and gardeners continued to lose their seed-saving knowledge and their stewarded varieties.  Industrial food systems replaced local food systems just as industrial seed systems replaced local seed systems. Throughout this process, seed has moved away from being the held in common by humankind, and joined the long list of resources appropriated by the private sector.

The results have been devastating. Most farming in the United States today relies on proprietary seed stocks, whether simply hybrid (F1), or plant variety protected (PVP – a limited patent), or genetically modified (GMO), the most extreme form of seed privatization.

The seed industry is now dominated by a handful of transnational biotechnology/chemical firms with 60% of the world’s commercial seed owned by 5 companies. What’s worse is that these corporations have no interest in supporting sustainable organic agriculture or organic crop breeding.  In fact, their profits rest on breeding crops that rely on agricultural chemicals, which they also sell. They have much to gain by commandeering the seed supply through market consolidation, discontinuing more seed varieties with each corporate merger, and leaving fewer varieties available to organic farmers.

Chemical companies have been buying out seed companies for decades.

 

Hybrids and other newer varieties are generally bred for shippability, appearance, and the ability to perform well in high-input, chemical-intensive monocultures.  Even universities sometimes patent varieties and sell exclusive rights to monopolize those varieties.

This privatization has led to increased reliance on hybrid seed stocks, and also to a loss in the amount of open pollinated varieties available, and also a loss of their quality, suitability and traceability. Most commercial dry seed production takes place where the climate suits the seed production, like the Pacific Northwest and Israel. That’s great in some ways, but how will those varieties grow in an opposite climate like the southeastern United States? Colorado is a good place to produce squash seed without much of the disease pressure experienced in more humid climates. But over the long run those seed stocks are not likely to hold up as well to Downy Mildew and Bacterial Wilt.

Mainstream, conventional agriculture produces increased rates of various diseases in people, too.  In this country we have epidemics of obesity and diabetes, despite increased advice on what, and how much, to eat. Once in a while, conventional breeders select for higher nutrient content, but it seems that every decade there are significant changes in which nutrients we’re told to pay attention to.  Likewise, disease resistance and regional adaptation are sometimes, but rarely, prioritized by modern vegetable breeders.

The political landscape surrounding seed is dire and reveals the vulnerability in our local food systems. Yet, there exist many seeds of potential to turn the tide of corporate control over our food supply, and to return food sovereignty to the hands of the people.  Communities that prioritize local spending, farmer co-operatives, food hubs, farmers’ markets and CSAs are also becoming the breeding grounds for a new local, organic, open-pollinated seed movement.  In Central Virginia, Common Wealth Seed Growers and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange are working together to create a robust seed system that meets regional needs. We’re creating access to well stewarded, source-transparent, regionally adapted, GMO-free, organic, open-pollinated seed varieties. Common Wealth grows, saves, cleans and packs all of the seed they sell, and also maintains several in-progress breeding projects.  This year Southern Exposure is partnering with Common Wealth and adding three of their best-performing varieties to our collection.

Cucumbers from a trial conducted by Common Wealth Seed Growers

At Southern Exposure, we are working with over 60 small farmers who grow seeds.  For 2018, we’ve increased our source transparency: all the seeds grown on the small farms in our seed grower network now have an “S” symbol.  This replaces the “e” symbol that had a similar meaning, but that we only used for seed that’s not also certified organic.

We offer some varieties recently bred for organic production, but we focus on heirloom varieties, which have stood the test of time. They have been passed down from generation to generation.  The heirlooms we carry (marked with the hourglass symbol in our catalog and on our website) have also stood the test of our trial gardens.  Some of the heirlooms we offer might disappear if we didn’t offer them. Heirlooms are often less uniform than newer varieties, in part because the uniformity that industrial farmers seek can be a disadvantage to home gardeners. For example, when you’re growing for your own kitchen, you don’t want all your broccoli to mature in the same week.

Alabama Blue collards, a variety with lots of genetic variation

Together, Common Wealth and Southern Exposure grow and test new and old varieties in our trials and collaborate to expand the number of trials we can do during a growing season. We are building local and regional networks of skilled organic seed producers, and teaching seed-saving techniques to farmers and gardeners. We practice ongoing selection under organic conditions.  This work is an essential piece of the larger mission of creating an agricultural system that produces foods that nourish us deeply.