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    The Story of Seeds: Think Global, Act Local
    The Story of Seeds: Think Global, Act Local
    The Story of Seeds: Think Global, Act Local
    Ebook201 pages1 hour

    The Story of Seeds: Think Global, Act Local

    By Nancy F. Castaldo

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Something as small as a seed can have a worldwide impact. Did you know there are top-secret seed vaults hidden throughout the world? And once a seed disappears, that’s it—it’s gone forever? With the growth of genetically modified foods, the use of many seeds is dwindling—of 80,000 edible plants, only about 150 are being cultivated. With a global cast of men and women, scientists and laypeople, and photographic documentation, Nancy Castaldo chronicles where our food comes from, and more importantly, where it is going as she digs deeper into the importance of seeds in our world. This empowering book also calls young adult readers to action with suggestions as to how they can preserve the variety of one of our most valuable food sources through simple everyday actions. Readers of Michael Pollen will enjoy the depth and fascinatingly intricate social economy of seeds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 23, 2016
    ISBN9780544320253
    The Story of Seeds: Think Global, Act Local
    Author

    Nancy F. Castaldo

    Nancy F. Castaldo has written nonfiction children's books about our planet for more than 20 years. As an environmental educator, she hopes to empower more young readers with her books about the Earth. She is based in Chatham, New York.

    Read more from Nancy F. Castaldo

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    • 4/5
      This is a beautiful book full of color photos, but more importantly, colorful accounts of "seed warriors" around the world who are intent on preserving the purity of the world's seed population for the future of our food source. In clear language and careful explanation and definition, Castaldo uses this book as an educational platform for kids -- it's a juvenile nonfiction book -- though certainly relevant and informative for adults. There is a lot of history here, as well as global economics and agriculture, but all very accessible. Looking at Mendel's study of genetics and then moving into 20th century crises like WWII (Nazis were as intent on stealing seeds as they were in stealing art) and bio-engineering, many individuals who have heroically defended seeds with their lives and livelihood are highlighted and extolled. There are seed vaults and seed libraries and an impressive 21st century movement to return to natural whole foods and natural means of creating them, as well as finding ways for crop equity around the world. The book ends with a Call to Action for steps average people can take to make a difference, as well as 5 pages of resources to learn more.

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    The Story of Seeds - Nancy F. Castaldo

    Copyright © 2016 by Nancy F. Castaldo

    All rights reserved. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by HMH Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2016.

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    hmhbooks.com

    All photos by Nancy F. Castaldo except p. i (corn) Siede Preis/Getty Images; pp. iii, 115–19 (sprouts) Filipe B. Varela/Shutterstock; p. iv, v (dirt + sprout) Organics Media Library/Alamy; p. vii (oak leaf) Alistair Scott/Alamy; pp. 1 and throughout (sunflower seed pile) Igor Dutina/iStockphoto; pp. 7, 11, 16 (stamps from author’s collection); p. 14 Lucie A. Castaldo (photo of author); p. 30 Dr. Luigi Guarino; p. 36, 47–48 Library of Congress; pp. 121–22 (pod) Lepas2004/iStockphoto; p. 123 (soybean seeds) Photodisc/Getty Images

    ISBN 978-0-544-32023-9 hardcover

    ISBN 978-0-358-12017-9 paperback

    eISBN 978-0-544-32025-3

    v2.1219

    TO ALL THE SEEDY FOLKS I’VE ENCOUNTERED IN THE BUCKET BRIGADE!

    —N.F.C.

    To see things in the seed, that is genius.

    —Lao Tzu

    CHAPTER ONE

    Seeds at Risk

    You spit a watermelon seed onto your plate, wishing your slice were seedless. You flick the black dots into the trash before loading the dishwasher. They’re garbage, right?

    But what if your sweet slice were from the very last watermelon in the world? Would you still spit out the seeds into the trash—or would you risk your life to save each one? Fortunately, you don’t have to make that choice and watermelons are not crucial to our survival, not even on a hot day. But what if it weren’t watermelons that were threatened? What if it were one of our priority crops, like wheat, corn, rice, or potatoes? What if you were facing a great famine, like they did in Ireland? Now the stakes would be higher. Would you face danger to save any of their seeds?

    We’re in the midst of a seed crisis. Every day new headlines jump at us. Seeds are facing many threats. And when they are threatened, our food supply is also at risk.

    It may sound crazy, even improbable, but there are scientists who are risking their lives every day for seeds. It’s true, and they’ve been doing it for years.

