“….In the early 70’s, my wife and I were living in the extreme NE corner of Iowa. It is really heartwarming to see the cooperation and understanding that is being displayed here.” (From a speech the second day) – “Yesterday was only the second time that I’ve ever spoken before any group, much less a group that’s half scientists, and to tell you the truth I was terrified. This Inventory will either be the vehicle for the preservation of these varieties or it will be a very clear window through which we will watch them disappear.” We are the stewards of this irreplaceable and sacred wealth with which we have been blessed. (holding up the Vegetable Variety Inventory)….is the vegetable gardener’s heritage. The vast majority of the vegetable breeding being done today is for commercial application and such varieties are seldom suited to the needs of the home gardener. “I am a vegetable gardener and I believe that the standard varieties that are available today are the best home garden varieties that we will see. I would like to meet with anyone who wants to work with me in accomplishing this.” I estimate this would be less than 1/3 of the approximately 3,500 non-hybrid vegetable varieties that are still available commercially. I believe that we should place in frozen storage all varieties that are available from only one or two sources. “The Inventory’s most important value is that it will clearly show which varieties are the rarest and in the most danger before they are dropped. The Inventory will also let gardeners search through everything that is available to find varieties that are specifically suited to their climates and problems.” But most gardeners only deal with three or four companies and the Inventory will cover somewhere around 130 companies.

Most times, however, they don’t know that a favorite variety is in danger until it simply doesn’t show up in their catalog one year and they are unable to find another source for it. Many gardeners will buy up varieties if they know that they are in danger of being dropped. It will be valuable to gardeners in two very specific ways. This will be the first time that we will be able to clearly assess what is being dropped and how quickly.

“The Inventory will be valuable in many ways. The Inventory includes variety name, the range of the days to maturity that are represented, a complete description of the variety and a list of all its known sources. “I am presently working on a computerized inventory of all non-hybrid vegetable varieties that are currently available in the United States and Canada. We must stop this short-sighted destruction.” But they are being allowed to die out, due to the economics of the situation, with no systematic effort being made by government agencies or lay organizations to keep them alive or store them. Only the very best make it to the catalogs and each is unique and irreplaceable. Each is the result of millions of years of natural selection, thousands of years of human selection and usually almost a decade of intensive and costly plant breeding and testing. Far from being obsolete or inferior, the varieties being dropped today are literally the cream of our vegetable crops.

But most often that hasn’t been the case during the last 20 years. “During the first half of this century, most deleted varieties had been superseded by superior ones. In many cases the deleted varieties represent the life’s work of several generations within these families and are extremely well adapted to local weather and pests and diseases.” Multinational agrichemical conglomerates are buying out family owned seed companies at a tremendous rate and proceeding to drop their collections of standard varieties in favor of more profitable hybrids and patented varieties. Also the tremendous amount of consolidation going on within the seed industry right now has escalated these losses tremendously. Each year hundreds of vegetable varieties are dropped from seed catalogs not because they aren’t delicious and unique, but because it is only profitable for large seed companies to stock the varieties which sell the most. “During this last year I have turned my attention to the preservation of vegetable varieties that are currently being dropped from commercial availability. I’ll be telling you more about the organization tomorrow, but what I really want to talk to you about today is some work that I have become very interested in recently.” “I’m Kent Whealy and I direct an organization of vegetable gardeners known as the Seed Savers Exchange that maintains and also exchanges heirloom vegetable varieties.

Harvest tucson