Seeds Company, Seeds Bank.

Seed Company

Seed companies produce and sell seeds for flowers, fruit and vegetables to the amateur gardener. The production of seed is a multi billion dollar business, which uses growing facilities and growing locations world wide. While most seed is produced by large specialist growers, large amounts are produced by small growers that produce only one to a few crop types. These larger companies supply seed both to commercial resellers and wholesalers. The resellers and wholesalers sell to vegetable and fruit growers, and to companies who package seed into packets and sell them on to the amateur gardener.

Each seed company or reseller that sells retail, produces a catalogue – generally published during early winter for seed to be sown the following spring. These catalogues are eagerly awaited by the amateur gardener, as during winter months there is little that can be done in the garden, so this time can be spent planning the following year’s gardening. Most companies run a mail order catalogue business, some also supply their range of seeds to garden centers and other retailers.

Seed companies produce a huge range of seeds from highly developed F1 hybrids to open pollinated wild species. Many gardeners like to stick to old familiar varieties but each year seed companies produce new varieties for gardeners to try. They have extensive research facilities to produce plants with better genetic materials that result in improved uniformity and gardening appeal. These improved qualities might include disease resistance, higher yields, dwarf habit and vibrant or new colors. These improvements are often closely guarded to protect them from being utilized by other producers, thus plant cultivars are often sold under there own names and by international laws protected from being grown for seed production by others.

Along with the growth in the allotment movement, and the increasing popularity of gardening, there have emerged many small independent seed companies. Many of these are active in seed conservation and encouraging diversity. They often offer organic and open pollinated varieties of seeds as opposed to hybrids. Many of these varieties are heirloom varieties. The use of old varieties will continue to maintain diversity in the horticultural gene pool. There is a good case for amateur gardeners to use older varieties as the modern seed types are often the same as those grown by commercial producers, and so characteristics which are useful to them may be unsuited to home growing.

Seedbank:

Seedbanks store seeds as a source for planting in case seed reserves elsewhere are destroyed. The seeds stored may be food crops or those of rare species, to protect biodiversity. The reasons for storing seeds may be varied, in the case of food crops many useful plants were developed over centuries and are now no longer used for commercial agricultural production and are becoming rare. Storing seeds also guards against catastrophic events like natural disasters, outbreaks of disease, or war.

Seed saving:

In agriculture and gardening, seed saving is the practice of saving seeds from open-pollinated vegetables and flowers for use from year to year. This is the traditional way farms and gardens were maintained. In recent decades, there has been a major shift to purchasing seed annually from commercial seed suppliers, and to hybridized plants that do not produce seed that can be reliably saved. Much of the grassroots seed-saving activity today is the work of amateur gardeners, organic farmers, and enthusiasts with environmentalist interests.

Open pollination is the key to seed saving. Plants that reproduce through natural means tend to adapt to local conditions, and evolve as reliable performers, particularly in their localities. The modern trend to hybridized plants interrupts this process. Hybrid plants are artificially cross-pollinated, and bred to favor desirable characteristics, like higher yield and more uniform size. However, the seed produced by the first generation of the hybrid does not reliably produce a true copy of that hybrid and often loses much of its yield potential. While comprehensive figures are hard to come by, one popular view today holds that thousands of varieties of vegetables and flowers are being lost, due to reliance on commercial hybrid seed. Widespread use of a relatively few mass-marketed hybrid seed varieties, in both home gardening and commercial farming, is said to be eliminating many open-pollinated varieties, especially the local variations that were naturally developed, when local seed-saving was the common practice. The concern is that this weakens the gene pool, resulting at some point in less hardy, more vulnerable plants. Countering this trend, and an affinity for variety and tradition, are the principal motivations for many large seed-saving groups.

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