This Grounded Conversation Reveals: Where Does “Keeping Seeds with the People” Get Hard?
– Foodthink Says –
The Fifth National Farmers’ Seed Network Annual Conference was held on the first day of 2018, marking both a fresh outlook for the new year and drawing a fitting coda to the China Social Ecology Agriculture (CSA) Conference that had just closed the day before. Farmers set aside the formal tension of the previous days’ proceedings, brought along the seeds they had saved, and shared stories, case studies, and the experience and wisdom they had accumulated in breeding. The singing-and-dancing farmer-friends from the southwest broke into song between exchanges, their mood relaxed yet ardent.
At this year’s CSA Conference, the Farmers’ Seed Network, together with the China Social Ecology Alliance and other organisations, launched the “Have Seeds, Sow Seeds” (yǒu zhǒng yǒu zhòng) initiative. Taken literally, the wordplay carries two meanings regarding seeds—”protection” and “utilisation”—and raises two questions: How can we halt the current loss of seeds and biodiversity? How can old varieties be revived and brought back to life in farmers’ hands within a framework of sustainable agricultural cultivation?
Seeds are the first link in the food chain. The protection and use of seeds have long been a topic close to Foodthink’s heart. We hope this article will help readers better understand the relationship between smallholder ecological agriculture and seed conservation in China today, and even more, that it will let everyone “get their feet on the ground”—see what remarkable achievements farmers have made in this field, and what challenges and questions still remain.
– This is Foodthink’s 32nd post –
This Grounded Conversation Reveals: Where Does “Keeping Seeds with the People” Get Hard?
Author: Foodthink Jun
A Gong Ta, a Mosuo elder of Naxi background from Youmi Village in Lijiang, Yunnan, is a revered Dongba (a Naxi title meaning “sage” or “wise one”). His skin is dark, he wears a deep crimson robe, and a long string of white beads hangs at his neck. A lit lamp rests to his left; in his right hand he holds a small copper rattle. Murmuring prayers written in Dongba pictographic script, A Gong Ta shakes the rattle, offering lamp-light on the first day of the new year to the Naxi gods, the mountain spirits, and the waters of nature, praying for the removal of misfortune from the human world.
A Gong Ta performing a blessing ceremony. Photography | Ding Zhendong (Farmers’ Seed Network)
Prayer text written in Dongba pictographic script. Image source | Ding Zhendong (Farmers’ Seed Network)
This “opening frame” from the Fifth National Farmers’ Seed Network Annual Conference, held in Tongren City, Guizhou Province on 1 January 2018, vividly illustrates the organic connection between germplasm resources, ecological agriculture, and the rich and varied lives, cultures, and beliefs of the villagers. The high-frequency terms that dominated the 9th China Social Ecology Agriculture (CSA) Conference just the day before—Social Ecology Agriculture (CSA, also known as Community-Supported Agriculture), Participatory Mutual Trust System (PGS, also called Participatory Guarantee System), Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB), and other abstract concepts—were translated, at that day’s annual conference, into the precious practical experience and vivid case stories that smallholders from different regions and ethnic groups have gathered at their fieldsides. The information density was enormous.
1
First Hurdle in Breeding: Seeking Crop Diversity
For smallholders, participatory plant breeding and seed conservation carry significant meaning at the livelihood, cultural, and community levels. It can, for instance, broaden the adaptability of crops and guard against livelihood crises caused by a total failure of a single variety; at the same time, seeds are carriers of ethnic customs, food culture, and other dimensions of human ecological diversity. The Farmers’ Seed Network advocates a Community Seed Bank model—in which community members deposit the seeds they have collected into a shared space for registered storage, while making them available for exchange and use among different farmers. This practice of linking ecological agriculture with community self-organisation at both ends effectively treats the preservation and management of seed diversity as a “springboard” for community organisational development. Following this line of thinking, the first hurdle in smallholder breeding is often simply to collect the right seeds in sufficient variety and quantity.
