Organic Seed Alliance received a grant from Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) to develop breeding populations for organic broccoli, sweet corn, and red kale. OSA resarcher Micaela Colley worked on these populations on active organic farms, with strong involvement from farmers as well as OSA staff and university researchers. OSA believes in Participatory Plant Breeding as it is decentralized, and recognizes the value, knowledge and skills of farmers in adapting germplasm to their agronomic and market needs. OFRF's Winter Issue 2010 has a nice summary of the project with profiles of each farmer.

Article:  On-farm seed breeding projects help farmers develop desirable crop traits

        

Andrew Rodman, editor of In Good Tilth, recently interviewed Organic Seed Alliance founders John Navazio and Matthew Dillon to discuss emerging trends, obstacles and successes in the organic seed sector. Read what they had to say about continued difficulty with availability of organic seed, contamination from genetically engineered crops, and the importance of evaluating and breeding varieties for organic conditions.

Full Article:  Seedy Fellows Talking Shop

        

Cooking Up a Story is a fantastic web site that serves up video interviews, explorations, and other programming on food and farm related topics. The quality of their videos - both technically and in content - are fantastic. Check through their archive, but first make a stop at their interviews with Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed (and OSA board member) regarding why he approached Organic Seed Alliance and Center for Food Safety with his concerns regarding the risks of GE contamination to organic beet and chard seed crops.

Two videos including a visit to Frank's fields.
Video Link 1:  Seeds of Life: David vs. Goliath
Video Link 2:  Seeds of Life: Beta vulgaris

        

The Natural Food Merchandiser recently did an interview with Matthew Dillon on founding of OSA, farmers' roles in seed systems, and seed integrity. The audio interview can be found here.

        

        

Great news for plaintiffs Organic Seed Alliance, High Mowing Seed, Sierra Club, Center for Food Safety, and the farmers and consumers we represent. And big thanks to our lawyers at Earth Justice and Center for Food Safety.

September  21, 2009,  Federal District Court Judge White ruled that USDA-APHIS agreed with plaintiffs that USDA-APHIS violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failingto prepare an Environmental Impact Statement before deregulating RoundUp Ready sugarbeets, based on his finding that APHIS improperly failed to evaluate the impacts, including socio-economic impacts, resulting from possible cross-pollination of conventional sugar beets and Swiss chard and table beets in the Willamette Valley. The remedy phase of the case will occur on October 30.

Organic seed is the foundation of organic farming and organic food integrity. We must continue to protect this natural resource, along with the rights of organic farmers to be protected from negative economic impact from GE crops, and consumers rights' to choose to eat food free of GE components.

We'll keep you informed as we learn more.  For now, here is a section from Judge White's ruling:

"In light of the large distances pollen can travel by wind and the context that seed for sugar beets, Swiss chard, and table beets are primarily grown in one valley in Oregon, Plaintiffs have demonstrated that deregulation may significantly effect the environment.

As the court concluded in Geertson Seed Farms v. Johanns, this Court finds that the potential elimination of  farmer’s choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer’s choice to eat non genetically engineered food, and an action that potentially eliminates or reduces the availability of a particular plant has a significant effect on the human environment. “APHIS’s reasons for concluding that the potential for the transmission of the genetically engineered gene is not significant are not ‘convincing’ and do not demonstrate the ‘hard look’ that NEPA requires.

Because APHIS concluded that it was not required to consider the effects of gene transmission and observed the lack of evidence regarding an organic beet seed market, it did not consider the effects of gene transmission on conventional farmers and consumers of sugar beet seed or of gene transmission to the related crops of to red table beets and Swiss chard. To the limited extent APHIS did examine this issue, it did so only on a cursory level. It did not consider the fact that the isolation distances are only voluntary. It did not examine whether the isolation distances were actually followed and likely to be followed in the future. Nor did APHIS analyze, in light of the evidence that pollen may travel significant distances, whether the isolation distances set by the Oregon Seed Certification Standards are sufficient to protect the non-genetically engineered crops. Moreover, there is no support in the record for APHIS conclusion that non-trangenic sugar beet will likely still be sold and will be available to those who wish to plant it and that farmers purchasing seed will know whether it is transgenic because it will be marked and labeled as glyphosate tolerant. Therefore, the Court finds that APHIS’s finding of no significant impact was not supported by a convincing statement of reasons and thus was unreasonable. APHIS is required to prepare an EIS."

 

        

Once again an organic crop has been contaminated by a genetically engineered crop. This time the European Commission's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed found the GE traits in German flax seed that came out of Canada.  The Organic Trade Association of Canada reports that "the GE flax in question, called ‘Triffid,’ was designed specifically to withstand applications of synthetic chemical pesticides."