    Scientists, such as the Russian seed collector Nikolai Vavilov, have recognized the importance of seeds and have given their lives to protect one of our planet’s greatest treasures. There are people throughout the world who are striving to defend and protect our seeds. Some plant them. Some share them. Some smuggle them. Some save them. All are working toward keeping the diversity of our seeds alive and well.

    Jubilee bush watermelon.

    Field corn harvest.

    SEED CRISIS

    Although war takes its toll on agriculture and seeds, it isn’t the only challenge facing them. Climate change, overexploitation, bioterrorism, and modern agriculture practices are threatening our seeds and decreasing our agricultural biological diversity (agrobiodiversity).

    SCIENTISTS RISK LIVES, EARN AWARD

    The scientists of Syria’s ICARDA genebank received the prestigious Gregor Mendel Award in March of 2015 for risking their lives to preserve almost 150,000 seed samples during the civil war in Syria. Most of those samples are safe at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault now!

    According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, some 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost since the 1900s because farmers have chosen to abandon their local crop species for genetically uniform, high-yielding ones. More than 90 percent of crop varieties are no longer being farmed.

    Of 300,000 species of edible plants, only about 150 to 200 are being cultivated, only eight are traded throughout the world, and half of our calories come from just three—rice, maize, and wheat. According to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, 23 percent of the calories we live on and consume in every country comes from wheat. Our diversity is shrinking fast. The world’s seeds are in crisis.

    Small farmers struggle against large farms.

    CHAPTER TWO

    Seed Pioneers

    Any dictionary can provide you with the definition of a seed. It’s a small object that is produced by a plant so that a new plant can grow. But that definition doesn’t begin to describe how important these tiny little objects are and why people have been willing to protect them.

    A seed holds all the genetic information for a plant. Many seeds can be eaten just as they are, like corn and chestnuts. Others are planted and provide us with the fruits, vegetables, and medicines we need to survive. Those plants help maintain our atmosphere. They take in carbon dioxide and provide us with the oxygen we breathe. In addition, think of all the creatures that also need seeds or the plant they produce to survive.

    Seeds equal life.

    SEED

    Similar to an egg, a seed or kernel is covered by a seed coat for protection and houses a fertilized plant ovule that constains a tiny embryonic plant and nutrition.

    Thousands of years ago, humans were hunter-gatherers. Although there were hundreds of thousands of fresh fruits, nuts, vegetables, and grains growing at that time, we would hardly recognize many of them. Take corn, for example. It wasn’t always the tasty cob treat we eat today. It started out as just a single kernel wrapped in its own husk.

    The domestication that began with the sowing of seeds moved humans away from hunting and gathering and into harvesting. Most of the seeds that existed then had adapted to breaking open and dropping to the ground with a breeze or a brush of an animal’s tail. The plant’s survival depended on its ability to spread its seeds.

    Chestnuts in their prickly husks.

    But humans changed that when they began to harvest and plant. They gathered seeds that remained on the plants and were able to be collected. Season after season humans planted and harvested.

    After many, many years those seeds became the domesticated varieties we have today, and they are genetically different from their wild counterparts.

    The ancient art of growing food from seeds has undergone many changes. Family farming has developed into a large, mechanized, high-tech business with emphasis on feeding growing populations. How did agriculture become what it is today?

    Early farm at the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

    Let’s take a look back at a few of the pioneers who gave us the fundamentals of the science of agriculture.

    GREGOR MENDEL, THE MONK IN THE GARDEN

    Humans have been creating variations of plants for hundreds of years. It all started with peas. Do you have your mom’s eyes? Or your father’s dark hair? We don’t give a second thought to accepting the principles of inheritance. We now know that we have genes that carry traits from parent to child, but inheritance was once a mystery. We can thank a nineteenth-century monk by the name of Gregor Mendel for our early knowledge of genetics.

    Mendel was born Johann Mendel on July 22, 1822, on his family’s farm in what was then Austria. He excelled at school and following his graduation went on to study physics and math. His father expected him to return to the family farm after graduation, but instead Mendel joined the Augustinian order of monks at Saint Thomas’s Abbey in Brno and was given the name Gregor.

    The monastery did not shut him out from the world, but rather enlightened him through its extensive library and the research and teaching of its monks. He furthered his studies of mathematics and physics under the direction of Christian Doppler, and also began studies in botany at the University of Vienna. When he returned to the monastery he taught and began to conduct his own research.

    And Mendel did not stray too far from farming. He chose to work with peas in the monastery garden of Saint Thomas’s Abbey. They were perfect for his research because peas are able to pollinate themselves. The anthers holding the pollen and the stigma, which receives the pollen, are enclosed in an envelope of petals, preventing outside pollination by insects and wind. This is why pea plants are exactly like their parent plants.

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