Farmers from various regions and ethnic groups brought the fine seeds they had saved over the past year. Image source | Farmers’ Seed Network
Collecting seeds is no easy task. Guo Wei, a farmer-friend from Changchun, and several friends rented over 30 mu of abandoned land at a forestry station in Heilongjiang, growing mainly Wuchang Daohuaxiang rice and the world-renowned Heilongjiang Golden Soybean. What troubled Guo Wei, however, was that beyond these iconic crops there seemed to be little else to choose from. Long-time and small-scale farmers in local Heilongjiang were becoming increasingly scarce, and crop diversity was dwindling; on top of that, the enormous environmental gap between the northeast and the south meant that many things Guo Wei wanted to grow simply could not be grown. He came to this year’s seed conference with a sliver of hope, looking for old varieties that would suit him.
Cheng Pengfei, a “star” ecological smallholder in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province, faced a similar problem. Over the past year he had put considerable effort into finding a suitable buckwheat variety. Cheng had originally been growing sweet buckwheat, but the processing volume was too small for de-hulling, and large quantities sat piled up in his warehouse: “They (the processing plant) heard I only had eight thousand jin of buckwheat and told me I’d need at least eighty thousand jin before they could process it!” After much asking around, he settled on miqiao buckwheat—a variety that grows only in Ximeng, Yunnan, with exceptionally high nutritional value and that is easy to de-hull and process. The miqiao took root well at Cheng Pengfei’s farm once transplanted from Yunnan. It is said that adding just a pinch of this buckwheat to millet makes the porridge more golden and fragrant.
Tang Yiguo, head of the “Qingcheng Programme” under the Liang Shuming Rural Construction Centre’s Kunshan project, counted his biggest harvest last year as the development of a local variety of foxnut (Euryale ferox), which immediately generated a flood of orders. “Eighty per cent of our foxnut goes to the Kunshan market. There are too many farms around Shanghai, so doing Kunshan works well enough for us—no need to take too big a step.” The farm’s main crop is rice, and a newly planted local specialty variety, “Suyunuo” rice, has also won widespread praise. Unlike the industrialised monoculture of staple rice at large scale, their core product concept is a rice gift box. A twelve-jin box comes with six varieties of organic ecological rice, priced at 350 yuan per box. Thanks to careful planning, their product sold out completely that year.
2
Self-Saved Seed Also Needs “Purity Improvement and Revigoration”
Yao Huifeng, of the Nanyuan Village Rice Cooperative in Yichun, Jiangxi Province, brought everyone a farm “blockbuster” film, documenting a full year of farming scenes in old Nanyuan Village. Nanyuan is a typical ancient village in southern China, with a history of over a thousand years. In the five years since Yao Huifeng, a young returnee, took the lead in establishing the cooperative, more than 1,000 mu of fields in the village have been transformed into ecological rice paddies. In the documentary, the rice paddies of Nanyuan Village look like glowing emerald mirrors, spreading through valleys lined with dark-green primeval forest. The village buildings in the open areas are mostly small houses of three storeys or more, looking tidy and prosperous.
↑ Click to watch the Nanyuan Village four-seasons farming “blockbuster”
With spring sowing and autumn harvest, the Nanyuan Village Cooperative practices unified seeds, unified agricultural inputs, unified planting techniques, unified oversight, and unified purchase. This year the average yield was over 500 jin per mu. Remarkably, seventy to eighty per cent of the rice cooperative’s members are born in the 1970s or 1980s—a complete contrast to the stereotype of Chinese rural areas as heavily aged. Beyond farming, the village organises all kinds of cultural events. Last year they held a folk music festival in the open fields, slaughtered a local pig, and the whole village drank heartily and feasted on great slabs of meat together. President Yao emphasised: “Farming can be a great joy!”
