The story begins with two kernels of Painted Mountain corn, dried, shriveled and hard enough to break a tooth on.   Hold them in your hand.  They are virtually weightless.  Place the seeds in rich, fertile soil, and wait for signs of green.   Care for your plants, keep pests at a distance, ensure pollination, and at the end of the season you will have two five-foot stalks of corn with about three ears on each.  Each ear will have approximately 350 kernels – a hodgepodge of vivid reds, blues, silvers, oranges, yellows and purples. 

            The story continues.  Remove all the kernels from the ears of corn you’ve grown.  Now, next season, plant each new kernel in rich, fertile soil, keep pests at a distance, ensure pollination.  At the end of this season, if you are lucky, you will have approximately 2100 stalks of corn, each with three ears, and each ear with 350 kernels.  Repeat this process the next year, and if all goes well, by the end of this third growing season, you will have enough seed to plant 2.2 million stalks – each unique, with no two ears containing the same color combination.  Repeat the process another year and another; and after five years of production, you will have enough to meet the current world-wide consumption of corn – 600 times over.

            Battered plastic sandwich bags, old yogurt containers and small brownish-yellow envelopes cover the hardwood floor at the Dharmalaya Yoga Center in Eugene, Oregon.  Each of these small containers is filled with seeds.  One plastic bag is packed tight with millions of gossamer brown threads, as small and light as dust; another contains a mix of big black speckled beans and dirty-white beans shaped like kidneys; another is filled with round flakes, tissue-paper thin, with just the hint of a bulge in the center.  There are seeds that look like blow-darts, seeds that could easily be mistaken for pebbles, almond-shaped seeds with white stripes running from base to tip.  

            The packages on the floor contain more than 100 varieties of seed – all of them collected by Oregon gardeners and farmers at the end of the growing season.  The gardeners have brought their bounty to participate in a seed swap, a gathering organized to distribute seeds locally and non-commercially.  “Seed swap” is a slight misnomer, for the gardeners and farmers do not trade seed pound-for-pound or seed-for-seed.  The exchange is idiosyncratic: Participants take seed based on their interest and need, not on how much seed they brought to the gathering.  Seed swaps build communities of gardeners by bringing together experience, expertise and resources.  They are nothing new; arguably, farmers and gardeners have been informally exchanging seed since the advent of agriculture.  But the current incarnation of swaps has its roots in a newer and more political ideology linked to the current organic food movement: a desire for more localized control and knowledge of the food we eat.

            Nicholas Routledge, the organizer of this swap, is a prominent figure among the agri-activists in Eugene and one of three central figures who founded the collective Food Not Lawns in 1999.  The organization began setting up community gardens, initiating education programs and building sustainable communities.  Recently, the organization has become less centralized, and the focus has shifted towards seed stewardship (the process of cultivating plants and saving seeds).   

            A bag of inch-long dried stems and flowers of the California Poppy sits on a mug-ringed table in Nicholas Routledge’s three-room apartment.  Along one wall of the apartment, a line of mottled Painted Mountain corn cobs, yellow, orange, and blue, and are suspended by a rough piece of twine.  Routledge takes out a healthy pinch of the poppy, a plant many consider a weed, and drops it into a tea strainer which he submerges in the boiling water of his mug.  He watches the tea steep for a moment.  “We’re not gardening for escapism, he says in a soft British accent. “We’re gardening because we’re deeply political animals.  We’re gardening because we think it’s the most effective, pragmatic, and hard-hitting form of personal and social transformation we can engage in.”

            Self-sufficiency, environmental sustainability and preservation of biodiversity are at the heart of these political beliefs.  Seed stewardship is the belief turned into action.

            The seed industry has followed an economic pattern similar to other industries in the United States and around the world: concentration.  With multi-national companies buying out smaller seed supply houses, Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta (all agro-chemical corporations) now control nearly twenty-five percent of the world’s total seed supply.  Genetically modified crops (varieties which include the genes of other species to increase favorable traits in plants), terminator crops (varieties genetically modified to produce sterile seeds) and the patenting of specific plant types all pose a serious risk to the world’s food supply.  These developments force farmers to be dependent on just a few corporations for their livelihood.  “What you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies,” Robert Farley, Monsanto’s agricultural sectors co-president, said in 1996.  “It’s really a consolidation of the entire food chain.”