When will the organic community say ENOUGH! BASTA! GENUG! ASSEZ!  In the US alone organic sales are over $25 Billion dollars annually. We are no longer a marginal voice, but we must be a unified voice. It's time to put pressure on our politicians to protect our basic freedom to operate an organic farm or business.

The Biotech community has been granted the freedom to operate without accountability, and yet we lack the basic rights of protection of private property (which agriculture products are) that are the foundation of western law. This goes against the basic conventions of good and bad neighbor agreements in which a neighbor who damage the private property of another neighbor, either by direct or indirect actions of their person or property (including biological entities such as animals and plants) is responsible for those damages. There is an immense historical record in common law and tort law that backs this position.

Organic Seed Alliance will be hosting a meeting of the organic community to discuss contamination issues this winter at our State or Organic Seed Symposium. We will discuss how to work as a community to address the contamination in organic systems, and develop action plans for maintaining the integrity of organic seed and food systems. Look for updates on the State of Organic Seed Report and Symposium on our web site soon on the Advocacy Page.

        

It's been a busy couple of weeks for OSA on a Southwest Seed Tour, with four events taking us from Santa Fe, NM to the Boulder, CO area. Over the next week I'll post several updates on these events.

The first stop along the way was the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) conference on organic breeding. Three OSA staff were involved in discussions with a very diverse group of participants. Plant breeders from Iran, the Philippines, Korea, Agrican and European nations, and the Americas met to share their approach to breeding for organic systems, discuss concerns related to the development of plant and animal genetic resources, and promote biodiversity and social justice in breeding systems.

OSA's Education and Research Director, Micaela Colley, co-chaired a session on "Evolutionary Breeding" that included a presentation from our Senior Plant Breeder - Dr. John Navazio. John presented OSA's approach to breeding for heterogeneous environments - farming systems that wide ranging variability in conditions including disease and pest pressure, fertility, and climatic conditions. The conventional breeding approach of selecting for very narrow uniformity does not work well in these variable environments, and so OSA's approach is to breed for elasticity, resilience, and responsiveness to variability while still maintaining "relative" uniformity.  John gave a great example of this work with a drought tolerant zucchini with deep roots to scavenge nutrients and a morphological structure that is resistant to the impact of high winds.

OSA's Director of Advocacy, Matthew Dillon, presented on Protoplast Fusion techniques in organic breeding. A group of European plant breeders (Eco-PB) recently published a report calling for a ban on protoplast fusion based on their definition of it as a form of genetic engineering, and asked for a US response to this.

Protoplast fusion is technique used by vegetable breeders to create male sterile inbred lines that are used in the creation of hybrids, predominantly in brocolli, cauliflower, cabbage, and chicories.  For example:  a radish cell and a cabbage cell are placed in a petri dish. Both cell walls are desolved. The cells fuse and the desirable mitochondrial DNA from the radish which contains thetrait of "male sterility" is transferred to the cabbage. Cell walls are regrown and a plant is grown from tissue culture. This is gene transfer that cannot occur in nature, but because the plants are in the same botanical/taxonomic family it is not considered genetic engineering by European Rules. (The US definition applies only to recombinant DNA).

The fact that this form of gene transfer does not occur in nature is enough to make it an unacceptable technique from the OSA perspective. Additionally, we oppose this breeding technique because it is an evolutionary dead-end. Plant breeders often save seed from other breeders hybrid materials to develop new breeding populations. The protoplast fusion technique results in plants that cannot viably transfer their genetics to the next generation. This is built-in Intellectual Property protection for these companies, even more solid than a patent in that its biologically impossible to use the genetics. We oppose any technique or legal framework that prevents the further of plant genetic diversity and future breeding potential.

It was a great session brainstorming with our European colleagues on how to better address this issue, as seed produced using this technique is currently allowed in organic systems. We'll share a more detailed plan on how to address this and be taking it up in discussion with our Organic Seed Working Group.

Look for more updates on our Southwest Seed Tour next week.

Below, researcher at the IFOAM conference who are past OFRF grant recipients. Photo by Jane Soobey, OFRF>
L-R:  Michael Mazurek, Cornell; Frank Kutka, NDSU; MIguel Altieri, UC Berkeley; Matthew Dillon, OSA; Walter Goldstein, Michael Fields Institute; Charles Martin, New Mexico State

        

Great  interview of OSA's Executive Director on opportunities in organic seed production. OSA staff hosted 3 workshops in Colorado in August and September. More on those events soon,

        

PCC Sound Consumer recently published an article by OSA's Director of Advocacy on the contamination of organic food and organic seed from genetically engineered crops. OSA is working with other organizations and advocates to address this issue, and encourages your support for this work. If we can't protect our foundation seed stock from contamination we can't protect our food. It starts with the seed. For the full article please visit Sound Consumer at:  http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/0909/sc0909-organic-integrity.html