Yao Huifeng and cooperative members in the autumn harvest field, waiting for the combine to finish cutting the rice so they can haul the grain home. Image source | Daoxiang Nanyuan Ecological Rice Cooperative
For President Yao, the difficulty in rice breeding lies in management. In his experience, without centralised oversight and unified seed-saving and breeding, it is very hard to guarantee that each household’s collected seed is of the best quality. Last year, President Yao tried to breed rice at home, buying several dozen large flowerpots to place in his backyard. Unexpectedly, once the seed ripened, the village sparrows ate it all… He had no choice but to try again next year. So far, President Yao and his cooperative partners have collected roughly sixty to seventy varieties of rice seed. “If farmers don’t even know where their seeds come from each year, they will feel no sense of security.” The cooperative places extra emphasis on purity improvement and revigoration techniques for self-saved seed, planning to focus next year on training villagers in seed selection and saving, to raise the seed self-sufficiency rate and to improve both rice yield and quality.
Tang Yiguo, also from the south, mentioned that in the new year he plans to refine his farm’s seed purity improvement and revigoration techniques further. In fact, nearly all the smallholders at the conference spoke about the importance of variety selection and breeding skills. The main technical means currently available to smallholders in breeding are variety introduction, purity improvement and revigoration, and cross-breeding, and expert guidance from scientists is critical to all of them. According to the Farmers’ Seed Network, by the end of 2017 the number of self-saved varieties registered in the network’s community resources database had exceeded 600. However, these are concentrated mainly in the southwest; self-saved varieties along the coast and in the inland are still relatively few. Meanwhile, under the coordination of the Farmers’ Seed Network, over the past decade or more, breeders from the Maize Research Institute and the Rice Research Institute of the Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences have been providing continuous technical guidance to community farmers in Guangxi and Yunnan. Most of these farmers have already begun their own variety selection and breeding, but farmers in other regions who are doing their own variety selection and breeding are still relatively few.
3
“Grain Is Our God”
Scene of community experience summary and exchange. Image source | Foodthink
As in previous years, the Farmers’ Seed Network’s annual conference invited community representatives from many multi-ethnic areas in the southwest, Inner Mongolia, and elsewhere. These places often boast an extraordinarily rich diversity of traditional crops (Guangxi alone holds more than 2,700 registered maize seed resources!), along with generations of accumulated farming experience and wisdom that give smallholders an intimate command of local microclimates and the growth of the crops suited to them. The farmers who came to share spoke about seed conservation, local agriculture, and food culture, their tongues unloosed:
“Thai friends came to visit our village, bringing local ingredients to cook Thai dishes for us, and we made tangyuan (glutinous rice balls) and ciba (pounded sticky-rice cakes) for them to eat.” —Qin Anfu, a Dong-ethnicity returnee youth from Sanjiang, Guangxi
“Some old-variety seeds may not taste the best, but they can be processed into many different products. For instance, some rice varieties make wine with a very high yield, and you can also make steamed rice cake and rice noodles from them.” —Huang Yinglian, community representative from Sancha, Guangxi
“Throughout the process of growing ecological millet, my greatest realisation has been that our Aohan culture is very much still here, yet local farmers do not value it—there is a lack of identification with it.” —Liu Haiqing, Xinglongwa Millet Cooperative, Aohan Banner, Inner Mongolia
“The farmers there (the Potato Park in Peru) never leave or abandon the land they protect; they keep every single traditional variety without exception and are also growing new varieties suited to local conditions. They have saved over 4,600 varieties of potato of their own—I think they are truly remarkable!” —Zhang Xiuyun, representative from Baoshan Stone City, Lijiang, Yunnan
“Our ancestors were originally a nomadic people. Riding horses and carrying swords, they came to the river valleys, settled down, and began growing rice, maize, and wheat. On the grassland, cattle and sheep were the gods who nourished our lives; now, grain is our god.” —He Jixian, a villager from Wumu Village, Lijiang, Yunnan
……
Zhang Xiuyun, a skilled breeder from Baoshan Stone City in Lijiang, Yunnan, went to Peru in 2014 on an exchange visit and brought back seeds of the famous purple-white maize. But this maize did not adapt to Yunnan’s soil and climate, and the crop was a resounding failure: the stalks grew too tall and the cobs were far too sparse. Yet this could not daunt her, with her wealth of breeding experience: “Even if it produces only a single kernel, I will save the seed.” This Naxi woman set about improving her growing techniques. Stone City is a mountain terraced area, and the villagers are intimately familiar with the prevailing winds in their surroundings. Xiuyun replanted the purple-white maize in more sheltered, wind-protected areas, greatly reducing the risk of the tall stalks lodging. At the same time, she tried cross-breeding the purple-white maize with “Guinuo 2006,” a star variety also bred by local smallholders in Yunnan.
