Bring Food Home: Scaling Up Ecological Seed Production in Canada

A couple of us from the Seeds of Diversity Office in Waterloo had the pleasure of attending this year’s Bring Food Home Conference put on by Sustain Ontario. The conference theme, “Building Bridges Together” was an acknowledgement of the need to bring together individuals and organizations from diverse sectors to generate action on food and farm issues. One of the sessions brought together a panel of commercial and non-profit leaders in local seed production to highlight different market development strategies and explore barriers to scaling up ecologically produced vegetable seed in Canada.

While backyard gardeners have a variety of choices for acquiring Canadian-grown seed from small , local seed companies; commercial scale ecological vegetable farmers in Canada procure almost all of their seed from international sources. For the most part, even seed purchased from larger Canadian seed companies is grown and developed outside of Canada. There was strong agreement across the panel that – especially with the looming challenges of climate change – there is a growing awareness of the need for secure, regionally-adapted and organically grown seed sources in this country.

This year, the Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security launched a series of programs to support the development of local seed production at a commercial scale. Local growers have been exploring various ways of scaling up production to increase the amount of seed available in the bulk quantities required by farmers, but there are a number of challenges they face:

• Appropriate technology for larger scale seed harvesting, cleaning, storing and packaging
• Sufficient space on small farms for production, processing and storage
• The need for large isolation distances for some crops (e.g. squash or spinach) which greatly limits the number of varieties that can be grown out in a single year
• Difficulty of attaining open pollinated seed for some vegetables (e.g. broccoli) which are currently available almost solely as hybrids for commercial varieties
• Lack of incentive when higher profits can be made selling vegetables as food rather than investing the additional time & labour to produce seed

Additionally, Daniel Brisebois pointed out that, in order to become an effective commercial seed producer, one must first become a skilful vegetable grower familiar with the specific crop qualities required by market gardeners. This makes for a long learning period, one season at a time.

Despite challenges, panellists expressed commitment to the expansion process and are beginning to work more intentionally with commercial market gardeners to identify high-demand crop varieties to grow in larger quantities. They have also been developing alliances and cooperatives for knowledge sharing and internal seed trade.  Seeds of Diversity continues to contribute to the process by banking local seed which is then available for future varietal development.

...for more information follow the Bauta Initiative at www.seedsecurity.ca.

Workshop Speakers: Aabir Dey, Regional Program Coordinator (Ontario), Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security; Kim Delaney, Commercial Seed Producer, Hawthorne Farm; Cory Eichman, Vegetable Farmer & Seed Saver, Saugeen River CSA; Daniel Brisebois, Vegetable Farmer & Seed Producer, Tourne-Sol Cooperative Farm; Bob Wildfong, Executive Director, Seeds of Diversity Canada

Back to November 2013 Newsletter