Cultivating response: Peasant seed and plant–human collaboration in an agro-industrial heartland

Using Donna Haraway’s notion of “response-ability”, or the cultivation of the capacity for response, this paper seeks to understand seed saving and plant breeding as politically and ethically charged modes of interspecies communication. In Brittany, France, a region known for its industrial-scale fresh vegetable production, peasant farmers and organic plant breeders question the modernist plant breeding and agro-industrial paradigm, cross-pollinating ideas to produce new understandings of genotype-environment interaction, biodiversity and heredity. Plant liveliness is understood as politically transformative, constitutive of an agriculture that supports peasant farmer and crop plant creativity and self-determination. In contrast to F1 hybrids, open-pollinated semences paysannes (peasant seed) retain the ability to respond to environmental changes, adapt and evolve over (human and plant) generations. Farmers must in turn engage specific modes of attention, interpreting plant expressions and shaping future generations through rouging and crossing, selecting and saving, watching and learning from their crops. Mutual response is the foundation of interdependence, in which nonconspecific partners adjust to one another’s ways of being and doing in order to labor together. In remaining response-able, farmers reckon with the liveliness and agential capacities of plants, qualities that work against their subsumption into factory-like methods of cultivation. These communicative practices hint at the radical potential for interspecies resistance to monoculture within plant breeding and cultivation, practices that are so often molded by the interests of agro-industrial capital.

Capturing the Narratives of Sustainable Farming: Study of Marginal Women Farmers in Five Districts of Odisha

This article presents an analysis of field research on sustainable farming practices in five districts of Odisha, that have emerged as a response to the adversities created by modern industrial agriculture and agribusiness market. The capital and chemical-intensive farming have left a legacy of irreparable environmental damage; and the monocultures have led to the gradual disappearance of a variety of indigenous crops, causing erosion of the seed sovereignty. 1 The first section of the article engages with the critique of increasing monopolisation of the food and farming systems, secured in a systematic and structured way by the forces of global agribusiness conglomerates. The second section captures the initiatives in which marginal women farmers are trying to revive seed saving and natural farming that had been lost due to the green revolution. These field investigations illuminate the exemplary ways in which such initiatives are empowering women farmers and enabling them to reclaim food security 2 and seed sovereignty in the current milieu of agrarian distress. Such grassroots engagements show the possibility of emancipatory politics outside the formal institutional framework that are structuring the alternative discourse rooted in local agroecology. 3

Seed saving in Atlantic Canada: Sustainable food through sharing and education

Seed saving is an important element of seed security. Seed saving can support biodiversity, nourish food systems, facilitate environmental education, and enable the creation of networks that support food sovereignty. Public interest in seed security is on the rise, but local resources and funding to support seed activities is limited. The survival of seed collections, libraries, banks, and farms depends on personal relationships within the seed community. While Atlantic Canada’s seed saving community is scattered geographically, it is tightly knit. Seed savers share knowledge, information, and tools, sometimes between competitor businesses. At times, information is shared between those with commercial interests, such as seed companies, and public events such as seed swaps, as individual success is contingent on the overall health of the seed system. In this field report, we synthesize findings from three case studies on seed saving in Atlantic Canada, which map regional seed activities, and detail the opportunities and challenges that such initiatives face. While Atlantic Canada has seen growth in the number and scale of both public and private seed saving initiatives, much work remains to be done. Nevertheless, the initiatives constitute a critical mass that can benefit from this assessment upon which future actions can be based.