Gradually, the purple-white maize stalks, which had once shot up to 2.89 metres, were brought down to a normal height of 1.7 metres; and when the dry, starchy texture of the Peruvian maize was combined with the soft, glutinous local variety, the result was surprisingly more palatable! Now the newly harvested crop of this “hybrid maize” is plump, tasty, and ready for planting in the new year.
In April last year, Xiuyun returned to Cusco, Peru, to share this breeding story at an international conference. The warm attention and praise it received from fellow Peruvian farmers filled her with pride and a deep sense of achievement.
Zhang Xiuyun is a skilled breeder in the area, with much insight into smallholder cultivation of traditional varieties. Photography | Foodthink Jun
The A Gong Ta of Youmi Village, in addition to performing the Naxi blessing ritual at the opening, also introduced the village’s various blessing activities throughout the year—most of them centred on agricultural production and daily life:
“On the 30th of the eleventh lunar month we do a big clean in the morning—clear the stove, pots, bowls, and ladles, press the bean curd, prepare the New Year’s Eve dinner… After the meal, the Dongba uses roasted flour to shape three hundred and sixty great gods. On the first day, at the first cockerel’s crow, we light the sky incense… On the thirteenth we circumambulate the mountain, praying to the mountain god for protection, bountiful harvests, and blessings for people and livestock. The first day of the first lunar month is the great New Year; we must pay New Year’s respects to all the Dongba in the village. On the fifteenth of the first month we worship the great and small mountain gods; in the second month, the ritual for the nature spirits; on the thirteenth of the third month, the Women’s Bathing Festival; in the fourth month, tasting the new wheat; in the sixth month, ancestor worship; in the tenth month, admiring the new rice; and then the winter blessings.”
The petite Qin Guizhen, a Dong-ethnicity young woman, carries the steady, meticulous bearing of a female entrepreneur. Photography | Foodthink Jun
Qin Guizhen (Guigui), a bearer of Dong embroidery, said the “old seed” she brought this time is the craft of Dong embroidery itself. In her home town of Tongle Township, a population of about 50,000, there are nearly 10,000 embroiderers! Her Qinghua Embroidery Workshop employs over 600 people, with an annual output value of more than five million yuan, supporting over 80 poverty-stricken households locally and increasing their income by more than two million yuan.
Guigui’s role model in life is her own grandmother, for her grandmother not only masters the unique Dong embroidery techniques but also practices Dong paper-cutting: “My grandmother took our Dong paper-cutting to the ultimate! In the entire village, she is the only one who can cut these traditional patterns.”
Guigui’s grandmother can cut traditional Dong paper-cutting patterns. Image source | Qin Guizhen (Farmers’ Seed Network)
Although chemical agriculture and its associated large-scale monoculture methods carry a powerful force of disruption against traditional farming, in remote, smallholder-dense areas they often have limited impact, hampered by complex terrain or relatively fragmented land ownership. Song Yiqing, a senior researcher at the Research Centre for Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has long been working in China’s southwest, doing old-seed conservation alongside local villagers. In an interview with Foodthink, she said: “When you truly go deep into these places, you come to understand that agriculture is a living, holistic system. From the food, clothing, shelter, and transport of local residents to their spiritual culture and beliefs, every link is connected; none can exist in isolation from the others.”
