Seed: The Untold Story Page #3

agates, look at this one.

It must be artistic

genius of nature

that allows this to happen.

(soft, relaxing strings music)

I've gotta sleep with this one!

When I was six years old,

my parents asked me what

I wanted for my birthday,

and I said, "Well

I want squash."

I didn't want a G.I. Joe

and I didn't want

a baseball bat,

I wanted squash.

And I wanted those because

I wanted to save the seeds

and grow 'em.

My seeds are my kitchen table.

My seeds are my

way of sharing food

with people all over the world.

I've been to over a

hundred countries,

collecting thousands

and thousands of seeds

Here from Bolivia, looking

like a speckled Robin's egg

This bean here from Tanzania.

One that's coming from Zimbabwe.

A variety raised by the

West Virginia hillbillies.

It's exquisitely sculptured seed

of a trichosanthes

gourd from Vietnam,

The seed is a time capsule.

It's preserving

things from the past

but it's also bringing

things for the future.

And this is, uh.

I feel I have an

obligation to the world,

whether that's

unbalanced or not,

to bring this appreciation

to as big a swath of

humanity as possible.

This tiny little skinny tree

with really large leaves

is in the cacao family,

same plants that

produce chocolate.

And this is just a

distant relative of cacao

that still hasn't

been commercialized.

What if there's all kinds

of other seeds in nature

that have the potential

for food production?

Way down there.

Feel the end of it?

Yeah.

[Man With Scarf]

Can you hold him?

This is what we

just harvested.

(soft, relaxing strings music)

[Patrick] You know that these,

these have been known to

make grown men scream.

They say that you can have

a fever for several days

if they bite.

[Jason] 'Kay, this

is called Pietrina.

And it's for being

used on cuts and sores

and almost has the

look of iodine.

There's about 300,000 species

of plants on the planet.

We come down to 30,000

different edible plants,

You put 'em in your mouth

and just kinda suck on them.

120 are used on a

really regular basis

and most of humanity

subsists on a mere 10.

Beans, corn,

wheat, barley and rice.

Virtually nothing compared

to the bigger picture.

We should put

particular attention

to the seeds of wild plants

and figure out how we can

get those into cultivation

because they're part of

the biodiversity heritage

that will feed the world.

Pick 'em out of

there, Patrick.

[Cameraman]

There's a good one?

So we're getting a meal on

a wild plant here, dali dali,

which is one of the finest

roots in the world to eat.

Top chefs would go

crazy over dali dali,

absolutely crazy over it.

So why don't we grow it more?

[Jason] Back in 1700s,

Thomas Jefferson wanted to

get seeds of risotto rice,

And it was thanks to slyness

that he was able to carry out

some of this contraband seed

and raise it near

Monticello in the new world.

To feed this

expanding continent

that immigrants

were streaming into,

we needed a diversification

of food crops.

In the 1890s,

over a billion packets of

seed were distributed for free

to farmers around the country.

The American Seed

Trade Association

hired the very first lobbyist

to stop the federal "seed

giveaway" as they called it.

They saw seed as a commodity,

something that could be

quantified, measured,

bought, sold, and

traded on stock markets,

just a number on a spreadsheet.

By 1924, the federal government

seed program would cease.

These great

industrialists said

"The only way we can

really make profit

"on American agriculture

is to invent a seed

"that they can't save."

And that gave birth to

the hybrid seed industry.

Hybrids were bigger and

better and produces more.

Success is yield.

Hybrid companies

fueled that fever

to get the biggest and the best.

Corn contests was rampant

throughout the midwest.

You were measured not by how

many times you went to church,

it was how good

of corn you grew.

Everybody was winning

that had hybrid corn!

If you save the seeds from

a hybrid and plant it again,

you get what I call

"Mr. Toad's Wild Ride".

Recessive genes that were

hidden in the parents

express themselves again.

This is like the grandparents,

the grandkids start coming out

with all sorts of weird traits.

A little more like the mom,

a little more like the dad,

like old uncle Harry.

Farmers took it for granted

that we go to a shelf in

a store to buy our seeds.

A profound change 'cause seed

is the beginning of all of it.

If you're relying on

someone else for your seed,

then it's like you're

relying for someone else

on your soul or something.

This is like this is

where it all starts.

To not control that part of it

is a major abdication of

control and responsibility,

and yet we did it wholesale.

It destroyed the

natural seed banks

and the seed practices

of the farmers.

(exhilarating but

melancholy music)

Hybrid corn was the atom

bomb of agriculture.

(bomb rumbles and explodes)

Right after the

Second World War,

the Green Revolution

starts in Mexico.

When you hear about

the Green Revolution,

people sometimes think,

well you know that's

about windmills

and tofu powered sandals

or whatever it is.

The Green in the

Green Revolution

was never about

environmental consciousness.

The Green was meant to be the

opposite of a red revolution.

The visions of the

Rockefeller Foundation

kicked off the Green Revolution.

To provide cheap food,

so that people would

remain capitalism

and would not riot

and become communist.

This is about developing

kinds of seed that matter

for large scale commercial

farmers wherever they are.

The Green Revolution was taking

this rich knowledge

of peasant farming

that evolve over millennia

and tossing into the

dustbin of history,

replacing it with modern

industrial agriculture.

All of sudden,

men in white coats

become the champions

and the sole arbiters of

knowledge about seeds globally.

Seeds of the green revolution,

what are called the

miracles varieties.

They were bred for

taking up more chemicals.

The hungry industry

of war chemicals

wanted to deploy these

chemicals as agrochemicals,

trying to push chemicals

into agriculture.

90% of the seed that

we use to grow our food,

is owned by chemical companies,

by pesticide and by

pharmaceutical companies.

Now there's a huge

conflict of interest.

When the chemical

companies own the seeds,

they not only want you dependent

on the seed as a farmer,

but they also want you

dependent on their chemicals.

We use 80 million pounds

a year of Atrazine,

just in the U.S.

Atrazine's demasculinizing

frogs and fish,

it can completely cause males

to develop into females.

Atrazine leads to

promoting breast cancer.

It's associated with

miscarriages and birth defects.

We should've learned this

lesson way back with DDT.

And we're just learning

it over and over

and over and over

and over again.

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