Therefore, from this vantage point, the value of a seed is measured not only in economic or biological terms; the everyday life that each “old seed” threads through—be it food, pastries, wine, embroidery, temple fairs, or blessing and ancestral rites—should all be regarded as part of ecological and cultural “diversity.”
4
Who is responsible for maintaining the “publicness” of seeds?
He Jixian, a villager representative from Wumu Village in Lijiang, Yunnan, said that in the past the village had various “home-grown methods” for tackling breeding problems. Wheat and broad beans, for instance, were varieties that villagers routinely bartered—trading between different planting seasons and between villages at different altitudes within the community.
Dongba He Jixian from Wumu Village not only shared agricultural production experience but also composed a poem on the spot. Photography | Foodthink Jun
Like farmers in other parts of the world, the people of Wumu Village have, over thousands of years of cultivation, developed traditions of breeding, discovering, exchanging, and sharing seeds, safeguarding seed diversity and even laying the foundations for the modern seed industry. Yet today, as industrialised monoculture continues to expand, the farmers who once held rich seed knowledge have seen their identity and skills rendered irrelevant, pushed to the very bottom of the long commercial food chain, and stripped of their rights to freely access and share seeds. Seed breeding has gradually shifted from community sharing to the exclusive domain of commercial companies, severing not only the interactive link between farmers and food consumers through rigid principles of commercial division of labour, but also blocking the living evolution and transmission of seed diversity.
As a response to the problems outlined above, the “Farmers’ Seed Network” was formally established in December 2013. It is currently the only organisation in China that works to promote rural sustainable development and smallholder rights from the perspective of seeds. Its core expert members have over 17 years of experience in participatory breeding and community development. The network advances smallholder rights through policy advocacy and community-based practical exploration; one of its core ideas is to call on scientists and research workers to help farmers with breeding, maintaining the publicness of germplasm resources and protecting farmers’ rights.
In an ideal state, “storing seeds among the people” should mean that farmers fully exercise their agency and creativity, working with research institutions on seed saving and breeding. But putting this into practice is far from easy! What was once part of a village’s self-sufficient circular economy now has to be driven by projects, and even requires exhausting every ounce of persuasive effort to convince people.Tang Yiguo’s home city of Kunshan is highly industrialised, and many villagers have switched from farming to factory work. “The residential complex opposite our farm is already selling at 15,000 yuan per square metre! So how do we persuade farmers to give up their factory jobs and come back to the fields?” Qin Anfu, a Dong-ethnicity returnee youth, is running a seed-saving project in the village, but it has been hard to win villagers’ understanding: “They think we’re running a pyramid scheme. They say the taro is really tasty, but if I grow too much I can’t eat it all, and what if I can’t sell it?”
Zhang Lanying, director of the Liang Shuming Rural Construction Centre, has also observed in Guangxi that the price of rice seed from companies rises every year, yet the price of agricultural products increases far less. A very practical problem: the old varieties that farmers painstakingly breed and grow, if they cannot form a proper interaction and connection with the market, if they cannot be “realised in value,” it is hard for genuine transmission to occur, and the so-called “publicness” easily becomes empty talk.
Chang Tianle, the convener of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market (abbreviated “the Market”), proposed a concept at the annual conference—”let farmers be the heroes of the city.” If there is a platform that allows farmers to bypass the layers of exploitative intermediaries, make friends directly with consumers, build their own brands, and convert their labour and knowledge into a real part of the product’s price—then farmers can earn enough income to support their lives, and consumers understand where their food comes from, fostering a sense of empathy between them.
A recent survey by Chang Tianle found that the level of income that truly generates interest and confidence in ecological agriculture for farmers is in the range of 30,000 to 60,000 yuan per year, that is, a monthly income of a little over 2,000 to 5,000 yuan. Image source | Farmers’ Seed Network
These alternatives that shorten the food chain and attempt to restructure the relationship between food producers and consumers—including working frameworks such as “Community-Supported Agriculture” (CSA) and “Participatory Guarantee System” (PGS)—can all be seen as a new form of organisational relationship. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, professor at Wageningen University and author of The New Peasantry, believes that this organisational relationship is a form of resistance to the current global food empire and corporate agriculture, or rather, an attempt at reconstruction. It is “ubiquitous, diverse in form, attractive and mobilising. It reconnects people, activities, and futures.”
The protection of old seeds can flourish in these new types of relationships, without relying solely on external (expert) forces. Cheng Pengfei in Zhangjiakou, Hebei, fully leverages platforms like farmers’ markets to understand consumer demands, growing both local traditional varieties and trying imported organic seeds, to great acclaim. He is now affectionately called “Brother Cheng” by consumers. Tang Yiguo in Kunshan uses a nearby 6,000-year-old rice-culture archaeological site to carry out food-education work, while simultaneously encouraging local villagers to register germplasm resources, persuading them that Kunshan has agriculture, has old seeds. Qin Anfu hopes to use the village temple fair in the new year to hold old-seed exchange activities. Yang Liping of Que Niao Community in Guizhou, with support from community organisations like the seed network, is working on the regeneration of local old varieties and indigenous ingredients, hoping to improve the village soil and attract more young people to settle in the village.
Various indigenous food ingredients developed by Que Niao Community | Yang Liping / Farmers’ Seed Network
As a representative of Que Niao Community, Yang Liping attended the 7th International Slow Food Congress held in Chengdu last year. The indigenous ingredients they developed were also selected and collected by the global food-resources directory, the “Ark of Taste.” Image source | Gu Lei
There are also young people brewing more mainstream commercial plans around the issue of old-seed conservation and development. Li Gaofu, a Hani-ethnicity youth who calls himself “the No. 1 in red rice,” presented a full “SWOT analysis” of his red rice project at the annual conference. His original plan was to attract commercial investment and use market orientation to expand production scale. But after connecting with the Seed Network this year, he feels this type of platform is more meaningful, and wants to strengthen interaction and dialogue with communities in the future, while stepping up efforts to collect and preserve old red rice varieties from the Hani Rice Terraces.
Li Gaofu, known as the Hani “No. 1 in red rice,” has already developed over a dozen red rice varieties among the Hani people. Photography | Foodthink Jun
For smallholder farmers, embedding into models such as CSA and PGS, and developing seed saving and conservation work with the support of community platforms where consumers participate directly, may well be a better approach. Finally, whose responsibility and obligation is the protection and use of farmer seeds, exactly? The farmers’? Song Yiqing’s answer is no. She believes that for smallholder farmers, breeding should be a proactive, self-driven livelihood need, not an obligation. And the maintenance of the publicness of seeds is, above all, to be carried out within a public discourse framework—one that requires both the support and participation of research institutions, national policy encouragement and support, and broad social engagement. This is why the international seed conservation field has consistently emphasised “protection + use” for seeds—neither is dispensable. Song Yiqing placed particular emphasis on the relationship among “scientists,” “farmers,” and old-seed conservation: “Scientists and farmers should stand together. Farmer seeds passed down through generations can supplement and update the public resource repository; and the farmer-seed resources collected by the public resource repository can be fed back to the community, enabling it to respond to consumer demands and other changes. Only in this way can genuine interaction take place, making seed conservation truly a living conservation that safeguards national seed and food security”.
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The “Farmers’ Seed Network” was established in December 2013. It is currently the only organisation in China that works to promote rural sustainable development and smallholder rights from the perspective of seeds. Its core expert members have over 17 years of experience in participatory breeding and community development. In its foundational work on Community Seed Bank development and participatory breeding, the organisation now covers 26 communities across 10 provinces and municipalities. Through the Seed Network, farmers have registered over 600 community-preserved crop variety resources.
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